As someone who has taught kids for almost two years now, and have tutored since eighth grade, teaching is a subject that gets me really emotional. So, as anyone who knows me personally could guess, my favorite teaching style is the last one, by Jackson J. Spielvogel.
As a student, I am extremely teacher oriented, and when I feel as though a teacher doesn’t like me, or if they don’t seem to care about what their teaching, my learning suffers. For example, I took Calculus in high school and dreaded going to the class every day. The foreign signs and symbols made my head spin, and as the teacher droned on and on I found myself daydreaming. But when I took calculus in college with Marc Fabri, it became my favorite subject! I got 100 on almost every quiz; I even looked forward to homework! When I see a teacher love his or her subject and enjoying interacting with their students, it makes me want to be more engaged in the subject matter and the class as a whole. Not to mention that communication is key, and where my U Penn graduate calc teacher would start speaking another language
As a teacher, I couldn’t imagine being able to teach if I hated my kids. I could care less about the sounds the letters made, but watching my students light up when they recognized letter sounds, and then progressed into being able to read full words filled my days with joy (corny I know, but it’s true). Since I was much more fun than their previous teacher, and was able to explain concepts in simpler words, the students flourished when I taught them, and progressed at a much faster rate. I turned tracing letters into race car games, sang songs to help them learn, and read to them when their mommies or daddies were late. As mentioned in several of the samples, students look up to teachers as role models, but I wouldn’t look up to someone who didn’t even like me. Emotion is an essential part to teaching, whether it’s emotion for the subject matter or the students (in a purely platonic way) and I believe it could make or break a class.
One the other hand, my least favorite teaching style is exemplified by Larry D. Spence. I want to start out by saying that in some cases, this learning style is the most effective. Engaging and challenging the students is all well and good, but damaging their self-esteem is not going to make them better students. I will try harder if I get an A- than if I get a C, because an extremely low grade basically makes me give up. I try, but I convince myself that I’m just not smart enough for the material. However if I’m just knocked down a little, I know I have the ability to do better, and therefore reach for that goal. I do not believe that making a student teach themself is helpful. Yes, a student should read ahead and try their best, but I usually do that and still have questions regarding the material. Also, it is important to get feedback from students about the course, because to truly teach is to be constantly improving upon your lesson plans and ideas. You learn with your students, and should always try to improve upon yourself, because as the world is constantly changing so are you. Regardless to say, we need teachers who will challenge us and knock us off our pedestal, but the question is where is the balance between being too strict and too laid back?