Reflecting back to Nalini madam, the teacher that I had written about during the first reflection task, I think she was a traditional teacher that simply worked on her competencies. Being a competent crafts person, she was a master of her subject content and that was probably the one factor that piqued my interest. In a day and age without the internet and where the information explosion was still a decade away, she played the role of the Most Knowledgeable Other, someone that we sought out for subject matter expertise. That definitely prompted me to consider her a good teacher.

For others to have considered her a good teacher too, they would have to look past her social and interpersonal follies and evaluate her teaching purely based on the competency discourse as well. Like I mention in my initial post, she was very distant from most children, was often short-tempered and a majority of the children did not approach her out of sheer fear. So, if not for her subject matter expertise, she would have been quite likely termed a bad teacher.

Reflective teaching

I do not know if two decades earlier, the concept of a reflective teacher or the power of reflection was as well known as it is today. But I do believe that she was one teacher that would have benefited extensively through the reflexivity.

If she had sat down at the end of her day and evaluated her class proceedings based on realistic learning indicators like the number of questions asked or the quality of discussions in the classroom, she would have definitely identified something amiss in her teaching style. With consistent evaluation of her own teaching effectiveness, she might have reached the points about being more available to students’ queries and identifying alternate study experiences to encourage children further. 

Another strong input to her evaluating her own learning efficiency, or her being a good teacher, would have been feedback. Being the most senior teacher in her department, and one of the most experienced ones in the entire school itself, it is highly unlikely that she would have had a ‘mentor figure’ that would have evaluated her teaching objectively and given her feedback in its true form. So, as a reflective teacher, she could have used other tools to obtain feedback directly from her students, anonymously considering her notoriety, and corroborated them with other data points.

Good Teacher or Good Teaching?

In the end, I enjoyed the overall premise of this week’s course: There is no easy answer to what makes a good teacher, but you can define good teaching contextually based on your audience. Like professor Moore summarizes wonderfully, the idea that there are ‘teacher competencies’ indicates that anybody could become a teacher by simply running through this checklist of items. Unfortunately, there are too many examples in real life, of teachers with decades of experience under their belt, who are still unable to foster good learning in their classroom.

So, good teaching, and hence a good teacher, is a culmination of various attributes of being a humane individual combined with effective practices like reflection and self-evaluation.