|
|
Today marks the third anniversary of my initial post. In previous years, I have used this date to note popular articles, discuss my own favorites, and to generally reflect. I usually say enough and more, so this year I instead decided to ask a regular reader and teacher if she might want to comment. She did. I am touched and humbled by her reply, which I include here in its entirety.
For three years I have been reading and learning from the Guru’s Handbook. At the beginning I was captivated by the succinct wisdom expressed in the bite-sized posts. As time passed, the subject matter deepened and the posts lengthened, but remained thought-provoking as ever.
As one who still considers herself more student than teacher, I sometimes felt like I was peeking in on territory which was not really mine to explore. And yet, there was a way in which, from the very start, the author made it clear that teaching is not so easy to pin down into definable classrooms.
There are too many things to list that I have gleaned from the last three years of blog posts and interactions with the author, but I feel compelled to speak of a few.
First of all, Asher Bey has created a space that feels very safe to explore the parameters of deep teaching, in a way that opens doors, rather than keeps people out. In large part I credit this to the fearless way in which the author shed ego power trips to reveal the sometimes painful lessons learned through mistakes. A student’s trust is built upon a teacher’s willingness to be vulnerable. When teachers dare to share this, it is a huge gift.
Secondly, I would say there is a high degree of integrity in the Guru’s Handbook, based on Asher’s ongoing encouragement to bring the responsibility back to us as teachers. Another of my teachers likes to say “If you learn anything here, it’s your own fault”, which is one way of empowering his students to own their lessons. Another face of that coin, and one which is articulated over and over in the Guru’s Handbook, is that we must continue to take responsibility for the student’s learning, by ongoing vigilance in noticing our own flaws and biases, and strive to not let them harm the learning process.
Thirdly, the inclusion of “offered practices” is a lovely invitation to test the theory being espoused. Finding a way to make ideas real is a challenge for teachers of many disciplines. Change happens in small steps over time, for teachers as well as students. These exercises are opportunities to try small changes in our teaching practices.
For these and numerous other reasons my thanks and congratulations to the Guru’s Handbook for three years of quality blogging. It’s much appreciated.
I am grateful to you, my readers, for your presence in my life and work.
At this very moment we are missing something. It is inevitable that we miss something, because there are too many things in the world at too many levels for us to be able to see them all. So we will miss things, possibly even very important things.
For those of us who pride ourselves on our ability to see, this can be a difficult truth to accept. Surely if we look harder or farther or deeper – perhaps faster – we will see everything we need to see. A moment’s consideration suggests this is unlikely. There are simply too many things happening around us, to us, and inside us, at varying levels of specificity and detail, for us to take them all in. Indeed, the harder we look, the more intensely we focus, the more likely we are to miss something else.
Where does this realization lead us? If we cannot help but miss things in every moment, then as we teach, we also miss things. What important cues are we not seeing? What is there about the student, the subject, the school, that we might be missing that we and the student would benefit from us seeing?
Part of teaching is learning to look, not always with a narrow focus that reveals details, nor with a many-shot focus that attempts to take in everything, but also with a wider, softer focus that lets us see the shape of things rather than the details. What does our peripheral vision reveal?
Because our expectations drive what we can see and where we look to see it, we may also need to soften our expectations, perhaps let them also become a little fuzzy around the edges as we seek to improve our vision.
My offered practice: take a moment in teaching to notice what you see. For the sake of the exercise, accept the possibility that at least one of your students is giving you an important visual cue that you are missing. Consider the possibility that the classroom also holds some important information that you are overlooking. Try looking at your students, space, and subject matter in a less focused way. What do you see?
In the canonical teaching exchange the teacher is paid by a school to teach, and the students are given grades and graduations for proving themselves with tests and assignments. But an exchange need not be about such obvious goods and symbols. It may instead be about social standing, attention, respect or services.
One great advantage of teaching with a clear exchange on the table is that there is less question about what the student and teacher are expected to give each other to support the arrangement. Such clarity can open space to teach and learn that might otherwise be taken up with ambiguity and tangled obligations, perceived or projected. One of the disadvantages of teaching as an exchange is that the exchange can mask the deeper and more profound reasons the teacher and student come together, making the exchange itself seem the point.
Thus the advantages and disadvantages are two sides of the same coin. The student who feels the cost of the study is high may come to feel that they have already paid enough into the exchange and the study should require no more. The teacher may come to objectify the work and forget the additional depth they must bring to the work for it to be excellent. Even if both teacher and student start out with good intentions, the very act of establishing an exchange can imply that nothing additional is needed, and as the relationship progresses, as days turn into weeks and months and years, the exchange can become the default on both sides.
Another danger in exchanges is that the teacher may come to percieve themselves as dependent on the goods or services the student provides, at which point the student can, intentionally or not, take control of the direction of the teaching. After all, the teacher is human, and few of us are unmoved when shelter and food are in question. The deeper and more challenging the teaching becomes, the more important this is to watch for.
When the exchange involves very subtle things, such as symbols and attitudes, it may be hard to see it clearly. Whatever the exchange is about, the teacher is primarily responsibile for making sure the exchange is in the student’s best interest and presents the least possible barrier to learning.
Teaching as an exchange is far more common than teaching as an unencumbered gift. Most people are suspicious of such gifts, fearing hidden costs, and the learning can suffer. Thus some teachers who might not otherwise will require an exchange when they encounter students who cannot learn without one.
To teach deeply, to be a great teacher, it is essential that you understand what exchanges are in play in your teaching and what they accomplish. Be aware of what is on the table in an explicit exchange, and look for what is under the table, exchanged but unsaid. Look also for those aspects of your teaching that can never be part of an exchange, and seek to understand why.
I was recently asked to comment on separating out the content of teaching from the method or presentation. That is, can we learn from teachers we find repulsive?
This goes beyond the challenge of learning despite a poor presentation to learning from teachers we actively dislike. Often what we learn from such teachers is to reject not only the teacher but the subject as well.
A first approach to this issue, often taught to children, is to focus past the teacher to the subject matter itself. After all, parents reasonably point out, there are many people in life who we do not like but must nonetheless engage with, and this is a chance to practice such skills.
There are other approaches for the self-aware student, including using the repulsion itself as a learning opportunity. While it often feels just the opposite, our own feelings of disgust and repulsion hold possibilities of advancement and personal power for us, if we engage with them at an emotional level and work with them until they soften.
Most of us have had the experience of disliking someone at first, to find later that our minds and hearts have somehow changed, and we like them now. Whether we we misjudged them or reacted from our own past, the point is that our perspective on other people can and does shift. Such perspective shifts occur more easily when that other person is an equal; the inherent power discrepancy between teacher and student can lock our initial perceptions and strong feelings into a resistant tangle.
And so there are a number of useful approaches to getting something from teachers we dislike or find repulsive. Among them, these three:
1) Bond with the teacher over the subject matter itself. That is, employ a tight focus on the study and make this the arena of commonality between us and the teacher. Look to connect on that basis.
2) Consider the hard and tender spots of our repulsion and dislike as lessons independent of the subject matter, and use them as our study. As we work these spots, we can free up emotional energy and flexibility, just as work on muscle knots on can free up physical energy and flexibility.
3) Change the power dynamic with the teacher in some fashion in order to lessen the power of authority to lock in our negative feelings. Perhaps reframe the relationship, viewing the teacher more as a resource or an assistant to our learning needs, than an authority to be resisted.
A teacher we find repulsive is often a hidden opportunity for learning something deeper, but the tools to learn from such teachers are rarely taught. Teachers, can you teach these skills to your students?
There is nothing new about the practice of having students teach other students as they themselves are learning. It has been a common practice throughout history, employed for any number of reasons, including an occasional lack of formally qualified teachers.
Learning by teaching is a highly effective way to learn. The focus and effort required to explain a subject to another instills in us a deeper and broader understanding than any lecture or class in which we are passive. This hands-on approach means engaging different parts of our cognitive system and drawing together facets of our understanding as we convey what know, and also what we do not know. Also, social connection and interaction provides a highly motivating environment for the student-teacher.
In learning, even intense study and practice does not give us the perspective that teaching does. Answering questions – anticipating questions – requires us to explore and understand the subject far more deeply than does traditional study. Teaching is a powerful way to learn.
But at what cost? On the surface, it seems that students would not learn from each other as well as they would from an experienced teacher. Rather than being taught the correct path from the start by a competent practitioner or knowledgeable instructor, they might acquire bad habits and poor technique. They might stumble and make mistakes.
Is such stumbling while learning truly so costly? When we take paths that turn into dead ends, we can see for ourselves why some paths are more effective than others. Working around a subject, exploring its limits, even falling down and getting back up to see how gravity and our feet work together, is all very much part of walking. Yes, our goal is to stumble less and walk more, but the basis for walking and running and even jumping and flying is what we we learn when we fall down and then get back up.
There is a difference between learning to walk and learning a created art such as ballet. The key difference is feedback: gravity and the ground provide much of the necessary feedback for a toddler to learn to walk, but ballet must be learned from a knowledgeable practitioner. In both cases, the important part is the feedback to the student on how they are doing, not whether or not they make mistakes.
So the more useful question, then, is this: can one student provide another with useful feedback, even without being an expert in the subject matter? The answer varies from subject to subject and from student to student, but generally speaking, yes. There is too much focus in education on the correct way to do a thing, and not enough on the many other possible ways to approach that thing. Can students provide each other insight on the many ways a subject might be addressed? Yes, especially if we as teachers model this for them.
With some preparation, nearly all willing students can teach other students, both usefully and with insight. At the same time such student-teachers dramatically improve their own facility with the subject. Learning by teaching does require more work from teachers and schools, but it is a powerfully effective way to learn.
The canonical view of teaching is this: the student begins to study, over time increases in competency, reaches expertise, and then teaches. One frame for these stages is The Four Stages of Learning, or The Four Stages of Competence, which I will summarize:
- Unconscious Incompetence: We come upon a study not knowing what is required to be skillful.
- Conscious Incompetence: We begin to realize what we need to know to acquire this skill.
- Conscious Competence: Our skill is such that with focus and thought we can perform well.
- Unconscious competence: We are competent enough to perform smoothly without a focus on details.
Unlike learning to walk, which few of us recall, most of us remember learning to drive a car. When, as new drivers, we realize that driving requires we attend to a great many details, we transition from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. When we are skillful enough to stop thinking about how to drive and instead think about where we are going, we transition from conscious competence to unconscious competence.
It would seem, then, that to teach, we must have arrived at unconscious competence. To teach well, we must also be able to step back into conscious competence so that we can guide the student. Being able to step back from this fourth stage is the line that separates those who only teach by example, who cannot examine their own learning process, from those who teach from a base of self-awareness.
What is missing from this model of learning and teaching is that learning is not a linear process. It is a circular one. Indeed, not even circular, but spiral. That is, we touch on the same material again and again, in different ways, at different depths.
To escort the student through these four stages of competence, we must ourselves walk the stages along side our student. We must revisit the material, the skill, the study, because it changes from student to student, from moment to moment, as do we.
Furthermore, the skills for which these four stages apply are not limited to the subject matter, but include the art of teaching itself and its component arts and skills, such as speech, writing, body language, movement, emotional and intellectual competence, and an understanding of spirit. We must walk through the many facets of the subject itself, the study of teaching and its parts, along side the student.
Can we as teachers truly be at stage four in all of these areas? Probably not. Thus the teacher is inevitably imperfectly competent, perhaps imperfectly conscious as well. As teachers we are walking through the stages ourselves, not simply escorting our student.
The path of excellence in teaching asks us to take this spiral journey over and over, with all the devotion and sincerity we demand of our students. It asks us to view competence again and again, through the eyes of each student, and from our own changing view.
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.
|
|
