I had many “good” teachers who offered good advice and provided a nurturing environment for students to learn. However, I was impacted by a few different kinds of teachers, who were not too nurturing as those “good” teachers They challenged me to do things that I didn’t know I was good about. I had a chance to recognize my talents and passions. I’d thank those good teachers for all their effort, but I truly appreciated those teachers who helped me find myself the real passion in learning.
I believe good teaching may be defined as the act to reach the goals and objectives of the intended lesson. However, great teaching should be an effort or experience to build the connection between learning content and students’ inner passion. Such an effort or experience will be closely related to individual students’ personality, real life experiences, and their lure of learning.
Daniel Liston states in his article “The lure of learning in teaching” that powerful teaching engages and recalls a lure of learning…. In teaching with a love of learning, we (as teachers) attempt to lure our students into reaching beyond themselves, to connect with the subject at hand. In fact, the passion about learning exists in everyone. However, the love of learning may or may not be visible or evident.
How can we develop passion and gain success with passion? Passion will first need to be recognized and triggered. It will then be nurtured and developed. After we are capable of performing well on our passions, we should then be challenged to maximize our potentials for accomplishing difficult tasks or meeting higher goals. Finally we will be able to say we are proud of our work because we are defined by the work we do and the accomplishments we can make.
People who are passionate about certain tasks tend to take ownership of the tasks. People’s passions are diverse. We can find students spending much time in math, science, computers, arts, sports, games, solving puzzles, gardening, sky watching, and many other tasks, though they don’t necessarily share the same passions. They don’t feel bored when they are engaged in the chosen tasks because they are passionate about the tasks. Every one of them can tell you a good story about how they got started and what it took them to get to where they were.
To help students develop passions about their own learning, teachers need to recognize their capability and potentials. Teachers should be passionate about the learning and invite students to be part of the process or journey of learning. Teachers will then provide adequate guidance and encouragement to lure students in learning. Although learning does not necessarily have to be fun, it should be relevant and significantly tied to students’ prior knowledge and personal experiences in order to trigger passion about learning. Once they found the passion about their own learning, they would continue the effort to improve themselves and be the master of their own learning.
