My host asked me to write on this topic. I liked the idea, but why ten? Why not nine or eleven?
- Accepting, without considering, constraints on how you teach
I asked Michael Gilbert of the Nonprofit Online News and he explained that this is the ten year anniversary of that publication. I considered this and choose to accept the constraint.
Constraints or rules on how you teach, explicit or hidden, can come from the school, the rulebook, or your own mind. The most challenging ones are the ones you don’t see, that you assume without question. Often these come from within you. Examine your constraints so you can see them, understand them, and then choose them or reject them as you see fit.
- Teaching the subject and not the student
Whatever subject you are teaching, it is the student — and only the student — who can choose to learn. So teach your subject to your student. Teach as much of the student as you can.
Here are some related posts you might find relevant: Faster and The Advanced Student.
- Not listening
It is very easy to believe that since you are the teacher, you should be talking and the student should be listening. There are two reasons this handicaps a teacher. The first is that teaching your students to listen deeply is one of your most important lessons, and there is no better way than to show them. The second is that the better you listen, the better you will know your student, and the better you can teach.
More about listening: Listen and Listening to Silence.
- Hiding your mistakes
School politics can require careful handling of a mistake, but downplaying or hiding a mistake can give it more power. A better way to defang a mistake is to embrace it and put it to good use. Start by seeing mistakes in yourself, whether you openly admit them or not. Then ask yourself if you can use these openly to teach, and what deeper lesson your student might take from that demonstration.
More on this subject: Your Flaws and Mistakes.
- Proving yourself competent to teach
It is a common belief that to teach you must be better at the subject than your students. It may even be true. But it is worth questioning. Also worth questioning is the effort you put into proving you are good enough to teach. A teacher who is proving their competence is probably not teaching what they mean to.
Other posts I have written on this subject: Teaching Tools: Giving the moment away and Not Your Student.
- Answering every question
The questions are the important part. Teach your students to ask deep questions and seek out the answers, and you will have done your job.
You may find these relevant: Laying a Foundation, Questions and Answers.
- Letting Ego teach
Whatever sort of protection your ego offers you, and however that shows up in your teaching, be aware of it or it will handicap you. Your modesty, your confidence, your irritation, your fears — these things can come from many places. Find out what your ego is teaching and why.
More on this in Fear and Addressing Ego: Introductions.
- Missing the other layers
You are always teaching more than one thing at a time, whether you mean to or not. Notice what you say, how you teach, how you stand. Your tone, gestures. Watch your students as they respond. How many layers are you teaching at once?
Take a look at What are you Teaching? and Doubt Versus Resistance.
- Keeping to a script
Sometimes the difference between a plan and a script is how present you are for the action. For any given day it is easy to believe that you know what will happen, to believe that the structure of the day is already in place. This is never true. Teach the student, teach the moment.
More on this in Scripts and Knowledge and Ignorance.
- Believing the role
When you teach, you take on a role. You present particular aspects of yourself to the student and leave out other aspects to best support your teaching. If most of what you do is teach, it can be easy to forget about the parts of yourself that you choose not to show the student. to forget the whole of what you are. This can leave a teacher feeling empty. This is one way teachers loose heart.
More here on this in The Student’s Vision.
It is hard to find a mistake a teacher can make that in skillful hands could not be turned into an excellent lesson for students. Often the difference between a mistake and an excellent lesson is not the teacher’s action, but their reaction.
Across the years of teaching I have made all these mistakes and others, many times. In most cases it was my fear that kept the action a mistake rather than allowing me to use it as an opportunity to teach out of my stumble. But no amount of study can prepare you for that moment. Rather, you must go into it willing to stumble and make mistakes, with an intent to be open to the moment’s opportunities for teaching.
And if that were easy to do, this list would be shorter.
[...] הגורו כותב על 10 שגיאות שמורים עושים. [...]
Thank you so much for this very useful list. It really helped me reflect on my practice.
Thank you so much for this very useful article – a great reflection tool for all teachers no matter how experienced.
Nice to know some people are considering these fundamental truths. I might add that a coffee cup, whether you call it a mug, a ceramic vessel, or a container, etc…; is still what it is. It requires not that we agree on its proper name. Therefore, its true that a teachers role is not to clarify ‘knowledge’ but to clarify the process by which we arrive at it. How else can we do this as teachers but by being ignorant as our students about the subject matter. Whether we are ignorant or knowledgeable people doesn’t change the fact of what we are. These things are just names…
Joe, thank you. While the map is not the territory, maps can be powerfully useful. If all we do is to teach that distinction, to teach the practices of map reading and map making, and how to see beyond map labels, we will have done our job and well.
[...] This is a better analogy than I can think of. It has something to do with this post, just not sure what yet. [...]