Some time ago I wrote What is a Teacher?. This question implies that there are teachers and non-teachers, and thus you must be one or the other. But perhaps our interactions with others are not always so clear-cut.

What is a teacher? Well, what does a teacher do?

A teacher guides another person on a path of learning. Sometimes with words, sometimes with actions. Sometimes by opening doors of heart and mind and spirit, sometimes with gentle and quiet witness.

Are you a teacher?

Knowing why we ask helps us find useful answers. There are many good reasons to ask. We might be seeking clarity on our life’s path. We might wonder if we are already teaching. Perhaps we know we are teaching, but are not sure if we ought to be.

In many disciplines a teacher is authorized by an external agency. A university teacher is degreed or accredited, a martial arts teacher has an advanced belt, a spiritual teacher comes from a lineage of teachers in a tradition. This approach has merit; it allows one teacher to review another for suitability to pass on knowledge. The approach also has limits, because skill in a discipline is not the same as skill in teaching. Authorization can cover a multitude of problems, providing a false sense of competence, or a distraction from a pursuit of excellence.

Excellence in teaching is a personal path, a personal choice, a personal study, regardless of external validation or authorization. Being a skillful practitioner of the subject is useful for instruction, but the teacher’s study of their own teaching process is essential.

Ultimately what a teacher teaches is how to learn, how to move from one viewpoint to another. Taking on the title is another matter. It may serve you, or it may not. It may give you courage, or it may hamper your best possible work, or both. If you understand yourself to teach by authority, you may miss the opportunity to teach as an equal. If you are accredited you may stop asking the hard questions about what it means to teach, questions that lie on the path of excellence.

The title of Teacher can limit what you see. If you take on the title, also learn to take it off.

My offered practice: If you teach regularly, if you think of yourself as a teacher, see if you can take the title away from yourself for a short time while you teach. Observe how your teaching process changes. If you teach infrequently, put the title on when you are not teaching. See how this changes your interactions with others.

As teachers of depth, our currency is trust: the student’s trust that we are acting in their best interest, and the student’s trust that our words and actions are largely consistent.

Follow through is not simply a matter of acting as we say we will, or of acknowledging and addressing our lapses when we have them. It is also a matter of refraining from promising or implying action when we are unlikely to follow through. Part of our practice as teachers is to observe ourselves, to see how we bring forth our stated intent. To be aware of ourselves as we are, not as we think we should be or wish we were.

When we teach, we provide our students with past and future continuity, connecting them and their world to the study. When we ask the student to do something in support of the study, we often imply our own action in return. We sketch a shared future. If we fail to make that future manifest, the student’s understanding of us as teachers, of themselves as students, and of the study as worthwhile are all affected.

The currency of trust is best served when we do more and promise less.

As teachers, everything we do demonstrates how we believe a teacher can and should behave. When we do not follow through, our students learn, but perhaps not what we intend them to.

We all have such lapses from time to time, in small or large ways. The key is to notice what we promise, to see how students understand our words, and to attend to the way we complete beginnings.

My offered practice: Watch yourself when you speak. What do you promise or imply? Watch your student. How do they understand your intent?

A student recently asked me, “how you do you know when something is worth pushing through or it is time to give up?” In other words, when on a path, when do we persevere, when do we ease off, and when do we move to another path?

Many spiritual teachers will tell you that when you get close to something very important on your path, that will be the time when you will most feel compelled to stop. A seemingly impassable wall can arise along with pain, terror, even illness. It is as if some part of you is fighting for life. Many teachers will tell you that this is the very time to renew your commitment to the path, the study, and push forward with all you have. To seek a breakthrough.

But the charismatic and manipulative leader who has none of the student’s best interests at heart will say exactly the same thing. As will the teacher who has seen this pattern before and has concluded that if it works for one student, it will work for all.

One answer does not fit all students and circumstances. Indeed, persevering on the path can be yet one more form of protection, denial and distraction from the student’s best direction. Or it may be exactly the right approach, right now, for this student. As a teacher, part of your job is to guide the student through these inflection points. How do you know when the student is on the right path and should continue? Push harder? Retreat? Move to another practice?

This is a touch-stone question in teaching, especially in spiritual teaching. How a teacher answers this question has everything to do with how they understand profound teaching, and how they care for a student who has trusted them with their deepest self.

Since teachers are not infallible, ideally this answer comes largely from the student’s deepest and truest knowledge of what they need. To help the student navigate, we must enter into a partnership with the student in which they tell us what we need to know to best guide them. Toward that end we must already have taught them, engendered within them, an ability to look through their own terrors and limitations, independent of our influence, so that when we ask them to look at this wall and tell us if their best way is through or around or over there, they may be able to.

It is too easy for those of us with charisma and authority to convince our students that we are right, that they simply lack commitment, when closer to the truth is that we are limited in our sight and the path we have helped them set may be flawed. This is why some of the very best teachers use a surprisingly gentle approach at this time. It is simply too easy to press the student in a direction that they cannot sustain or that is deleterious to them.

If you have a student whose momentum seems stalled, who you believe could reach a new level by persevering and recommitting themselves, before you encourage this push, look to yourself to see how your own journey echoes the student’s. Review your own, similar stalls, your own connected fears and terrors, and your own walls. Only then, when you are familiar with the landscape in yourself - past or present - should you advise the student on their best path forward.

And if your past does not echo the student’s path at all? Then be even more reticent to advise.

As teachers we need not be perfect in our abilities or knowledge, but we must be perfectly committed to seeing into ourselves. What we teach comes through us, so we must work to clear our way of hidden walls and demons. Only with our commitment to our own such path can we fruitfully advise our students on theirs.

“Will this be on the test?”

I have heard teachers complain about students who are in class for a grade and will do nothing beyond what is required to get it. They complain about the students, but the problem is with an educational institution that trains both student and teacher to use grades to represent learning. The institution asserts that the goal is learning, while at the same time demonstrating that consequences come from grades. This mixed message is not lost on the student who both learns to play the grade-game and to mistrust the teacher, school, and process. Learning, the student discovers, is not the point.

Not all teachers give in to this system gracefully. Some resist.

On the first day of class, a calculus teacher of my acquaintance said: “exams are open-book, and I will tell you in advance what kinds of questions will be on the tests. If you pay even a little attention to what I say in class, you will get an ‘A’ without any problem.” After a period of adjustment, the class took on a very different quality. The students relaxed. The material became the focus.

A photography teacher I know gave his students a choice: “If you are here primarily for a grade, come back at midterm, and I’ll give you a handout with the final exam questions and answers, but for now, leave. If you really want to learn, with no guaranteed grade, stay. I’ll make you work, but you’ll learn.” I wasn’t surprised to hear that most students left. He told me that students who stayed made the class was one of the best he had ever had.

These teachers managed to put the issue of grades largely aside, so that students could explore the material without the distraction of the grade-game. But the costs to teachers who experiment with such resistance can be very high. The photography teacher was let go because one student missed the midterm handout, failed the final exam, and complained to the school. This is not surprising; whatever the grade-game is, students learn to play it. Change the system out from under them, and some become resentful.

So we have a dilemma: either we use grades and the game itself becomes the study, or we forgo grades and restructure based on student motivation and learning, facing not only student push-back, but assuming institutional motivation, which is not often evident.

For a teacher to go into a school where grades are used and try to circumvent the system is hard and dangerous work. More dangerous, though, is not seeing the tyranny at all; the teacher who uses grades and fails to see how grades typically end up replacing and undercutting learning is missing something critical to learning.

As teachers, when we can remove or at least devalue the effect of grades, we can open the door to the subject itself being more visible. It is risky, though. While some students will see through to the material, others will resent the sudden change. But it is certainly possible. Many students take classes out of choice, from yoga to literature to martial arts, with no grades at all, so clearly it is possible.

There are alternative institutional approaches. If you are not familiar with the philosophy and practice of Summerhill School, a 90 year old school that does not use grades at all but nonetheless produces quite capable students, I recommend you take a look. The school was founded by A.S.Neill, who wrote a book on the subject, a chapter of which you may read here if you wish.

My offered practice: if you teach with grades, consider how you might change the effect of grades on the student, even if only for a single day. If you teach without grades, consider what would happen if you introduced them.

In our lives there are many wagons to fall off of, many resolutions to make and break, many ways to see ourselves as failures. As teachers, we want our students to see the best of what we are, not the worst, so we hide our weaknesses where we can. But this is monochrome thinking, to divide ourselves into strong and weak parts, and when we see ourselves so simply we miss the chance to demonstrate resilience and grace, to give our students perspective that may serve them in their own trials.

Talk of wagons takes us by Alcoholics Anonymous. While some believe that the power of the 12 step AA program is in a relationship with God, there are atheists who also find significant value on this path. One of the major tenants of AA - religious and secular - is surrender to a powerful external force.

Surrender is a common theme across religions and practices. We might think, when faced with addiction issues, that resistance - fighting back - might be the more useful approach, and yet surrender is so often emphasized. Why is this?

Surrender eases rigidity. When we hold tight to the conviction that we can control what happens by fighting back, or behaving properly, or applying more will, we become rigid and fail to see what is going on around us. We make plans based on what we think should be, not what we actually see around us, and then these plans tend to fail. Fighting harder calcifies our conceptions, decreases our flexibility, and we see even less.

The core of addiction work is acceptance - acceptance of how we are as we are now, with all our flaws and weaknesses. Acceptance over time allows us to see ourselves without blame or praise, without glitter or dark shading. Imperfect and present, in this very moment.

Should we reveal this work to our students? As teachers, we want to show our students the best they can be by showing them the best we can be, not to reveal ourselves as weak. When we fall off the various wagons that we intend to stay on, it is easy to slip into anger, blame, self-recrimination and despair. Acceptance is the first step to clearing away these cobwebs of denial and distraction, so that we might see clearly enough to take the next single step, whatever it may be.

This is powerful. When we accept our own falls with grace and responsibility this shows through to our students, even if we say nothing about it. Acceptance is a subtle infusion into all we do and say, and it teaches.

Our students will fall off of their own wagons, in time, in various ways. We cannot prevent that. But we can help prepare them to address their own falls more competently, and little serves as well as the example of their teacher summoning grace in times of weakness and personal crisis. A teacher, standing tall. Imperfect, but present.

My offered practice: whether it is canonical addiction or the doughnut you swore to forgo, when you next fail your own intent, notice this failure, and see what grace and humor you can bring into that moment. Take that perspective into your teaching in some small, subtle, quiet way, so that your students can benefit from your reflection.

All things end. Sometimes silently, sometimes with flash and noise, but still they end. This is true in teaching as well. Teachers leave, students leave, relationships change, and not always clearly or cleanly.

We can wish for passages that are clearly marked, such as graduations, where we have time to adjust and reflect, to be both be sad for loss and glad for movement forward. But in life transitions of such clarity are rare.

As teachers, we have a greater responsibility to our students than they to us, especially with resepct to the greater scope of the teaching relationship. We can - and where we are able we should - speak of these transitions to allow the student to reflect and change under the umbrella of our support and insight.

I once left a school where I had studied for many years, silently and without explanation, because I did not see a better way. I regretted this for some time. Years later, when I spoke to my old teacher, I found that he was less concerned about my departure than I was because he had seen other students come and go, but I know it did not leave him unmoved. It would have been better for us both to have done this in some way together. As an experienced teacher, you can help a student make a transition that they themselves may not be able to understand.

This need not be complicated, or tangled, or even explicit. It may be as simple as providing a moment’s reflection about the teaching relationship’s shift, or a gentle question about transitions, or some thoughts on the nature of the changing seasons.

This can be hard, of course, both for teacher and student. But as teachers we must shoulder this responsibility. Our job is to see the vector of the student’s movement forward, to look for their best interest in learning. For the teacher who finds this change of season painful, and many of us do, I offer this bit of advice: be as gentle with your own heart as you are with the student’s. There is little gain in creating hard edges; life provides a sufficient quantity without our help.

Part of excellence in teaching is showing the student how to move beyond you. With your insight and experience, you can give your student a door to their next season of learning. Perhaps, at the moment of door creation, the student’s best interest will be to stay with you. But knowing how to move forward without you, and knowing that they can, means a stronger, more insightful student - in this season and the next.

It is easy to cut a student’s confidence with words, and it is easy to miss the signs that one has. As teachers, our words carry weight, at times far more than we realize. We know how uncertain we feel inside, but typically the student does not.

So it behooves us to be observant. If we notice a wounded look on our student’s face, or their words show a sudden shift in confidence, consider how we may have contributed to this. If we cut by accident, understand how so that next time we cut with intent, or not at all. When we cut deliberately, it is our responsibility to watch and see how the cut takes and what it accomplishes and what it costs.

Is it in the student’s best interest? It may well be. To weaken a student’s confidence may open the way for them to learn more, to learn deeper. Or it may slow their progress.

We should also remember that the student’s confidence may be mere bluster, intended to convince us - or themselves - that they are more assured and competent than they feel. When we look, if we only see arrogance, we should pause and look deeper. To cut something that is not there is almost certainly not in the student’s best interest.

There are times to weaken a student’s confidence, to open the closed door of rigid certainty. This is the problem with hardening confidence, that it can serve to shutter vision and slow learning. Of course, the opposite - meek insecurity - can do the very same thing.

Our certainty as teachers can also cloud our vision and make us see our own problems in the student’s behavior, so another of our responsibilities is to see beyond ourselves to the student’s best interest. Be sure of our own motivation; irritation and frustration make us likely to miss important subtleties. It is best to seek our clarity first, and see the student’s confidence - or arrogance - in this clearer light.

My offered practice: look for a time to use words to cut a student’s confidence and ask yourself what benefit it might have to the student and what cost. Ask these questions, whether you choose to act or not.

A teacher’s words are powerful. Be careful of what you tell your students because they may believe you.

April first is a good day to consider the limitations of seriousness. Teachers, myself included, often take our work seriously in many ways, perhaps one or two ways more than we must. It is hard to stay serious without also falling into rigid thinking about the subject, the students, and oneself, and a rigid mind is infertile ground for curiosity. The straight-and-narrow seeker had best be lucky enough to find a path that does not curve.

Today when many people look for ways to surprise each other, we teachers often find ourselves looking for ways to instead keep things under control. An acquaintance tells me: “I don’t like surprises. I like to know what’s going to happen.” But we never know what will happen next. We only fool ourselves into believing we do.

As teachers, our work is to see our subject with fresh eyes so that we can effectively convey it to our students’ fresh eyes. It is also our work to see the student anew, because it is useless to teach yesterday’s student.

And ourselves? We are most familiar with our own internal world, and it is easy to think we know who we are. But such certainly can blind us to movement, to possibility, to insight. To our best of teaching tools: ourselves.

Today, let us take a moment - a split second, perhaps, if that is all we can manage - to play the fool, to allow ourselves to be surprised by something, perhaps our subject, or our students, or ourselves. It is in this moment of surprise, if we let ourselves look, that we can see through the cracks of what we think we know to undiscovered lands beyond.

There is a corporate belief that a formal class on a subject is the best way to improve employee performance. Donald Clark, elearning speaker, blogger, and entrepreneur, writes:

How many training departments have an informal training strategy? Very few, despite the evidence that the majority of what we learn is not through courses, but informally from our colleagues and other sources. Almost all of the budget, in many cases almost every last penny, is spent on formal courses, despite the known fact that the majority of our learning is informal.

Informal teaching and self-directed learning are the clear trends in business toward best practices - meaning most effective approaches - and yet I believe we are unlikely to see this trend adopted by established institutions any time soon. Why not? There are naturally many causes, including an entrenched and lucrative training market, and a lack of good institutional examples (beginning in grade school), but I suggest that the most subtle and controlling cause is corporate fear that an informally educated and self-taught employee might threaten the company by challenging, questioning, and changing how things are done.

There may be some validity to that fear; open and self-directed learning is often dangerous to an institution. But the corporation that attempts to limit employee learning to what is narrowly relevant will lose - or fail to create - employees who can look farther and perform past current boundaries.

The institutional costs of an employee who does not fit into the box is more obvious than the costs to the institution of having all employees fit in the same box. The latter cost is usually much higher, but takes place much more quietly and over a longer span of time. It is often hard for an institution to perceive its own best interests when it is more a collection of traditions and processes than a collection of observant people. And so formal training persists and informal training is neither taught nor modeled.

The better we understand why we teach, the more profoundly we can do so.

Few of us teach for a single reason or for the same reasons from day to day or even minute to minute. We are mix of motivations, one moment gladdened by a struggling student’s understanding and the next musing on our paycheck. Few of us are constant in our motivations, and we should be hesitant to describe ourselves so, because what we tell ourselves constrains what we can see.

Understanding one’s motivation requires getting specific. What precisely do you get from teaching?

For many, teaching is an exchange. We expect something back. Our compensation often includes money, though the pay may be more of an enabling force than a motivation. Or it may be both.

For some, the exchange is about the student, and we expect them to pay us in some way, perhaps with something non-material such as respect, diligence, or service.

Some see themselves as part of a gift economy, in which they teach today and someone gives them back something tomorrow. Traditionally, a gift economy requires a community in which exchanging favors is part of the culture, but I know people who practice this way in the hopes of creating this economy in a larger world. What do they get from this? Perhaps a feeling of being part of cultural change.

Teaching evokes a sense of purpose or higher calling in many of us, which I explore in Teaching as Service.

Nearly all parents teach, intensely, and for many years. Teaching often echoes the parent-child relationship, which I touch on in Teaching as Parenting. Teaching children and family has a multitude of potential motivations. What are yours?

For some, teaching is paying off a debt. We were taught something of value and we pass it on. Perhaps we also gain the sense of being part of a tradition.

We may teach to make our struggles, won and lost, mean more. I touch on this in Teaching as Redemption.

Few teach without enjoying the attention and companionship the work provides. Because this is mostly with our students, there are potential tangles. I examine this in When the Student Worships the Teacher.

For some of us, teaching is how we see ourselves, how we understand our place in the world. I touch on this in What is a Teacher?

Do you see yourself in this overview? What do you get from teaching? What do you want? Desire - fulfilled or not - affects this work. When you teach deeply, a clear understanding of what moves you is essential to the kind and quality of teaching you can do.

Once we start looking at what we want from teaching, we will see it change, because we change and the world changes. Look today, but also look again tomorrow, and again after that.

My offered practice: Name something you get from teaching that you want to get. Name something you want to get that you do not get. Now reverse it: Name something you do get but that you do not want, and another thing that you both do not get and do not want. This is an simplistic labeling practice, and not to be taken too seriously, but try it for just this moment, and then again, another day, for another moment. The practice is to learn to look, not to conclude.