Is Teaching an Art or a Skill?

My Teaching, IFL Year 1, Class E1..9

Is teaching an art or a skill? This is a question commonly asked by those people who are involved in educational field. Some people say that teaching is a skill for the reason that to be a teacher one must be knowledgeable and have a talent in teaching. Yet, some people say that it is not a skill but an art. Teaching is like performing. Once ones know how to perform well in front of their students, meaning they are able to deal with disruption in the class, produce a good learning atmosphere, build a good rapport with students, and the like, they are considered as good teachers. Therefore, which view do you support? To me, based on my experience gained from my practicum at the Institute of Foreign Languages (IFL), teaching is a combination of both a skill and an art of teaching.  

I had always thought that as long as we were knowledgeable in the subject we were going to teach, we would become a good teacher. Not until I got involved in teaching did I realize that what I thought was far from right. On 6^th May 2013, I experienced my first teaching. I was supposed to teach a writing skill to a group of freshmen at IFL, whose ages range from around 18 to 30. Before going to teaching, I had prepared a lesson plan as a guideline helping me to have a clear idea of what to be included in my teaching, dressed properly, and prepared all teaching materials needed. After that I walked into the class confidently. I started my class by following what I had planned in advance. Everything was going to be great, I thought. 

However, everything did not went smoothly as I thought. The real circumstance was not the same as what had been predicted. Even though the techniques adopted were well linked, there still were some problems with dealing with time. For instance, the allocated time was 90 minutes, but because of external factors such as traffic jam, some students arrived at school late, say 15 minutes. Therefore, the learning time was only around 70 or 75 minutes. Due to this reason, we, as teachers, need to be flexible in our teaching, or else our teaching would be dreadful. As I experienced during my last technique, I estimated that students would be able to complete their task on time, and everything would finish as the time set. Yet, some disruptions happened. Some students was ignorant about the time limited; they talked with their friends about something else completely irrelevant to the assigned task. As a result, they could not complete the task. If I had not been flexible enough, my teaching would have been miserable. Thus, having a skill, being knowledgeable and talented, in teaching is not enough to be a good teacher. The art of teaching must be taken into account when teaching.

After my first teaching, I came to believe that though I was knowledgeable and so confident in my ability, without an art of teaching, I could not be a good teacher. I knew that my first teaching was not good enough; I ignored the fact that teaching involved applying the knowledge we had together with how to deliver those sets of knowledge, how to help students assimilate those sets of knowledge, how to encourage students to get involved in the classroom activities,  and the like. As a result, there were a lot of rooms to improve in my further teaching. I had learnt my first lesson from my first teaching practicum, and I adopted that experience in my second teaching.

Time went by, my second teaching practicum arrived. My lesson plan and other related teaching material had not been so readily, well prepared. I went to the class, and taught as in the previous, but what was different was that I change my teaching style. As mentioned earlier, in my first teaching I did not care about using an art in teaching my students; I thought being knowledgeable was enough. I tried to diversify my classroom arrangement, encourage students to be active in the class, and praise them after they answered to the question correctly, and these worked well. In contrast, I had not been well-prepared about what I was teaching due to the fact that I had little time to prepare so that I was ready to teach. Therefore, when teaching, I was not as confident as when I taught the first time. To sum up, a good teaching is not about being confident without being well prepared.

As I had learnt from the two previous teaching sessions, I gained deep insight what teaching really was. Therefore, during my third teaching, also it was the last one, I adopted a combination of a skill and an art of teaching in my classroom. I had prepared everything for my teaching in advance. I planed what I was going to teaching very carefully by estimating what would be happening during my teaching, how my students would respond during classroom activities, and the like. I also noted down my weaknesses and my strengths from my previous teaching so that I could know which areas to improve and which ones to strengthen. As a result of combining between the art and skill of teaching together, my third teaching produced a good result. 

From these three teaching sessions during my teaching practicum, I have learned a lot about a job as a teacher. I seriously believe that these sets of experiences will help me to become one of good teachers in the future. To be a good teacher is not as simple as we think. It requires a teacher to be an expert in the areas s/he is going teach, together with how s/she is going teach. Being knowledgeable in the subject is not enough to be a teacher. Therefore, I hope that if you choose a future career as a teacher, you need to know this concept. Teaching is a combination of a skill and an art of teaching.