Excited About Teaching Again

I've been a teacher for 22 years. Gosh, that makes me feel old! When you've been doing anything for a very long time, you risk becoming complacent, becoming "ordinary," even of becoming "stale." While settling into a familiar groove can be comfortable for a while, in time I find it lacks fulfilment and satisfaction for me. When I find myself in this situation, I begin to reexamine what I do and look for something that will relight that spark that gets me really excited about teaching and learning. Several "events" in my life and career lately have relit that spark for me and have gotten me to reflect on my practice and become really excited about the process of teaching and learning once again.

One of those events has been creating and teaching my first online course using Moodle. If you are not a participant in this course (Issues, Trends, and Tools in Education and Technology in a Web 2.0 World) but are interested in finding out more about it, email me and I'll be happy to tell you more. This activity has caused me to be:

A Learner

At a very basic level, I needed to learn how to use Moodle in order to put the course together. I'm still learning how to use it as my students and I move through it together over the life of this course. It's a constant learning experience for me. And knowing that taking this course is a stretch for some of my students who do not consider themselves to be very "tech savvy," I think its really important for me to be stretching myself as a learner as well.

Additionally, I took an online course not too long ago. As an online class student myself, I formed definite opinions as to what worked well, what didn't work well, and what I would do differently if I ever taught an online course. Now it's time to put my money where my mouth is and apply what I learned about taking and teaching an online course from a student's perspective.

A Communicator

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching is the interactions you have with your students. These teaching, learning, and communication interactions are critical to creating a classroom environment where learning can occur and is valued. When you are teaching online I think it is still just as critical for the teacher to have ongoing interactions with his/her students. However, since the environment is different, I need to rethink the process and methods by which I do interact with my students so that they feel supported, encouraged and valued.

A Teacher

Much of what I'm teaching in this course I've taught or presented in one form or another in the past during in-person classes or meetings. However, putting this content online has caused me to need to rethink my teaching practice. I need to make the content engaging, clear, "just enough" information, not too much so that it's overwhelming or too little to be valuable. I need to anticipate the questions, concerns, misconceptions, confusions, etc. and try to plan for those things in advance since students won't be able to just raise their hands and ask. And I need to be able to provide content that will be interesting and accessible to a range of students - those who are fairly technology savvy as well as those who feel less knowledgable or who are less comfortable with technology.


All of this has caused me to really examine and reflect upon own teaching practice, to challenge my usual routines, to "clean up" my pedagogy. This takes me a bit out of my comfort zone as a "seasoned" teacher, but I find opportunities like this exciting and rewarding. I think stretching my thinking and my practice ultimately helps me to grow and improve as an educator, no matter what environment I'm teaching in.