At the heart of teaching is this: you offer knowledge and perspective, and your student perhaps learns. At the heart of teaching is also this: you gain something from teaching, you satisfy some need or desire, or you would be doing something else.
Love, tradition, money, obligation, service, blood-ties — there are many reasons to teach. And some of us teach constantly, subtly; a parent or sibling or friend can be a teacher without formality or label.
However and whoever we teach, if we can bring our motivations out where we can see them, we can teach more profoundly and with more integrity. It is tempting to look only at our most attractive motivations, the ones of which we approve, but this draws hard lines around what we can do in our teaching.
What is the darkest, least flattering motivation you have for teaching? This is what constrains your deepest and most profound teaching ability. Left unseen and unknown, this is a blind spot you will teach around and a trap that will catch and prevent your best work.
Few motivations are purely one thing or another. To better see the mix, look without conclusion. Look without judgement. Ask without quick answer. What moves you to teach?
Between teacher and student there pass many intangibles that are hard to label. Perspective, advocacy, challenge. Attention, adoration, social contact. Gratitude, loyalty, inspiration. Some of these may be motivational to you, some may be incidental, some may be in the way. Some you may consciously ignore, others you may barely notice. If you teach for compensation or exchange, what do you expect back for your teaching? From whom? Be aware of these assumptions, however you may like or dislike them, because unseen they will constrain your most powerful work.
Notice what you gain from the student specifically. Anything the student gives you that you feels is part of your teaching exchange will affect how and what you teach. For example, if you teach for money, you are exchanging something for money. What is that something? If you teach for money but you believe the money is incidental to your teaching, how are you teaching that?
Whatever the many reasons you teach, observe what comes from the student, the school, or someone else. What comes from your own actions, or from the focus of study itself? How does teaching affect your self-image? What part of teaching adds to your integrity, and what part takes away?
Excellence in teaching means looking at our motivations. It means opening the doors to our darkest place, and means reopening these doors when routine and fear help us close them.
Our motivations affect everything we teach. To teach with excellence, to teach profoundly, we must open the doors to what drives us, turn on the light, and look.
I have a Latin motto that has hung in my classroom for many years: “Docendo discimus” which translates to “by teaching we learn.”
It is through the exchange of knowledge, traveling a two-way conduit with our students that we gain inspiration, understanding, and passion.
Whilst this article is of course, accurate, I can’t help feeling that it is rather simplistic. Most of us teach for a variety of reasons, as suggested. But our ability is less connected to th underlying motivations and much more directly to our ability to communicate. How passionately we do that may well be driven by some of our motivations, but how effect we are depends upon gaining feedback and responding appropriately to that, so as to create a virtuous circle.
Michael, it does seem that one reason to teach is to learn, yet teachers so often feel the need to prove we know enough to teach. How else, we may wonder, do we gather the respect of students, teachers, and administrators? Examining this contradiction takes me to some interesting places, starting with this question: how can I both be knowledgeable enough to teach a subject and be teaching to learn? Does this mean there is a line, on one side of which is my knowledge and credientials and on the other side my ignorance and openness to new information? Where is that line? Who draws it?
Thank you for inspiring me to ask.
Peter, thank you. I agree that communication ability is important in teaching. At the same time, I don’t think we can teach profoundly without being internally clear about what drives our teaching.
An example, one I’m sure you’ve seen, is the teacher who secretly wants to be liked by their students but knows intellectually that this will interfere with the quality of their teaching, and so tells themselves this is not a motivation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be liked by students — the problem is not in the wanting but in not seeing the motivation in ourselves so that we can account for it in our teaching. When we watch this teacher in action and see that they take student feedback to either support or threaten their hidden desire, we see the cost to not knowing ourselves as teachers. This sort of hidden motivation — whatever it happens to be — closes our ears and eyes, no matter how good a communicator we might be.
A teacher’s communication ability is important. But I have seen clumsy, stuttering, mumbling teachers with clear internal vision teach profoundly and change lives, while smooth communicators with excellent vocabularies and splendid oration give confusing and heart-wrenchingly mixed messages. I have seen the damage that a charismatic teacher with superb communication skills can do when they let their internal hungers blind them to their teaching mission.
I agree that responding appropriately to the feedback we get from students is essential. But how we respond appropriately if we don’t hear this feedback? How do we hear well if our own internal agendas are clogging our ears? I come back to understanding our own motivation as a critical step to excellent teaching.
I appreciate the chance to discuss this issue with you.
So much of Teacher training is about knowing the material well, and methods of presentation.
Once again you point out the great importance of looking inside with complete honesty in order to effectively convey something of value to others.
To me the most valuable reminder in this post is that to seek the darkest motivation and pull it out into the light so it can cease to be something to “teach around” or be trapped by.
So- I think my darkest motivation is simply loneliness, a desire to create people that can understand a world because there are so few to find…
But you know me old, friend: Do I have a darker motive unknown to me?
Janet, I would hesitate to use the phrase “complete honesty,” though I may well have, because it has the sound of an answer, a judgment, of a conclusion, and most of these expeditions into ourselves are unpleasant enough that we are naturally seeking such closure. Is this useful? Words are powerful. On the surface “complete honesty” sounds wonderful. In practice, I find that we either fail to achieve it, or we label our efforts as done when there may be more to find.
Thank you for giving me cause to consider this.
Rory, thank you. Loneliness is such a powerful motivator, and when we believe we shouldn’t be motivated by loneliness, or that it it is separate from our teaching, it can also be a powerful suppressor of our capability to teach profoundly. Again, the problem is not the feeling, it is our suppressing it and our efforts to make it seem something else, rather than accepting it as part of the whole that we are when we teach.
As for you in particular and your motives, whether you know something or not is well beyond me to say. I can tell you what I see in you as a teacher, but not here. Contact me if you wish.
Thank you for bringing this up.
Thanks for that reminder of the importance in choice of words. I inferred that as the intention, not necessarily the fait accompli. Do we examine things for partial honesty? or simply accept that we will not achieve honesty in total?
Janet, what is honesty? Perhaps it is communicating as best I can about what is true for me. But what is true for me changes moment by moment, even if some aspects appear to remain constant. Each second that passes changes how I understand the world, even how I am able to convey my understanding, my truth. In mid-sentence, perhaps, my understanding changes, subtly, profoundly, invisibly, glaringly. If my truth changes mid-sentence, can my words still be honest?
Words are essential and words are distracting. The map is not the territory. But we must have maps.
This may be a partial answer to your question, which I hope is always only partially answered.
Janet wrote: “Do we examine things for partial honesty? or simply accept that we will not achieve honesty in total?”
…which got me thinking. My favorite definition of honesty is from a previous post of Asher’s, Teaching by Speaking Honestly: “To speak honestly is not to say everything, it is to say one thing, in context, such that it is clear and genuine.”
Finding complete honesty implies the security of stasis; that this thing we’ve uncovered won’t change in the next moment, or the next. It sounds official, like we’ve found an object and put it in our pocket. But how boring it would be if we could actually know everything about ourselves?
I wonder whether it’s a matter of “settling for partial honesty,” so much as it’s about continually updating a process of curiosity that leads to greater clarity. Like getting closer and closer to infinity, but never quite there; still interesting and useful and occasionally fun. Just not complete.
Solomon, thank you very much. I wonder if it might be worth examining what it is that we do put in our pocket when think, “ah, now I have it!” if it is not complete honesty, which it probably isn’t. Sometimes the things we put aside (into pockets or elsewhere) are worth a second look.
Solomon~ I like this: “constantly updating a process of curiosity” and the reminder that we are not static, either teacher or student.
I learn more when I teach. I suppose it’s a selfish motivation in a way.
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Cheers! Sandra. R.
Any task done for others must have some benefit to the doer for it to be sustainable.
As a teacher, my passion for teaching comes from many internal sources: pride in my skill, belief the information is valuable, an opportunity for me to take the material to a deeper place, watching students grow into themselves, a creative outlet, etc.
The best teachers I have had also enjoyed helping me to think for myself. They did not need to indoctrinate me to their own way of thinking.
Teaching is a spiritual art. It is a way to connect souls as well as minds. It is an act of love. It is also an act of receiving love.
Teaching is also an opportunity to control and manipulate students. Anyone who takes up the sacred act of teaching needs to be aware of the seductive powers the role of teacher.
Thanks for the reminder.