Tuesday 7 May 2013

Developing into an Expert Pedagogue


10,000
; The amount of hours it’s said to take to reach expert, professional, elite, autonomous, advanced and just really awesome.


I believe developing into an expert coach or teacher takes years, maybe even a lifetime. There is no fast track way to be an expert at anything, teaching included. We as upcoming coaches and teachers need to understand that to become a good teacher and coach will take lots experience, and more importantly experiences of failing. These experiences can be outside of your career and even unrelated but still cause positive growth and adaptation.

One of my lecturers for a unit on positive psychology used to say, "developing as a teacher is much the same as developing as a person". This is something that touched me and gave me a greater understanding of the multidimensional art of teaching. The fact that teaching (and coaching) is so complex means that there are so many qualities teachers need to be successful. For example they need patience, knowledge, experience, controlled emotions, motivation, confidence etc. These qualities are gained from growing as a human being, which shows the relationship between who you are as a person and abilities in teaching. "What you are as a person is far more important than what you are as a basketball player". This quote from John Wooden also shows that your professional life is always directly related and effected by everything else about you.

If you want to make changes in your teaching it might have to start with changing yourself. Though this will not be easy and will take some time, real change is a slow process. As coach Wooden said, you should make small daily advances and changes to better yourself. These changes will eventually, overtime add up to meaningful, positive change (Horton & Young, 2010). The path to expert is a long one, keep cool and enjoy the journey there. Get to work.

"I studied art. The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great because they painted a lot"-Macklemore.

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