Excerpts from "The Skillful Teacher"

Over the holidays, I picked up Stephen D. Brookfield's The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom and started reading it in preparation for my practicum journey and life as a beginning teacher. This book was recommended to me by a few teacher-friends, who said that reading widely and deeply about teaching practice has helped them to grow as teachers. I still feel very inadequate and unsure about many things in the teaching profession, and so I hope that reading The Skillful Teacher, among other books, will help me grow into a more confident and accomplished educator in the future.

Anyway, one passage that I found particularly thought-provoking was Brookfield's research into what students really think about teachers:

In my own classroom research over the years, . . . it seems that students, whatever their age, wish to be treated as adults. They don't like to be talked down to or bossed around for no reason. . . . They say they wish to be treated with respect . . . One of the most important indicators they mention that convinces them they are being treated respectfully is the teacher attempting to discover, and address seriously, students' concerns and difficulties.

They also want to believe that teachers know what they're doing, that they have a plan guiding their actions, and that they're not new to the classroom. They want to be able to trust teachers to deal with them honestly, and they hate it when they feel the teacher is keeping an agenda or expectation concealed from them. They like to know their teachers have lives outside the classroom, but they dislike it when teachers step over that line and make inappropriate disclosures regarding their personal life. They also want to be sure that whatever it is they are being asked to know or do is important and necessary to their personal, intellectual, or occupational development. They may not be able to understand fully and completely why the learning they are pursuing is so crucial, but they need to pick up from the teacher the sense that this is indeed the case. One indicator of this that they look for is the teacher's willingness to model an initial engagement in the learning activity required. This is particularly appreciated where the learning involves a degree of risk and where failure entails (at least in the students' minds) public humiliation and embarrassment. (pp. 31-32)

It has been a while since I was a secondary school student, and sometimes I wonder what they are thinking and why there are certain misunderstandings and miscommunications. This passage helped me to recall what it is like to be a student, and it is a valuable personal checklist for me as I embark on my practicum journey.