Lessons I'm learning about teaching

I have been a teacher now for about four years. Every year, I learn so much about teaching. Here are some of the things I've been learning this year...

I've been learning a lot about teaching this semester in particular, primarily because some of my classes have been complaining about my teaching. I guess you could call that a blessing in disguise, because it's pushing me to improve my craft. These are the lessons that I've come up with so far.

- First priority for a teacher is student buy-in (closely related to motivation).
- Grading equity is very important, and inequity, or even the students believing that you are being equal, can kill your rapport with the students.
- Assessment should happen as often as possible, because it gives you a solid pulse on what is happening in the class, and it gives students motivation and clear purpose.
- Students want to do things in class, such as have discussions, play games, do experiments, etc. (Maybe obvious, but it can be a good reminder.)
- Inspiring students to love a subject may be more important than actually teaching them knowledge in the subject. (Think about it. How much do students remember from high school physics? Mostly whether they like it or not, right?)

I'm not one hundred percent sure of these conclusions, but they are useful to me right now because they come from problems that I identified with the generous help of the students.

In fact, I offered extra credit for an essay giving me advice on what I can change about my teaching. I got a flood of advice, some of it pretty difficult to swallow, but it was useful--primarily just for getting an idea about what the students were thinking about my teaching. It wasn't pretty.

That was discouraging at first, but I realized that I can learn from it, and I also realized that some of the students may not have had a negative opinion of me but they were influenced to do so by the other students. Which leads into some of my lessons. Students are highly influenced by their peers. If a few students think I'm a crappy teacher, it can quickly spread to the whole class even if the rest of the students didn't have that thought in the first place. This is why establishing rapport with the students from the beginning is critical.

So I'm thankful to my students who criticized me. I will use their criticism to become a better teacher. Hopefully any mistakes that I made will not kill their love of physics for the long term.