Communicator style in teaching: Giving good form to content
✍ Scribed by Robert W. Norton
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1986
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 406 KB
- Volume
- 1986
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0271-0633
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
While I greatly admire Kenneth Eble's book, The Craft of Teaching: A Guide to Mastering the Professor's Art (1976), it is his essay on teaching styles in an earlier volume of New Directions for Teaching and Learning (1980) that has provoked me to further study of the connections between teaching style and communicator style.
I agree with Eble that: (1) style in university teaching needs to be better respected by the teachers themselves; (2) style should not be confused with affectation; (3) style should not be denigrated as a kind of posturing to mask a lack of substance; and (4) style is not merely the natural manifestation of personal eccentricities.
In my view, however, it is necessary to introduce more precision in discussing the notion of teaching styles. For the educational researcher, the primary criteria with which to judge a definition of style are (1) whether the definition is at the appropriate level of abstraction and
(2) whether the definition can be used to generate useful units of analysis.