Everyone has a personality, but what people outside of education may not fully realize is that when you put a group of people together they form their own personality. This personality is clearly seen in classes that meet regularly over the school year. It never takes long for the class’ personality to come through after just a few lectures. Some classes are quite serious, others can be playful and a continuum of personalities with everything in between. But after their personality emerges rarely would a significant change in that personality occur during the term or school year.
When I started doing regular college lectures I was surprised at how diverse the depth of classroom personalities could be manifest. I would be giving the exact same lecture to two different groups of students and how they responded to those lectures would be completely different and quite distinct. My observations had nothing to do with the motivation or competency of the students even though I tried to be consistent in my presentation and used the same materials. Nonetheless the classes would behave very differently.
Eventually I came to realize that I needed to modify my teaching style and personality to match the personality of the class. Initially I thought 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 again as the premise of this essay states, “every class has an individual personality” therefore one cannot be formulaic in getting the students engaged. Thus my strategy is to identify the personality of the class and then try to see what behaviors of mine resonate with the class. A morose class may be stimulated to be engaged by dramatics on my part. For example, I teach biochemistry and metabolism to medical students. Often if a patient’s metabolism gets out of whack it will lead 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 would get enhanced participation from the class if I asked a question set up for the student to answer, ‘seizure, come and death’ when that was not the case. After I got the wrong answer, I would then explain why it was wrong and often they would, I think, pay better attention to the lesson.
One playful class might respond extremely positively to some of my playful antics in a lecture. However, it is equally possible that another playful class might get out of hand if I behaved too jovially in lecture. So every class needs to be gauged individually and cogently.
There is no simple formula to figure 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 gets the students interested and involved. As with any educator how to reach the students is a ceaseless battle that requires an armament of methods that need to be tailored to address the students’ personalities as well as group mentality. The group responds, often as a group and the personality of that group dictates what it will respond to and how.