Sometimes I was asked my preferences. What was my favorite subject in school? What animals did I like? What movies? What sports?

Less often, I was asked what I saw. What did I see when I looked at that mountain? That tree? That person?

This is where questions become dangerous. Facts alone are relatively objective. Preferences typically follow cultural expectations and exposure. These are safe things to ask. But what someone sees is a reflection of what they think and feel. To ask about this is to invite them to participate fully in the conversation, to speak of things other than what they have been told is there.

The asking of ask such a question is powerful all by itself. It says that this person’s view matters. To ask a child what they see will change the way the child looks at the world.

My offered practice: consider a child or adult in your life. Ask them what they see. Ask them what they think. Notice what you are telling them by asking this. Listen not only to what they answer, but how.

A teacher has great power to demonstrate good endings, to give the student a way to transition from one path to another, one level to another, one teacher to another or to no teacher. Even when the student is staying with the teacher, the teacher can help mark a place where one form of study ends and another begins, showing how things are ended well.

When a deep teaching is informal or unstructured in duration, it is rare to find a teacher deliberately ending the work at a useful place. More often such teachings end with life circumstance; someone moves away, loses interest, or there is a falling-out. It is rare indeed to hear a teacher say, “I think that we have done good work, and it is enough. Go do something else.”

For these and other reasons, it is sometimes the student who must end the relationship. One student I spoke with had found herself unable to function due to stresses with her teacher. Despite having gained a great deal from the work she had decided that it was time to end the relationship but was conflicted. The words of her teacher came back to her, making her doubt herself. Only when the cost was very great did she see ending as her best choice.

This can be hard for a student. The decision alone may be brutally difficult. Teachers are often able to evoke vulnerable and dependent feelings in their students, and if the teacher is reluctant to let the student leave, it can be difficult for the student to even consider this option.

Teachers, if your student cannot freely leave your teaching, they also cannot freely stay with your teaching. While there are times when the student’s learning is best served by a sense of needing to stay, there are important times when the teaching will suffer if the student does not feel free to leave.

From the teacher’s point of view, the work here is to enable the student to leave in a good way, and then, perhaps, if appropriate, also allow them to stay. Teach your student to think about what it means to end things, to move forward, to graduate, to grow beyond you and your teachings.

From the student’s point of view, the work here is to understand that the teacher is a means to a path, perhaps a doorway, and not the path itself nor the room beyond. The student may have come to trust the teacher, rely on them for direction, clarity, comfort, transformation, even deep spiritual bliss. A sense of rightness and belonging is often found in such relationships. These are hard things to give up.

The excellent teacher will have taught the student that the genesis of such profound experiences is not in the teacher. They will have taught the student to practice finding these things on their own, and will make the ending a positive and beneficial process, whether they leave the door open for the student to return or not.

My offered practice for students and teachers both: consider your most profound and powerful current teacher-student relationship. Reflect on ending it, and what it would take to do that gracefully and with beneficial outcome for all. What might you do now to lay the foundation for that ending?

Here is his answer: What Teachers Make

Money is a strong motive force. If your students pay you to teach, money necessarily becomes part of what you teach them, whether you intend it to or not. By the very act of accepting payment you show and thus teach that your teaching may be bought. When students believe their ability to pay is why you teach them, it affects how and what they learn.

Being paid to teach also affect us as teachers. We may wonder at our value when it is represented by money. We may be affected by the control of those who pay us.

If the money takes steps around you, as it does for most public school teachers, traveling from citizen to government and then back to the school and to the teacher, the influence that your monetary compensation has on your students is blunted because they are less aware of the flow of these funds. If parents instead gave their children cash to give you directly, what those students learn and how they understand your teaching would change markedly, as would your own understanding.

For the student who pays you directly, it is important to take into account that influence while at the same time separating the teaching from that influence – not an easy task. Additionally, it is important to separate out the teacher’s need for compensation from the student’s need to compensate. We may not need the money, but the student may need to pay in order to learn. Or the other way around.

Further, what money means to one student is different from what it means to the next. A rich student and a poor student will not have the same experience in learning in the same environment, even while paying the same amount. While each teacher-student relationship is unique, students in a classroom expect to be treated similarly. A difference in base wealth creates a difference in the learning experience even though on the surface it may appear equitable.

Thus we must look for and understand the currencies in play. Money and its absence are both motive forces. A student who believes they pay a lot to be taught may feel they need not give much else, such as respect or effort. A student who pays no money may feel they are incurring an obligation and attempt to compensate in other ways. Such reactions may interfere with the teaching, or they may help it, and we must seek to understand the student and their motivations so that we can best serve their learning.

If you have paying students, you have two issues to consider: for yourself, how money affects your teaching and how to allow for that influence. For the student, how to separate out the money from the learning, or how to include it in your teaching, or both.

My offered practice: If you are paid to teach, consider how your teaching would change – or stop altogether – if there were no money at all. Or less money. Or more. Consider how your teaching would change if students paid you directly, or in differing amounts. Follow the trail of influence that money plays in your teaching. Consider how your deepest and most important teachings are affected.

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?

What is a Teacher?

“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.

Exercises in Listening

Deliberate Mistakes

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 Authority

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.

Details

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.

Teaching Without Action

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.

Finding the Teacher’s Clear Signal

A student can more accurately sense your disconnection from your own
integrity, from your own clarity, than they can your disconnection from any facts.

Seeking Truth with Curiosity and Wonder

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?

Responding to Challenge

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.

Why Do You Teach?

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.

Why Teach When There Are Books?

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.

Addressing Ego: When the Student Passes You

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.

Excavating Fear

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.

On Being Done

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.

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 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.

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.

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.