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Teachers make the best predators because they are already on the inside of the student’s trust. They know how to assume authority, control attention, and evoke compliance – all essential predatory skills.
Predatory teachers use their teaching platform for personal profit at the student’s expense. Instead of attending to the student’s benefit and being mindful of their own integration, such teachers take from the student, sacrificing both the relationship with the student and their own integrity.
These teachers are socially maladapted. That is, their actions not only harm the student but also harm the concentric circles of community and social trust that surround and infuse the teaching relationship, rippling that damage out into the larger society. The resulting problems can affect many people over long spans of time.
Why are students vulnerable to such teachers? Deep study with a teacher echoes our most profound early experiences, in which knowledgeable and powerful entities take critical care of us. Thus even experienced and mature adults can be as vulnerable as children to charismatic and insightful teachers. These teachers can move us, take us off balance, and convince us that they know us better than we know ourselves. This makes it easy for them to manipulate us, to take things that are not in our best interest to give.
What motivates such teachers? Some do not fully realize what they are doing. Some find ways to rationalize, to refuse to see how their actions serve themselves at significant cost to the student.
Many social predators find ways to take repeatedly, not destroying their prey but keeping it alive to feed again and again. Often the student is an active part of this deleterious dynamic, helping to create a symbiotic relationship, an exchange of favors and demands, a mutual knot of obligation and manipulation.
But however complicit the student may be, the teacher, who has the greater influence and power, has primary responsibility to act in the student’s best interest. To teach with integrity.
To protect our students from predators, we must first be able to recognize predation, in others and in ourselves. To understand how we ourselves might walk such a dark path opens our eyes to relevant patterns and gives us useful tools. Excellence in teaching requires us as teachers to become familiar with our darkest sides so that we do not, in ignorance, teach them. So that we neither prey upon our students nor create students who are ready to be preyed upon.
It takes courage and determination to look into our own darkness. As teachers of depth we must look there because what is hidden controls us most completely. Only when we percieve ourselves down to our most unpleasant foundations and can regard our flaws without bias can we be confident that our actions – and the actions of others – are in the student’s best interest.
My offered practice: take a moment of your teaching and student interactions to ask yourself what you might gain if you were both acquisitive and willing to disregard your student’s welfare. Dwell in that imagining for a moment. Next consider what you might do with an opposite intent and a willingness to nurture the student and their learning. Repeat the practice, noticing also your own reaction.
This is one of the most important questions a teacher can ask. I once considered it the least important of questions. What did it matter what I wanted? Surely more important questions involved the nature of duty, fidelity, God, and truth.
But when teaching deeply, if you cannot touch what the student really wants, cannot unearth a deep and profound desire, you cannot motivate them to pursue understanding on their own. To look beyond what is in front of them. To do what is necessary to walk the path.
It behooves the teacher of depth to ask themselves this same question, and to ask as often as it takes to find the bedrock of answer beneath the sands, the ring of truth beyond the mirages of fear and hope.
Without taking on this question at depth, without pursuing its answer diligently, we can hardly expect to put ourselves on a course of study and exploration, and we can even less expect the student to follow our example.
After the simple answers are dispensed with, the ones we adopt from the world around us, we often find we do not know. So accustomed are we to accepting our answers from our culture, so unfamiliar are we with asking beyond a casual query, that we are often hard-pressed to find authentic desire within ourselves. We simply do not have the practice.
And so, practice this. Ask. Ask again.
The answer may change over time. Or perhaps the heart of it never changes, but only in appearance, like the moon in phases. Such change is all right. It is the asking that is important.
My offered practice: find an opportunity to ask your student this question in some form or another. Listen for the ring of truth in the answer, the sense that you have gotten close to the heart of the matter, without giving too much weight to the form in which it arrives. Learn to listen for the ring of truth. Learn to ask again.
I began this writing in October of 2006. This post marks the anniversary of my fourth year.
I found beginning this work to be a challenge. I wondered if my observations about excellence in teaching were too obvious to be useful. I wondered if readers would challenge my credentials. I wondered if I could successfuly convey what mattered most to me.
These concerns, I realized, were universal to all teachers. I decided to bring myself and my experience to this platform in the hopes of offering other teachers both companionship and inspiration.
Since then I have posted nearly 200 articles. I have, fortunately for all concerned, learned to tighten my presentations a bit, perhaps to write with a lighter touch.
What was popular this year? What is a Teacher? continues to be one of my most read articles, as does Ten Mistakes Teachers Make, a combination I find heartening. Also popular this year was Anger, one of my early articles, written in the hopes that if I put what I had learned into words I might remember it.
My personal favorites this year include The Dirty Secret of Education, and Ending a Teaching, and my interview with Matt Harmless, a Christian teacher and pastor, on his views about education, religion, and student challenge.
I am now interviewing another teacher from a different faith, and look forward to sharing that interview with you in the coming year.
My thanks to all who have made this last year possible. Those of you who have written to me or commented on on my articles have provided me with both inspiration and companionship, the very things I was hoping to offer when I began. I look forward to more.
I am deeply grateful.
In one way or another, every student who learns consents to learn. Some might point out that schools often force children to study, but while we can force a child to be present in a classroom, and possibly even intimidate them into performance, we cannot truly make them learn. There is in each moment of learning at least the seeds of consent.
Many teach without awareness of student consent, missing that such consent might be both gained and useful. When a student can be enticed to learn willingly, to be engaged in the process, they start to become the architects of their own understanding.
To consent means to be somewhere out of choice, and that means having the capability and understanding – the power and the knowledge – to leave. If a student cannot freely leave a teaching, they also cannot freely stay. Such lack of choice creates student resistance that few teachers are capable of using to the student’s advantage.
There are many ways to work around such consent, and we see them all the time: a school that does not regard the will of students to be relevant, a teacher who creates emotional dependencies such that the student will not even consider leaving. To block or weaken an ability to consent by disregarding it, denying it, or preventing student motion, is to move from teaching to simple control. Without student choice, any learning that takes place is threadbare.
Whether child or adult, the deeper the teaching, the more important is the student’s consent to study and the more essential the teacher’s sensitivity to such consent. Passive assent is not sufficient; a student must also be self-directed. The charismatic leader who can inspire blind devotion is just as likely to create a weak student as the inept teacher who values obedient regurgitation over understanding. In short, external motivation weakens the student’s learning, at any level and for any subject.
Student resistance or consent is rarely simple or complete. There is nearly always some of each. If a teacher can find the seeds of consent, they may be able to encourage them to grow.
My offered practice: listen for student consent. Notice the student’s willingness to learn from you. Where you find resistance, look also for its opposite. Find ways to grow consent.
What are some signs of an excellent teacher? I asked this question of an experienced teacher, one who teaches teachers, and she answered:
“I like to hear: ‘I don’t know. What do you think? Let’s find out!’”
One might expect to hear this phrase from a kindergarten or elementary school teacher, but this woman is a pharmacology instructor at one of the world’s top universities, and very popular with her students.
Let us look at what she said.
I Don’t Know
When we as teachers say that we do not know, we can create a moment for the student to consider this particular unknown, to realize that we will not always lead them to a tidy answer, to think about hunting down the answer themselves.
But teachers rarely do. When faced with the apparent choice between a student’s best interest in learning and the teacher’s authority and reputation, most teachers will choose the latter and fill the air with words. This is an unnecessary choice; there are many ways to say these words and many meanings that can be carried along.
What Do You Think?
When we ask this of the student we are saying, succinctly and powerfully, that the student’s thoughts on the subject matter. We are engaging the student both in the subject at hand and the process of reflecting on understanding itself. This is teaching.
When the student leaves our classroom, all that is left of our teaching is what they think. It therefore benefits our teaching to find out what that is while we are still teaching them.
Let’s Find Out!
When we find answers along side our student, we teach them not only what to understand but also how. It is one thing for the student to leave our teaching with a better understanding of the subject matter and quite another for the student to leave knowing how to learn more without our guidance. Excellent teaching is not about transmitting the subject matter from our mind to the student’s, but about creating within the student the ability to learn the material beyond our influence.
My offered practice: Explore this three-part phrase in your own teaching. Consider it in three steps: start with the first phrase, and when you have a facility with that, add the second, and when that comes easily, the third.
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