By Roel Snieder
This may seem like a simple question because you may be inclined to answer “for my students.” But in this newsletter we invite you to reflect on whether this really is the case, and whether this answer is complete. Teaching can be a fun and gratifying experience and there is nothing wrong with enjoying your profession! As a result your motivation to teach likely is motivated by your enjoyment of being a teacher.
But there can be a dark side too to the satisfaction that teaching can bring. Teaching can be an ego-gratifying experience because as a teacher you are the expert in front of a captive audience, and you also hold power over students because you determine whether they pass or fail, and the grade that they get. These elements could feed a sense of self-importance while teaching. Lemaitre argues in his article Science, Narcissism and the Quest for Visibility that the academic environment may breed self-centeredness because the high value many academics attach to individual achievement.
So, if you are honest, do you teach for your students, or do you teach for yourself? You might actually teach for both you and for your students. That is what may have drawn you to teaching in the first place!
But if you teach for your students, the question arises for which students you teach? In the classroom you will have students with a range of skill levels. Are you teaching to the top students? The ones that struggle most? All of them? These questions point to a problem we face while teaching; how can we be in front of a group of students and make sure we provide each of them with the support and stimulation that they need?
Some teachers get their satisfaction from teaching to the top students, these teachers thoroughly enjoy the high-level interaction with these students, which can be intellectually rewarding. But does that high-level interaction exclude other students? Other teachers focus on the students that struggle most with a class, and as a result, other students may be under-stimulated.
A group of students is inhomogeneous, and different students have different needs. Reconciling these needs makes teaching a challenging activity. We invite you to reflect on the question for whom do you teach? For yourself? For your students? Which students do you focus on? What can you do to meet the needs of all students? These are tough questions! Nobody said teaching is easy …