{"id":73,"date":"2012-09-20T10:41:15","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T15:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/instructionadventures.wordpress.com\/?p=73"},"modified":"2012-09-20T10:41:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T15:41:15","slug":"the-courage-to-teach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/2012\/09\/20\/the-courage-to-teach\/","title":{"rendered":"The Courage to Teach"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s reading came from chapter one in the book The Courage to Teach. <\/em>The chapter was entitled “The Heart of the Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching.” The chapter’s primary focus was on the fact that technique alone does not make a good teacher. Factors like integrity and the identity of the teacher help to promote good teachers. For the author those two factors appear to be some of the most important.<\/p>\n

In reading this chapter, I found myself once again looking at myself internally. The chapter touched on one of my biggest fears about teaching: Teaching is all based on technique\u00a0and if you do not have that foundation then you will be doomed in the classroom. This idea formed throughout my K-12 school years as I watched my former teachers use various techniques\u00a0that they had learned to teach us the information we needed to know. Upon entering college, my eyes were opened when I meet many professors\u00a0who had no formalized training in teaching but bravely went into the classroom each day. In those early days, as I sat in these classes my fears were reconfirmed that good teachers were only those who were trained in the techniques. Luckily, this perception changed as a moved into my upper level major classes. I began to see that years of experience, the level of comfort in the subject area, and a natural affinity to teaching also factored into the formula, along with technique, to make a good teacher. My fear however remained. I realized that I could attained the first two points, but\u00a0the third was very elusive and something that was very personally internal.<\/p>\n

Today I have been put in many situations where I have had to over come my fear of not being a good teacher. I have conducted classes where I have been very well paired, not prepared at all, and gone into classrooms on a wing and a prayer hoping for the best. In reading this chapter, I found myself confronting that old fear that I thought I had mastered. The premise of the argument I had encountered before listening to other teachers, however; the chapter had a profound effect on me especially the section that talked about learning to listen to ourselves internally. This was something that I had never truly done and I began to equate that with the realization that I did not trust myself in the classroom. I realized that I believed that without a formal technique\u00a0to guide me that I would not be a good and effective teacher. This internal reflection also made me reevaluate my past teaching moments in a new light as well and I came to realize that what the author was arguing for was in many ways absolutely true. I began to remember classes where I was the student and the class was strictly driven by technique. I also remembered classes where all three aspects of technique, content, and the identity were balanced. These were my favorite and most effective classes.<\/p>\n

From all this internal reflection, I came to the conclusion that I have many times before when I have thought about teaching: it is a balancing game! A balance of technique, knowledge, and personality rolled into a consumable form for students to digest makes, what I believe to be, one of the best teaching environments for students to learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s reading came from chapter one in the book The Courage to Teach. The chapter was entitled “The Heart of the Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching.” The chapter’s primary focus was on the fact that technique alone does not make a good teacher. Factors like integrity and the identity of the teacher help … Continue reading The Courage to Teach<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":460,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/460"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apps.lib.ua.edu\/blogs\/instructionadventures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}