I recently had cause to reminisce about my experience in #teaching undergraduate classes at university, and especially about what makes a great teacher. My background in this is that I taught tutorials starting in 2015 and undergraduate seminars starting in 2018, I attended plenty of ‘train the trainer’ courses, and worked closely with a wonderful team of academic teachers for years. Aside from my teaching experience, I have obviously also experienced a vast variety of academic teachers as a student.

Here’s my humble opinion on what makes a great teacher:

  • Show enthusiasm for the topic. If you’re truly passionate about something, it will show, and your enthusiasm will affect how your students perceive not only you, but also the topic. On the other hand, if you’re teaching something you really don’t like, then how are you students supposed to enjoy learning about this? I’ve taught the Introduction to English #Linguistics, and I greatly enjoyed teaching about 90% of it, but there’s always a topic that’s not quite my thing – in this case, S͎y͎n͎t͎a͎x͎. But I still tried to make it as interesting and fun as possible for my students, for example by adding funny memes and references to my slides. My favorite example was to use ‘Yoda speech’ to illustrate how phrases work.
  • Use great teaching material. If you put effort into your teaching material (your slides and/or your handouts), it shows, and it also helps you to understand what you are teaching in much more depth. I’ve taught classes that have been taught by many people before me, who obviously provided me with their slides and material. But instead of just using their slides, I always created my own, (*cough cough*) better slides! Not only because as a former media designer, I am very particular about layouts, but also, as I mentioned before, it helps you to truly think everything that you’re gonna be teaching through, evaluate, and make changes where necessary.
  • Use appropriate methods. Most students resent listening to a monologue for 90 minutes, so try to use appropriate teaching methods whereever they can be applied. Change things up to keep students engaged and stop them from falling asleep during a lecture. There are excellent collections of methods that can be used for all kinds and sizes of courses, so make appropriate use of them.
  • Know what you know (and what you don’t). If you don’t know the answer to a question that was asked, then don’t try to answer it with whatever comes to your mind. Be aware of your own knowledge, and just say “I can’t answer that right now, but I will look it up and give you an answer next time”. Sadly, many people seem to be afraid to do that, and confuse their students instead.
  • Know your students. Nothing feels worse as a student than having a teacher who obviously doesn’t seem to care about *you*. As I student, I always greatly appreciated teachers who put the extra effort into learning the names of all their students (even in lectures of 50+ people) and get to know them a little bit. This is something I also always put effort into as a teacher. Getting to know your students breaks the ice, and also helps students become more comfortable with each other in the course.
  • Have fun. I think this is obvious. Enjoy teaching! Even if sometimes it’s hard to motivate a room of people staring at you, teaching and the feeling of helping people learn can be great fun! And if you don’t enjoy it, then perhaps teaching is not for you.

These are my two cents on what makes teaching successful. What are you experiences with teaching, or as a students with teachers?

Originally posted on my LinkedIn profile.