by Joseph F. Clark, PhD

All people have unique personalities, but what those outside of education may not fully realize is that when you put a group of people together, the group forms a personality all its own. This is clearly seen in classes meeting regularly over an academic year. It never takes long for the class’ personalities to emerge…often after only a few lectures. Some classes are quite serious, others can be playful, and others run the gamut of everything in between; rarely does a significant change in that personality occur during the term or school year.

When I began regular college lectures, it surprised me how diverse the depth of classroom personalities could manifest. I could give the exact same lecture to two different groups of students, but their responses to those lectures would be quite distinct. My observations had nothing to do with the motivation or competencies of the students even though I tried to be consistent in my presentations. Nonetheless, the classes behaved very differently.

Eventually I came to realize that I needed to modify my teaching style and my own personality to match that of the class. Initially I believed that if I had a playful class I might be more playful to energize them. Well, that behavior might work for some classes and even on particular days, but as the premise of this post states, “every class has its individual personality;” therefore, we can’t be formulaic in getting the students engaged.

Thus my current strategy is to identify the personality of the class and then try to see which of my behaviors resonates with it. A morose class may be stimulated to engage by dramatics on my part. For example, I teach biochemistry and metabolism to medical students. If a patient’s metabolism gets out of whack it often leads to seizure, coma, and death. In my more morose classes, the endpoint phrase of  “seizure, coma, and death” became a kind of mantra to my questions about metabolic anomalies. The fun begins when I receive enhanced participation from the class—I asked questions poised for the usual (but wrong) answer, “seizure, coma, and death.” After students resp0nd with the wrong answer, I would then explain why it was wrong; I believe that keeping them off guard like this would lead them to pay better attention.

One playful class might respond extremely positively to some of my playful antics in a lecture. It is equally possible, however, that another playful class could get out of hand if I behaved too jovially. So, each class needs to be gauged individually and cogently.

There is no simple formula to figuring out what strategy will resonate with a class. My experience is entirely empirical, but I try to cycle my repertoire of lecture methods to see what interests and involves the students. How to reach the students is a ceaseless battle that requires an armament of methods—methods that need to be tailored to address the students’ personalities as well as the group dynamics. The group will respond; and it is the personality of that group that dictates what it will respond to and how.

Find an earlier version of this post on Joseph F. Clark’s blog. A link to Dr. Clark’s blog is located on his website at http://www.josephfclark.com/.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under 21st Century Teaching & Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.