Who should I be as a teacher? – How to choose a teaching persona.

Summary:

• Consider who you are
• Consider what you value. 
• Consider how others perceive you
• Consider the impact that you want to have.

It is incredibly important to have a carefully constructed persona as a teacher. You want to come across in a particular way to form the best working relationships with your students to benefit their learning. 

This is no easy task, and you will be changing and tweaking your persona over the course of your career. Creating a highly personalised persona is incredibly important so that you can stay consistent, but you need to start at the beginning; you first need to consider what you want and what you’re working with before you move on to how you’re going to implement it.

Consider who you are.

There are a whole lot of things that make up you. Sure, you’re a teacher who wants the best for your students, but there are certain things about you that will come across whether you want them or not. Developing a persona around some of your core personality traits will help you develop a persona that you can stay consistent with. 

Thinking about your personality and who you are as a person can be difficult. If you’re unsure and anxious, you may not want to highlight this in your teaching persona, but it still needs to be considered. Do you want to spin-off of this trait and be the teacher who asks a lot of questions and is always moving around? Or do you want to counteract it, and be the type of teacher who always has their hands on their hips but a smile on their face?

You need to have your teacher-face on all day. You need to develop something that you can maintain, and the easiest way to do this is to build on what you already have. The key to making any teaching persona work is consistency; it doesn’t matter how good your persona is, it won’t work if you can’t keep it up.

Consider what you value.

As teachers, I’m sure that we all have similar values. Integrity, forgiveness, patience etc. are all common values cited by teachers. These are fantastic, but pick one or two that you really want to convey. Being really specific and clear about what you value as a teacher can help you build a strong persona and inform your teaching practice. 

One that I resonate very strongly with is honesty. I am very honest with my students, which ranges from letting them know point-blank that I don’t know the answer to their question to being a bit brutal in feedback on drafts. I’ve found that by being so consistent in this approach, I get a lot of honesty back. Students will tell me that the reason that they didn’t hand in their task wasn’t that they lost it, but because they really thought that it wasn’t good enough and were terrified to show me. Having these relationships and interactions with my students helps me support them in the best way that I can. 

Now, honesty isn’t the only value that you can base your teaching persona on. You might highly value respect and listen to every point of view. This may extend to enforcing respect between students, no matter how small the problem is. You might develop a restorative system in your classroom for managing behaviour, and you would earn the respect of your students.

You may instead highly value hard work. You would give a lot of process praise, and not let students coast and rely on just being clever. There’s a whole lot that you can take out of only one core value, and just picking one or two will help you be consistent. This consistency is the key to predictability and safety for your students and will have a more profound impact than doing a number of things sporadically.

Consider how others perceive you.

This is something that we often have very little control over. Whether you like it or not, your students will view you in a certain way from the minute you enter the room. They will quickly form a judgement before a single word has come out of your mouth, and you can strengthen your teaching persona by making good use of this. 

People will perceive a forty-year-old biker with a beard and tattoos in a different way to the tiny twenty-something recent graduate. The strategies that work for the biker will not work for the graduate, regardless of what they try. You may be able to use the same general idea or basis, but you will need to deliver your teaching differently. 

As much as I don’t like it, I’m never going to be the big loud teacher who is a natural leader and can keep a class enthralled with engaging stories for an entire double. I’ve known teachers like this, and I’m incredibly jealous. On the other hand, these teachers will never be able to get away with having a quiet lesson where students lead the class because their students will always look to them to lead. In addition, while many of their students look up to them, these teachers rarely ever have very personal one-on-one conversations with their students about their situations and feelings.

See more: Should Teachers Intimidate their Students?

Everyone has their strengths, and the trick with developing a teaching persona is to tweak your practice to make the best use of them. Teaching works best when not everyone is doing the same thing or relates to the same students, so it is best to develop strategies that you know you can make work.

Consider the impact that you want to have.

While most of what I’ve already said has to do with you as the teacher, you also need to consider your students. You need to consider their backgrounds and their needs to determine what kind of teacher they need. In addition to this, your students may have certain expectations of their teachers in specific contexts. While you don’t always need to meet their expectations (especially if they are stereotypes), you need to be pretty convincing if you’re not. 

Some students need a teacher who is calm and in control. Maybe they’re doing a particularly hard, high-level subject and the stakes are high. They’re getting a lot of pressure from home to do well, and they will not like it if they don’t think that their teacher can get them there. Say you have another student in the same class. This student doesn’t know how they got in; they’re not confident and think that they might fail. They need some reassurance and to be able to know that this is hard and it’s okay to make mistakes. Both of these students have different needs, and they will value very different things in a teacher.

You may be teaching at a school where the students have a lot of trauma, and you need to be predictable and safe for the students to interact with. You may have a class of disengaged and bored students, and you need to be fun and interesting. You may need to have a slightly different teaching persona for the different subjects that you teach or for each specific class, which can make this whole process difficult. 

Choosing a teaching persona is difficult.

It needs to be specific, nuanced, and possible. You need to be consistent and still connect with the broad range of learners in your classroom. You need to be very clear on what you want to accomplish and how you are going to do it. 

It’s not as simple as walking into a classroom and being yourself. To be a successful teacher, it is incredibly important that you take the time to think about how your students perceive you and how you connect with them. It takes time and it will change over the course of your career, but it is well worth taking the time to do it properly.