Greetings and salutations — welcome to another newsletter!
Think about the most influential teachers in your life. What made them special? Was it their deep knowledge? Their teaching methods? Or perhaps the way they connected with you as a person?
Whether you're in a classroom, coaching on a field, mentoring a colleague, raising children, or leading others, teaching is a profound responsibility that many of us undertake in various aspects of our lives. Although great teaching is incredibly important, we rarely step back to examine what truly makes teaching effective.
This newsletter explores three critical dimensions of teaching; developing strength in each area can help you make a lasting impact on those you guide, helping your learners flourish!
Before we get to the ideas, I want to share a new course!
That's How Learning Works?!?! - Fundamentals for Educators ($27.99 / 2 hours)
In this concise course for educators at any level, you’ll learn how to use the fundamentals of learning for building your courses — helping students learn efficiently and effectively!
More courses on the same idea are coming soon: Coaches, L&D Professionals, Parents, Students, Athletes, and Lifelong Learners.
Please let me know if you have any questions!
Ideas
At some point in life, everyone is a teacher.
Being a teacher can happen in many different ways: Choosing a career as a teacher or coach, becoming a parent, mentoring others in your career field, or having a leadership role. Although some people do not think the roles outside of teaching or coaching count as teaching, I take a broad approach — any role in which you care about the flourishing of others is a role in which you teach.
The best teachers share common traits, which I call the Teaching Trinity. The three parts to the Teaching Trinity are humanity, content, and pedagogy; each part plays a crucial role when teaching.
Humanity
Great teaching begins with great humanity.
Humanity is the set of personal characteristics that help you bring out the best in your learners: Emotional intelligence, care, empathy, compassion, patience, enthusiasm, consistency, a sense of humor, vulnerability, authenticity, and many others. The personal characteristics in humanity help you create a wonderful culture, inviting the learners into the culture. As the learners become a part of your culture, you use the personal characteristics to respond appropriately to each learner; by responding appropriately, learners develop emotional, physical, and cognitive sets of knowledge and skills.
Embracing your humanity when teaching creates a safe and stable foundation for learners, allowing the learners to positively contribute to the culture — plus deeply learn the knowledge and skills you are teaching!
Content
Great teaching happens when the teacher deeply understands the content.
Content is the sets of knowledge and skills in any domain; these can be any combination of emotional, physical, or cognitive. Great teachers have a deeply connected and organized sets of knowledge and skills, with a readiness to use the knowledge and skills to engage with the learners. Another part of content is knowing the ways that learners will make mistakes. Every domain has parts in the knowledge and skills that cause students to make mistakes, which can lead the learners down the wrong path. Knowing how learners make mistakes helps you empathize with learners through humanity and plan ways to challenge the mistakes through pedagogy.
Consistently demonstrating that you have a deep understanding the content creates trust with your learners — allowing your learners to feel confident as they acquire knowledge and skills!
Pedagogy
Great teaching happens when the teacher deeply understands how to structure learning.
Pedagogy is how to efficiently and effectively structure the learning experiences for the knowledge and skills in a domain. Deeply understanding the content is not enough; great teachers know how to structure learning experiences in a way that continuously engages and motivates learners. There are many methods in different domains for effectively structuring learning experiences, with a common thread of sequence and complexity driving the structure. In addition, great teachers deeply understand the learning process (see the bottom image of Belcher’s Model for Learning!), using this knowledge of the learning process to structure the learning experiences.
Deeply understanding the pedagogy for a domain helps structure learning for your learners — giving your learners a great chance to learn efficiently and effectively!
The good news is that we can develop our knowledge and skills in each of humanity, content, and pedagogy, continuing our growth as teachers. By embracing each part of the Teaching Trinity and continuing our growth, we can help our learners flourish!
Stories
We all have stories about the Teaching Trinity; here are a couple of mine.
Story 1: I played high school football for a true legend — Glynn Carlock Sr. Coach Carlock (always addressed as Coach Carlock) is one of my role models for the Teaching Trinity, using his humanity, understanding of football, and ways to teach football to get the best out of each of us. Coach Carlock used his humanity to attend to each player, creating a culture of excellence and trust. We knew Coach Carlock had the football content, both with his teaching and his continuous desire to keep learning through coaching clinics. Coach Carlock also knew how to teach football, using creative drills to make us more aware of the technical and tactical knowledge and skills in the game. I am grateful for the three seasons I played for Coach Carlock, with many wonderful memories during those seasons.
Story 2: A hidden aspect of teaching is the ebb and flow of energy and enthusiasm during a semester or season. At my school in Singapore the fall semester was straightforward: Nine weeks from the beginning to Fall Break; five weeks to Thanksgiving; four weeks to finish the semester. The first nine weeks started with high energy and enthusiasm, then gradually decreased until Fall Break. The next set of five weeks had solid energy and enthusiasm, then the last four weeks were burning the end of the energy and enthusiasm. The spring semester was different, due to Lunar New Year and our Interim Semester — these events caused us to only have three weeks of class out of the first six weeks of the schedule. Because this timing was very chunky we had to be strategic about the sequence and complexity of learning experiences, especially the graded assessments. We were also mindful in both semesters about the workload for students, using our humanity to help students with their energy, enthusiasm, and motivation. Talking about the flow of the semester with students helped them understand themselves better, giving them tools for managing their emotions, energy, and enthusiasm.
Questions
- In what roles do you teach?
- What is your reaction to the Teaching Trinity?
- Do you agree with humanity, content, and pedagogy as the three parts in the Teaching Trinity?
- Think about your favorite teachers — how did they exhibit the characteristics of humanity, content, and pedagogy?
- Who are your role models?
- How do energy and enthusiasm ebb and flow in your teaching?
- What is your level with each of humanity, content, and pedagogy?
- What is one action you can take to improve in each area?
Learning happens when we share what we are thinking, so I would love to hear your answers! Also, you can use these questions as conversations starters with friends and family — hearing their answers and having a conversation would be great!
If this newsletter resonated with you, please share on the socials and with someone who you think would also benefit; I would greatly appreciate any help in spreading these ideas!
Thanks for reading this newsletter — and all the best!
Nathan
Take a look at Belcher’s Model for Learning — please work through the model, thinking about the learning process of learning as described by the model.
[For a much deeper discussion about the entire Model for Learning, read this essay: That’s How Learning Works?!?! A Comprehensive Model for Understanding the Learning Process.]
