Act Like a Professor: Finding Your Classroom Identity

When I first began teaching, I remembered the advice and approaches I had heard over the years. This wasn’t advice directed towards me, but just pinches and whispers of the methods of teachers I knew--friends’ parents, neighbors, and fictional characters. Let them call you by your first name. Never let them call you by your first name. Don’t smile before November. Always greet them with a smile. Give them lots of options. They can choose to do the assignment or they can choose to fail. It seemed to me that teaching was an odd balancing act of teaching information, developing students’ skills, and speaking another language comprised of shifting tones and small physical gestures.

It was a language that was completely foreign to me.

My first day in the classroom, I shook from start to finish. I felt like I was giving a presentation, much like the assignments I completed in school. I wasn’t communicating as a teacher but as a student. I didn’t know how to speak as a professor, to act like a teacher, or perform as an expert. None of the advice I had heard felt natural. It all felt so performative.

What nobody tells you is that teaching is a performance.

It’s a performance in the same way that all public identities are performances. We’ve all read Judith Butler. We are performing our gender, our race, our sexuality, our class, our education, and so on. Our students are watching these performances and they are interpreting our class materials through this lens. They are the audience for our courses.

The key to any strong performance, though, is to make your audience forget that they are watching a performance. You want your audience to be lured in by your authenticity. A good performance is a believable performance, a natural performance.

So how do you construct a natural performance?

Let’s start with your foundation: who are you as a person? What do you feel comfortable doing and not doing? What makes you laugh? What makes you excited? The traits, values, and behaviors that bring you joy or irritation as a person will bring you the same joy or irritation as an instructor. Are you someone who is talkative? Someone who is practical? Someone who appreciates firm boundaries? Go with that! It will make you more comfortable in the classroom and allow you to more easily assume the position of an expert. If you are uncomfortable, you will doubt yourself; if you doubt yourself, you can’t trust yourself; if you can’t trust yourself, your students won’t trust you. For your classroom performance to succeed, you have to be the first one to believe in it.

Once you establish your performance, you need to be consistent. I repeat: you must be consistent. Your course materials can have twists and surprises, but you are the glue holding the materials together. Your students need to feel that they know what to expect from you and what you expect from them. Your consistency will ground the course and provide your students with the confidence to build on the foundation you provide. If your students feel like the foundation is unstable, they cannot build. This consistent foundation helps your students better interpret your intended meaning, intuit your goals, and meet your spoken and unspoken expectations.

Then construct lesson plans that reflect the values and qualities of your performance. If your persona is student-focused, include classroom activities that emphasize group work and student discussion. If your persona focuses on traditional expertise, you might focus your attentions on crafting engaging and thoughtful lectures. In other words, your classroom performance, your classroom management, and your classroom activities will all work together to hone the overall learning experience.

If you are just starting to identify your personal teaching style, it may help you to have a few archetypes to keep in mind. These archetypes are not meant to limit you or your performance. They are meant to be toolboxes to build your consistent foundation. Pick the archetype that feels most right to you and use the tools available for that performance.

The Chill Dude: this professor is relaxed and cool. They don’t care if you do the readings, but they are way more impressed if you do. And you want to impress them. They opaquely reference their storied past and teach you the canon in a way that feels downright rebellious. You feel that by participating in their class, you are entering a secret club where the membership dues are paid via the syllabus. This creates a sense of camaraderie between students and professor. Students are fully open with the professor, and while others may find this openness off-putting, the Chill Dude prefers it this way. When students go awry, the Chill Dude cannot discipline, however. They can dismiss a student’s behavior, roll their eyes, and pivot the conversation, but to fully assert their own authority would not be cool. But, like, whatever, you know?

The Distant Expert: this professor is not cool and does not want to be. They’ve worked far too hard to be concerned about what you think of them. They often seem to be in their own head. Their thoughts are far more interesting than yours because they have had more time to work them out. The promise of their experience--their unreachable knowledge--makes you desperate to learn. You want them to bestow their gifts upon you and share with you what you could not learn on your own. This professor relies upon lectures and the Socrates method. They can sometimes appear to be overly unapproachable and this can result in marginalized students feeling vulnerable in their classrooms. It’s important that the Distant Expert uses their distance to democratize their classroom to separate themselves from everyone. Keep your pedestal for yourself and yourself alone!

The Authoritative Parent: this professor deeply cares about each and every student. You know that they care about your well-being. They ask how your other classes are going, what you want to do after graduation, and whether you are taking care of yourself. But because they care, they are not afraid to become stern--to scold--when the class fails to meet expectations. This professor will let you know when you’ve disappointed them and yourself. They are patient when you are trying your best, but impatient when you do not put in the work. This professor focuses on making their students self-sufficient, using guided group work to create a seriously scaffolded semester. Sometimes students can have an overly-emotional response to this professor, wanting them to fulfill their personal needs as a true parent would. Try to limit your role to classroom concerns as much as possible to keep from overextending yourself. You have to let those baby birds figure out how to fly.

The Diligent Advocate: this professor wants to make the world a better place, one course at a time. They see the institution--even the educational institution--as perpetrators of systemic oppression and societal ills. When you are in their class, you truly believe you have the power to change the world. You see the coursework as a mission or as a commitment to bettering yourself and others. This professor encourage you to challenge established authorities, and as a result, develop your critical thinking skills throughout their class. Their own opposition to hierarchies can undermine their authority within the classroom; it can also encourage more traditionally-minded students to dismiss the class itself. It’s important that this professor find ways to connect their values to the course objectives so that the course significance is clear to all students (and not just like-minded individuals). Go ahead and be the change you want to see!

Now keep in mind that these are not the only archetypes by any means. You might consider the archetypes provided by personality tests like enneagram types or Myers-Briggs. You might find you identify with the Architect, the Peacemaker, the Executive, the Individualist, or something else entirely. Whatever helps you find the methods and tools suitable for your performance!

After years of babysitting, my natural performance is “The Weird Aunt.” I am my best when I allow my enthusiasm to be unbridled but my distant to remain firm. I am approachable but not accessible, walking the line between friend and parent. I am not comfortable explicitly disciplining students, so instead I have conversations about expectations and their responsibility to meet those expectations or reconcile with the consequences. I use brief lectures, monitored group work, and open discussion. More particularly, the Weird Aunt persona allows me to transform my awkward sense of humor as an advantage. I make odd jokes about the topics I want to draw attention to or point out the absurdity of certain subjects without diminishing them. The Weird Aunt/Uncle archetype has weird interests, but these interests allow them to venture out into the world, embrace unexpected opportunities, and to enthusiastically share them with their “nieces and nephews.” This archetype marches to the beat of their own drum without becoming out-of-touch with the wider world. Furthermore, the Weird Aunt/Uncle can care about their students without being expected to parent them. You can also think of the Weird Aunt/Uncle as the caring mentor.

That’s just what works for me, though! It took me a bit of time to realize that this is my natural performance. Once I did, though, it helped me figure out how I wanted to manage my classroom, how I wanted to plan my lessons, and how I wanted to speak with my students. After a time, the performance becomes unconscious. Simply muscle memory. But this muscle memory is important to helping you and your students become comfortable in the classroom, confident in your skills, and respectful of established boundaries.

How do you perform as a professor? What scripts, behaviors, or assignments do you incorporate into your performance? How did you identify your performance type? Share your experiences and questions in the comments!