By Mark Rearden, West Lake Country Club | December 1, 2019
I was thinking back to my prep school days (no, not a posh boarding school in New England--Strom Thurmond High in Edgefield) and was trying to assimilate the qualities I liked most about my favorite teachers. There is little doubt that being older, more well read, and hopefully wiser, has affected my reasons for liking the ones I did. Having said that I will go ahead and discount the ones who required nothing of me and let me get away with murder. As a teenager, some of those folks would have been on my list, but I would never have taken the time to care why I liked them.
Once I was able to turn off the teenage filter I recognized that the best teachers all had two things in common, probably more than that, but two qualities that stand out. The first is continual feedback and the second is affirmation or confirmation.
Let’s look at feedback. When I looked up feedback in the dictionary the first definition was this: the process in which part of the output of a system is returned to its input in order to regulate its further output. WOW! Does anyone doubt we are now in the digital age? Let’s see if we can calm that definition down a little bit and give you a bit more, well, feedback. I realize I am playing your role and mine, but you are not here with me so please just go with it for a moment.
Feedback is what is returned to your students to help deepen their understanding of the material or skill. One hopes as a teacher they will give you some feedback too, but it is your role to figure out how to get feedback from them. Most adolescents are not going to “go there” on their own unless they have particularly good communication skills. Even then, insecurity will inhibit a kid who is eager for more information from asking the next question. So, much like our definition implies, feedback is a two-way street, but as the instructor, sometimes you have to make the student get behind the wheel.
The second part of feedback is the word continual. Disclaimer – this does not imply that you never shut up. What this means is that you arm the student with the basic information for the skill first. Then, as the student works on honing the skill, you give them feedback as often as seems appropriate. As students we want to know when we do it right, when we do it wrong, and when we could do it better. So, continual just means constant attention to the students striving to do it better. Give them enough time to work it out on their own and then step in and offer the advice that keeps the learning curve working for you.
The second quality is affirmation or confirmation. Both of those words have similar meanings: affirmation – a statement asserting the truth of something, and confirmation – to make something valid by confirming it or ratifying it. All good teachers do this. It serves several purposes. 1) Remember how good it made you feel to hear “You can do this,” especially when you were afraid of the outcome. Having someone believe in you gets you out of the blocks when you don’t feel it yourself yet. It validates that the student possesses the tools to do it. You are the authority on the subject, so you should know whether they can or cannot, right? 2) It lets the student know someone else cares about them beyond their family. Don’t miss this one. It is not that someone else cares about their work; someone else cares about them. This is huge.
For those who are teachers extraordanaire, taking the time to validate or ratify the student’s efforts outside the classroom goes to a whole new level. You are no longer just teaching, you are inspiring, you are paying it forward for the next generation. Those students will not forget how it made them feel to have a teacher who cared. Mark my words, I was not an exceptional student, but I still remember and appreciate the good teachers and coaches I had.
On a side note: affirmation even feels good to an older adult. I had a former teacher stop me at work one day and offer thanks and appreciation for writing the weekly articles. Good teachers never stop teaching and inspiring, do they?