Confidence in the Classroom

Jilly's response on yesterday's post (about looking nervous in the classroom) was so true. She stated that confidence is 95% of classroom management. It seems so unlikely that individuals who lack social confidence would even enter the teaching profession - especially to teach in middle school or high school. As usual, I have a hypothesis about this.

We associate school with smart people. Those folks who can really get a handle on the content, the readers, the math wiz-kids, you know the type. Then university life comes for these folks and it's more success with more content - school is the safe zone. Now it's career time and school teaching looks like an obvious choice. All that time spent conquering the content perhaps left little time for developing social skills and achieving rapport with others. Perhaps retreat to that content was even a refuge from social interactions (so sad). If one-on-one is a challenge for an individual like this, imagine one-on-thirty-five! I've seen it alot as a teacher coach, and it's not pretty. In an up-coming post, I'll share one of my classroom observtion transcripts (names changed, of course) to illustrate just how brutal secondary students can be. Following that, I will explain why it happens, what can be done about it - and most importantly, how to prevent it.

Happy teaching!

Stef