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We all carry voices in our heads. They are the voices of our teachers, parents, friends. They comment on our work, our accomplishments, our failures. Sometimes they cause us to wonder if we have missed something, to wonder if they would approve.
Over time, these voices – these imagined voices – become so familiar that we are no longer entirely conscious of them even while we act and react with them in mind. In this cacophony of judgment and praise our own capacity to see clearly and think for ourselves can be drowned out.
Our students have such voices as well, and over time our own voice may join them. We must be on the lookout for this because as flattering as it is to have a student follow our mental footsteps and wonder how we would view their actions, it is our task to teach our students to see the world around them and think for themselves.
There are many ways to address such thought patterns in a student, some of them overt, such as discussing how we model the people who influence us, and some subtle, such as exaggerating a voice for dramatic effect and seeing if the student recognizes the echo in their own mind.
Most teaching is about strengthening the student’s understanding of our views, but there are times when it is best to seek to weaken the shadow of our voice in the student’s mind. This is not because our words are not worth hearing and remembering, but because we have a duty to teach our students to listen beyond imagined voices of opinion and judgment, to see past the pitfalls and blindnesses of their friends, parents, and teachers.
My offered practice: look for a time and place in which you sense a reflection of someone else’s voice in your student’s thoughts, perhaps even your own. Can you highlight these imagined judgments or praises in a way that helps the student see through them?
I have been asked for an introduction to my work. The following is a collection of fourteen articles that I offer as an overview of the first two years of these writings. I have excerpted a bit from each article along with the link.
“Teacher” is a lable. Sometimes it carries too much weight to be useful, and sometimes not enough. Sometimes a student crosses your path for only a moment, not long enough to make introductions, let alone to label the exchange, but long enough to offer something of value. Long enough to teach.
Learning to listen well is perhaps the single most important thing that a teacher of depth can do….Here are some exercises that I practice:
There is a myth, a script, that says the teacher does not, should not, make mistakes. It goes on to say that teacher mistakes should only seem to be mistakes to the student who does not yet understand the teacher’s true intent. Indeed, a clever teacher can arrange for the student to conclude this about nearly any misstep… Choosing to reveal your mistakes to the student changes this script.
Teaching without assumption of authority is a sort of stealth teaching. For those accustomed to being known as the teacher, this approach can be mysterious; how do you teach someone who does not consider themselves a student? Such skills can augment formal teaching and can extend a teacher’s range, but these skills can be hard to come by, especially if you are used to relying on your position to command attention.
This sort of subtle teaching is powerful because it comes in under the radar of defensiveness and fear. No one is being told they do not know enough, or that they should try harder. The “teacher” is simply solving problems as an equal. And learning happens.
It is a teacher trap to think you can give all the information you need to give to a student, in any moment. No matter what the level of the student, it is not helpful to tell them everything they could be doing better. It’s too much.
Another way to look at teaching is that our purpose is the student’s learning, and our actions should be in support of that purpose. So if the student is learning without us doing anything, we should stand back, do less, let them learn.
A student can more accurately sense your disconnection from your own
integrity, from your own clarity, than they can your disconnection from any facts.
As teachers we get mixed messages about curiosity. We are told to encourage wonder in our students but to stay on topic. We are told to stoke a desire to explore but not to upset the parents.
A delight in uncovering, unwrapping, and discovery produces agile, self-propelled students. How do we open the door to wonder and curiosity as an approach, and yet honor the limits of the world in which we teach?
When possible, keep the conflict within the scope of your teaching. That is, include this issue, this challenge, this drama, whatever it is, in the study. Take the attitude that this conflict is not external to the study, and you will keep it in view rather than push it into hiding. The teacher who does not allow challenge to their teaching is missing a great range possibility for deep 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.
Words do not carry meaning, though they can, perhaps, point to meaning. This is part of the teacher’s job: to point to meaning. This requires us to have some sense of where to point to, and where to point from — the student.
Look into the dark corners. In the privacy of your own mind and heart seek the extremes of possibilities: your talented student fails — are you relieved? The student succeeds brilliantly — have you any envy? The student comes to you asking advice. Are you reassured? “I need you,” the student says. What do you feel?
This can be a tangled set of motivations, even for the most self-aware of teachers. On the other side of this tangle, of course, waits our greatest prize: a student who goes farther than we thought our teaching could lead, who validates our deepest work as teachers. It is a tangle worth walking through.
As teachers we must be aware that our protected fears detract from our teaching ability. To avoid our fears we must look away from them, and we must keep looking away from them. Over time this focus on not seeing becomes an ingrained habit upon which we layer compelling explanations for why we do not dig in that spot. We cannot see this area, cannot use what is there, cannot go beyond. We limit our ability to teach anything that touches this.
It is easy to underestimate the power of a teacher’s advocacy to move forward, to clear a space for something new, especially when you are that teacher. A teacher’s help in making this transition can allow the student to focus on something new with confidence. A teacher’s approval for moving on, for being done, can be a great and freeing gift.
At this time of year I like to reflect on those people in my life who have given me the gift of their companionship, their insights, their spirit. Some of these are my teachers, some are my students, some are neither.
If you are part of a spiritual discipline that values thankfullness as a practice and attitude, consider that such appreciation of others is something that can be observed and emulated. As a teacher, can you show your students what gratitude might look like?
Be aware of the difference between lecturing about gratitude and practicing it. Too often we direct others in actions and attitudes we ourselves do not evince, without even the useful teaching of giving voice to our own struggles.
My offered practice: when teaching, make or find a time to enjoy the company of your students, or to talk about a subject you have affection for. Can you find some satisfaction in this time, in your students, in your subject? If you can find an ember of delight in this moment, breathe on it and seek to turn it into warmth. If you find that you appreciate the company or effort of your students, tell them this. Consider how you might also tell them without words.
Thank you, my readers, for your presence here.
In the course of teaching, especially deep teaching, teachers take on different aspects in order to reach their student. Sometimes this is as simple as presenting a confidence we do not feel, sometimes it is a more involved face or drama created for the student’s benefit. Any time we teach, we choose what facets of ourselves to show our student in order to best teach them. Our job, after all, is to help the student understand the material, perhaps the world, not to understand us.
In order to evoke class discussion and decrease drop-out rates, these teachers posed as students, using on-line personas with invented names, photos and profiles. When the teachers revealed these actions, some students and faculty reacted with outrage, feelings of betrayal, and questions about the teachers’ ethics.
Most of us were raised in a time when teachers could not easily pass as students. On-line this is no longer the case. We may find it unsettling, but our discomfort alone does not make it unethical. We must look beneath the surface of our assumptions, to the core of what we understand, to our touchstone: what is in the student’s best interest?
The instructor in this case benefited the student in at least two ways: first, increasing student involvement, as intended, by demonstrating how an involved student might act. And second, by reminding students that on-line all we know is what we are shown, all we have is masks. Even when photos and bios are a good semblance, they tell us little about the person behind them. These are both useful teachings.
As the world around us alters, we must be careful to distinguish between what is new to us and what is at odds with our best principles. Being surprised at how a teacher teaches does not mean we need also be outraged. The on-line world is a tool, and how we use it to teach is what is important.
For those on the path of excellence in teaching, it is to our advantage to understand how we use presentation in our teaching and why.
My offered practice: in the course of teaching, notice yourself presenting a facet of yourself, a persona, a mask. What is the benefit to the student of this particular presentation? In another moment consider the question again.
Enter a classroom of loud student voices and you are likely to find a teacher demanding silence. The method can vary; I have seen teachers write on boards, yell, drop books, pound desks, or stand quietly until the class follows.
However it is achieved, student silence is not student attention. If as a teacher you insist on student silence – and you would be in the minority if you did not – and you get it, take some moments to examine what you actually have. Student silence is usually passive compliance and nothing like engaged listening or captured attention.
Attention itself is a shifting quality, like water, and even the most focused of us drift. We can hardly expect our students to attend to our every word, nor to attend perfectly. So what can we expect? Very little. We can only expect what we teach and inspire.
In Ten Mistakes Teachers Make I write: “…teaching your students to listen deeply is one of your most important lessons, and there is no better way than to show them.”
If you want your students to be genuinely and deeply attentive you must show them how. Demonstrating listening means someone other than you is talking. What should they talk about? Just as having a response in mind changes the quality and effectiveness of your listening, telling someone what to say and then remaining quiet is not particularly good listening.
My offered practice: devote five minutes of your teaching session to listening to your students talk about the subject in as open a format as you can arrange. Practice listening to them as you would want them to listen to you.
Teach your students to speak. Show them how to listen. Demonstrate this often and well, and they will come to understand, from both sides, what listening can accomplish.
I rarely recommend video lectures because I prefer to read than to watch most presenters, but I found this TED lecture by Daniel Pink to be well worth my time. While he is addressing his points to business, they are also relevant to education.
He says: “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” Research shows that if a problem may be solved mechanically, by following instructions, rewards motivate workers to better performance, but when a problem requires creativity, rewards instead degrade performance.
To apply this to education, if we believe that students learn mechanically and by following instructions, then rewards may motivate them. If not, if we believe that that learning is a creative act, then we must take serious note of this research and change our pedagogical processes accordingly.
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?
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