Today's Teachers Need to Learn to Perform in Front of a Camera

It is not common knowledge that all instruction is a performance, 每个老师都是演员, 每个教室都是剧院. I’m not sure if this fact is simply a dirty little secret, or an indication of the teaching profession’s disproportionately low value to society.

Rarely is a classroom audience so self-motivated that a teacher can pull off a lecture with merely a straightforward recitation of facts. The teacher’s challenge is not so much presenting 信息 on a topic for students to memorize, but rather persuading the students to believe that the material being taught is worth knowing. 如果不是这样的话, the teaching profession would have died out in step with popularization of the printing press.

The worthy feat of convincing students to think hard about what they’re being told and shown requires the teacher to adopt a class-time persona that’s suitable for such a demanding performance. 对这种说法的任何怀疑, 伟大的教学需要采用一个角色, withers under the bright lights and the vacant stare of the camera lens when teaching with video.

当教学有效地对着相机, the first significant hurdle to leap is to find your voice—to adopt this persona that is a little bit bigger, 更有权威, 更多的 on 而不是你的基本性格. 当面对面授课时, this persona tends to be brought out through the natural social group dynamic feedback loop between you and your students: Good teachers are naturally motivated by motivated students. Seeing the wheels turning and the lights igniting gooses the enthusiasm. 噩梦类, 没有一个学生在上课, 遭受同样的动力:这是一个可怕的, Sisyphean slog toward your positive persona when the students are having none of it.

When you replace the live student audience with a webcam, it is normal for teachers to find themselves back in the nightmare classroom, without positive reinforcement to bring out the great teacher within. Educators achieve transformational growth when they can teach excellent lessons to a camera, 掌握他们的表演角色, without the benefit of the feedback loop of a live audience. Regular practice at it may be even 更多的 valuable than the resulting collection of great curricular video.

The key to training yourself to adopt a persona suitable for teaching is to be very deliberate and disinterestedly pragmatic about your teaching persona. You need to cultivate and nurture that persona from the primordial soup of your early days spent learning the discipline. Ask yourself: What persuaded me that this material was worth learning? What sort of character would have done the best job reaching me, 今天也可以接触到我的学生? Your teaching persona will emerge from a negotiation between that ideal character and what you have the acting chops to pull off. 半开玩笑的经验法则, start with the version of yourself that appears exactly two cocktails into a party and work from there. Intentionally separating your research and other professional roles from your teacher persona liberates you to perform at your best—or your silliest, 如果有必要的话.

在理想的情况下, you would be able to enlist a proxy student to sit in on your first few recording sessions to provide constructive feedback on your teaching performance. 辅助轮是用来依靠的.

Finally, if you feel discomforted by concerns about “authenticity,” consider these harsh critiques:

冒名顶替综合症是优秀的死敌.
Those who are unwilling to sacrifice their own narcissistic need to put their “authentic” selves on display to benefit their students do not have the right priorities to be excellent teachers.

即使你最真诚, purest self-image is the perfect character to teach your material, 你不可能把你的全部个性都塞进几段视频里. Deliberate simplification and amplification reveals the accessible persona that students need. Students recognize this as authentically skillful teaching.

[This article appears in the November/December 2018 issue of 流媒体杂志 “教学即表演”."]