Collaborating With Different Personality Types

Apologies for a very tardy post due to final week of intersession assignments; but here it is:

The way I see it, beyond all the stress that comes with being a new teacher and setting up classes, etc. the most difficult thing we face is working with the different personality types that we find in our classes. While we can work for days to create lessons that we think will work for different learners, a teacher will never quite know if something will truly work or not in combination with the real students experiencing them.

Not only are our lesson plans at risk, so is our authority. As a teacher, it is often important for most to be respected by students, but also well liked. Finding the perfect balance between these two desires is something quite troublesome. Like I mentioned in my facilitation, working towards being a student’s friend can often be detrimental and harmful to the classroom environment. As my reading facilitation group saw, the case study of Eliot Wigginton was a perfect example of the break down that can occur as a result of becoming friends with your students. In attempt to override what Wigginton thought of as trouble students, he aimed to befriend them in order to defuse the behavior that he deemed harmful for his classroom. The problem was, however, that the thing that people—not only students—like about friendships is that there isn’t a hierarchy of authority; a student doesn’t have to obey their friend. Thus, Wigginton was unable to discipline his classroom because none of the students felt that they had to because of the relationship they had built with him.

When attempting the manage a classroom, it is extremely important to not only be able to collaborate with different personalities, but also to be able to know how to discipline them while still maintaining respect that we so desire. This is where our B&S required reading came in, in that it offered us different options to be able to appeal to students and make them feel that they can respect us and even like us as teachers and people. Actions like using students’ names and greeting students at the door are little things that can be done that will most surely show students that as a teacher we care about them; these feelings will most surely be returned.

I know that collaborating with different personality types can be placed into many topics of discussion (classroom planning, teaching structures, lesson plans, etc.) but I feel that the notions that I have discussed and the interplay between the two are the most interesting.