Teacher in Development

For the last few months my "bookless" student and I have been exploring issues related customer service. It all began with a simple photocopied article that my student brought into class one day.

"Hey, I’ve been reading this and I really like it. It’s useful. It’s what I’m doing at work, so why don’t we work on it in class?"

 Cool! This is the perfect situation: Your student willingly telling you what he/she needs or wants. I took out a copy of his article, and began reading it through on my own to prepare discussion questions and highlight more difficult words for vocabulary building.

Our classes rocked for a few months or so. My student came into class filled with energy, and completely ready to engage in stimulating conversation and debate about the article’s ideas. On many occasions we would be so engaged in the content that all conciousness of time would just evaporate, and his personal assistant would have to come knocking at his office door to announce that the class had ended.

I thought, "This is great! I think I’m onto something here. I should look for more articles by the same author addressing similar ideas and themes. We could build a whole course around this stuff." I presented my idea to my student, and he loved it. Rock on! I started researching on the net, and found piles of pdf files, reports, and websites. I even found a few podcasts from other sources that delved into the same issues we had been exploring in class.

It was, in my mind, the perfect set up. I had endless content to work with. Content that my student had identified as being interesting and important to him. I was being "student centered."

But something strange started to happen. When January rolled around, my student’s travel itenerary picked up considerably. Our classes began to get cancelled. Business trips abounded. When we did see each other, I valiently tried to continue where we had left off, but was met with little to no spark. The interest, the engagement with the content, had moved on.

Interesting. Now I was faced with a choice. Would I ignore the failing vital signs of the classroom - attention was falling away, eyes were fluttering, breathing was labored, and blood flow…well…it simply wasn’t moving very much. Would I plunge forward with our beautiful, "student centered" course that I had so quickly attatched myself to? Or would I toss it, lean in close to the "body" and listen again for the vital signs? 

The class wasn’t dead. There was still lots of life, but a shift had happened. What was interesting and useful before had moved on, and interesting and important had become something very different for my student.

So I’ve been listening to his vitals. Friday’s class was an interesting one. The heartbeat started to get stronger again as he shared about a major off-site he had just come back from in Miami. Now on his front burners was branding. Public opinion. Change. It was a passionate discussion. The class flowed again.

So I stayed up really late last night researching corporate brands. I wrote down a page of really cool quotes and ideas that were directly related to what we had been discussing in the previous session. I went to bed exhausted, but armed and ready for thismorning’s class.

Or so I thought.

I was pumped and ready to dive in, but as the session began I noticed that my student was on a different beat. The conversation flowed freely and easily, but in a completely different direction this time. Again I found myself faced with a choice: I could cut the flow and broadcast my stuff, or I could keep my finger on the pulse, and flow along with what my student was genuinely into today. I kept my prepared class out on the table for a few minutes, just in case, but in the end it wasn’t needed. Not today.

The class flowed easily, and at the end he gave me some really cool feedback. "I really like free talking like this. We explored themes that we hardly ever talk about, and I got to play with phrases and structures that were completely strange to me. I liked it!"

He liked it, and I learned a cool lesson: It’s important to plan and prepare, but it’s way more important to teach like a DJ - to be sensitive to the student’s "beat" and flow with it.  If I wanted to, I could have just ignored the pulse, and broadcasted my own stuff - but the party would have flopped.