Developing Your Teacher Voice

One of the things I love that I get to do in my role as a teacher educator is coaching student teachers. It's just such a pleasure to see students at the end of their studies in our program pulling together all of the things they have learned and putting into practice! That's not to say that they all have it all figured out. Most have growth areas--which is normal, when you are just starting out in a profession. Often I've given them specific coaching on particular aspects of their teaching: using their physical presence as part of their classroom management, strategies for making groups, tips for facilitating discussions, and the like.

Sometimes we have to work on their "teacher voice." My fellow educators probably know what I'm talking about here: there is a way of using your voice as a teacher that we don't use in many other settings. It's not just about being the loudest person in the room, it's more a quality of how we use our voice to command authority, to facilitate the discussion, to draw students in to the learning.

Some teachers seem to learn this very naturally, while others need to practice it, but most highly effective teachers have a very real sense of "voice" that they use as a key part of their teaching practice.

And today, I'm made acutely aware of this fact, because I've lost my voice. I have a cold, and with it, my larynx is failing me. I can whisper, but with some difficulty, and that only seems to make things worse, honestly. I'm struggling and straining, and it's making me realize just how much my voice is part of my teaching practice overall.

At the moment, I'm wondering how tomorrow's classes are going to go, and the meetings I have scheduled with students as well. It's difficult to communicate in the classroom when one of my most important tools is inaccessible! Can I plan other ways to communicate? Certainly. But will they be as effective? Well...maybe...but I feel like I'm going to be struggling to do my best teaching if I have to rely on body language, facial expression, writing on the board, and strained whispers to get the point across. Particularly because we're in the first days of the new school year, and I'm still doing so much relationship-building with students...and I am finding just how much I depend on my voice to do this work. This is requiring me to think creatively about what I can and should be doing to connect well with my students!

The real lesson for me is this: the teacher voice, once developed, is an effective means of keeping students "with you" in class. And now that I've come to rely on it so strongly, I'm really struggling without it!

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash