What is my role as teacher?
When I started out, I did not know what I thought about my role consciously, other than the vague notion that the teacher was an expert at his or her subject, and an authority in the classroom. But, because I was not an expert at English language arts, not at 22 years old, I did not feel like an authority. As a result, I acted like an authority, and my students sensed it. I survived a few years pretending like this, but privately, I felt like a fraud. I was a fraud. How could I be an expert of writing or reading or literature? I was only 22, and I’m not a genius. Instead, I was acting a part. I was inauthentic, and the students knew it. This prevented me from forming the kind of bond with my students that I later learned was necessary for teaching and learning. They couldn’t trust me, because I was not being me. In turn, “they” resisted being themselves. We were strangers, acting roles for each other. There was no trust. There was no vulnerability. How could they ask me for help with their writing, if they didn’t trust me? How could they admit they didn’t know something — simply ask a question about something they did not understand, if there was no relationship? I didn’t know any of this was important at the time.
I survived the first three years of teaching — despite my lack of intentional work on community building — because of three things: One. I had tremendous support from my bosses. Two. The skills-based curriculum was very clear and very practical. Three. I accidentally DID show who I was to those students due to the fact that my first job was at a boarding school, where the classes were small, faculty worked in the dorms at night and on the weekends and we ate meals with the students daily. As a result, my personality leaked out. I couldn’t pretend to be an expert and an authority all the time. That’s the only way I survived those first three years.
The teacher’s role can be that of expert, but only if the person teaching is an expert. On the other hand, the teacher’s role could be something else. Experts have a lot to offer, but they often possess internal (personality) barriers and external (social) barriers that prevent them from being accessible to their students.
Then, I started teaching in a public school, and things got really bad. Classroom management became a major problem. My students didn’t buy the expert act and didn’t care if I was an authority. Some of them did not listen to me when I talked. Others talked over me. They baited me into confrontations. They did not complete their classwork. The few students who were interested in learning were disgusted with me, because I could not control the class. In addition, my attempts to punish bad behavior were ineffective, because punishment rarely works.
I dreaded going to work. Unproductive and disconnected, I was forced to face the fact that I was a bad teacher. By then, I had a master’s degree in English and could legitimately call myself an expert, but I felt like a failure. By the end of my first year there, I needed to change my teaching or quit. I decided that I would quit, because I didn’t know how or what to change. I was desperate, which was an unexpected and powerful gift.
Just before the first day of my second year at that public school, I decided not to quit, but instead to go back for another year and do whatever I felt like doing, until they found me out and fired me. I didn’t know what to change or how to change it, but I was in a place where I had stopped trying to be someone who I was not. And, that WAS a change, not in curriculum so much as in pedagogy, a pedagogy of self.
Even if I were an expert, I didn’t have it in me to act that way. I still can’t. I am not that kind of person. The pain I experienced at failing to be the expert forced me to explore who I really was. I had thought I might be a defender of the weak and vulnerable, because I had been bullied in school when I was a child. I thought I might be the warrior, the one who fights to make things right. But, no. That wasn’t me either. I had to let that go, too. It hurt to know that I could not stop the meanness that was all around me, could not stop the abuse that was everywhere. Punishing perpetrators, and there was no shortage of them, had become my opportunity to displace my old resentments, to seek revenge over the people who hurt me in my past, people I would never be able to confront in real life. I became a bully myself, the bully of the bullies. These were all subconscious motivations for my behavior, until they suddenly were not, and then I had to stop, leaving m to ask myself, what is going to be my identity as a teacher? Who was I? I didn’t know, but I was learning what I was not, and that was a start.
The role I would eventually embody as a teacher became increasingly impossible to ignore as I let go of what I thought I was supposed to be. It was simple. My instinct is to help. To this day, I still identify my teaching this way, partially, because it requires so little effort, but mostly because it is so me. My role became that of teacher as helper. I woke up one morning, put on my clothes, looked in the mirror and told myself time to help kids learn to read and write. And, with that, the pressure was off. I didn’t need to prove anything. I didn’t have to do anything else. All there was left to do was to be me. And, that was easier. Not easy, but easier. Once I stopped trying to be someone or something else, once I stopped trying to do the things that I assumed were correct for teachers to do, I became successful. I suddenly could teach. Lightning had struck me.
This was transformative in every way. I showed up one day, and my students sensed the change immediately. I felt like they saw me. They did, because I was there now, when I had not been “emotionally present” before. Less and less, I used force, coercion, incentives and rewards, and I began seeing my students, listening to them, caring about them and accepting them for who they were, instead. I accepted that they did not like the books I assigned. They didn’t even like the books I liked. I could see that they did not want to be in school, and I accepted that too. The curriculum I had thought must get done, material that I thought I should “cover,” began to take a backseat to building my relationship with my students, to listening to them and to giving them the freedom to be themselves. It’s never too late to find out who you are and be that person. I assumed my bosses would fire me when they found out that I had stopped teaching the books that the other English teachers were assigning. Back then, they thought of their curriculum in terms of the titles of books. “I’m teaching Catcher in the Rye this month,” a teacher might say. Now, we think of curriculum as skills, themes, and essential information. We think about what ideas and skills students takes away and can transfer to other situations. This is all an improvement over what and how we used to teach, but none of that matters, if we don’t have relationship, because whether we think of curriculum as texts or as skills, neither will matter to the students, if they don’t trust us.
It’s never too late to find out who you are and be that person.
The only thing my bosses ended up noticing was that I had stopped sending students to the office for bad behavior. I hadn’t really stopped teaching, just stopped pushing. The way I figured it, I was just getting started. I started taking a lot more time helping my students with their reading and writing skills, especially their writing — which was pretty bad. I also helped them to behave nicely. They just hadn’t known how. Nobody had taught them how to be fair and polite, to be sensitive to other people’s feelings and to take responsibility for their own mistakes. So, instead of punishing them for “getting out of line,” I assisted them in understanding what they were doing, helped them see the consequences of their actions and the precursors to those moments when they were mean or disrespectful. They call that social and emotional learning nowadays. I admitted my own mistakes to my students, took responsibility for my failures, and though I felt vulnerable, and though I was scared to admit I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know where we were going, they followed where I led, because they trusted me.
This was not a neither a neat nor clean process for me or for them. I was not organized, and the results varied. Any academic outcomes were nearly impossible for me to measure, because they were so far removed from the interventions that may have stimulated them into being. I was experimenting and not fully aware of what I was doing, except that I knew I was being honest.
The one thing that I intentionally did every day was that I showed up as me. I knew when it was real, because I could feel it. It felt authentic in the moment, and my students were less resistant, less angry and came to class more often. They were asking to go to the bathroom, the nurse, to their lockers, to see their guidance counselors less frequently. However, our progress along the winding road that year frequently doubled back toward to old patterns and habits, and things would ignite — and not in a good way. Change is difficult, especially when you can’t see around the next corner. And, I wasn’t alone. I was changing my teaching, changing the learning routines of six classes per day with about 20 adolescents per class, who disliked school, many of whom disliked themselves and most of whom hated change. I had over 100 students. It was as if I was driving a bus, every seat filled, through a storm, at night, with no map, no destination and the passengers keep asking “Where are we going?” “When are we going to get there?” “Can I get off this stupid buss?” “Do you even know what you’re doing?” All the while, as we are making our way down the winding road, we are also building the bus as we go.
I did have a vague understanding that my purpose in their lives was to help them, not to be an expert or an authority. Over time, they began to think about what they were reading, began questioning the ideas they saw in texts and started expressing those thoughts and questions in words, both spoken and in writing. They even interrupted me and one another less often.
Knowing the special role that you will play in the lives of your students will be only partially intentional, and not even 100% conscious, meaning you will at some point decide to identify with a role, and once you’ve figure it out, your behavior will be automatic and subconscious. You will need to be your-self, which sounds easy, and it is, as long as you:
A. like being with kids and
B. You can figure out how to be a supportive adult presence to them. This may require a lot of personal reflection, the trying on of many hats and even feeling some personal and emotional pain, mostly from your own childhood. It will a b s o l u t e l y require you to have patience with yourself — and with them. It’s a long journey, not a sprint. It’s not a race at all.
You don’t have to be completely sure what your role is, but you need to do some thinking about it or else the daily work of the job will lack meaning, focus and direction for you and for your students. Your idea of what teaching is, comes from what you think your role as teacher is. It will be your compass on the high seas, during storms and in calm weather. It will guide you as you make decisions about what to do and when to do it, as well as what not to do. This compass will be important for those choices, ones that seem infinitesimally small and inconsequential, but might actually be enormous and have far reaching consequences for you and your students. And the reverse is true too. Some choices seem too big to get our heads around, but they are often exaggerated by our own fears, our own drama, and sometimes these turn out to be minor issues or were problems that had obvious solutions once we settle down and examine them carefully.
Whether we are trying to decide what to do tomorrow with our students, what message to communicate in the feedback we write on our students’ essays, or how much homework to give, the organizing principles that guide our decisions will coalesce around our idea of what teachers do, who we are, and what our responsibilities to our students are. Since most of us attended school for many years ourselves, we incorporate our understandings of what the teacher’s role is without being conscious of it. Some of us think that since we turned out alright, the methods that our teachers used were fine. But, our students might not be like us, maybe our students learn differently than we do. Also, maybe we didn’t learn all we could have from our teachers. Plus, shouldn’t we do better than our teachers did, if we can?
Some of us were very lucky and had fantastic teachers, but that begs the question. What makes a good teacher? What do good teachers do? Are they performers? Coaches? Taskmasters? Disciplinarians? Experts in their content areas? Do they need to be warm and caring? Or, should they be tough and detached? Some people believe that the best teachers wear different hats depending on who their students are. One student may need a drill sergeant, while another needs a counselor.
Sometimes the best way to think about your role as teacher is through metaphor. Think of it this way. A teacher could see his or her role as a banker, where his or her primary action is depositing information into students’ heads. Now, that would not be the metaphor that I would subscribe to. Paulo Freire wouldn’t like that much either, but you might, and that’s what matters. That metaphor would require the person to see the teacher as an expert, a possessor of knowledge as truth and the controller of the answers. The person would have to envision students as empty, ignorant and passive — willing to learn. Again, that’s not the way I understand my role as teacher, but if I did, that perspective would certainly govern my actions. It would inform my planning, curriculum and my responses to students. Even my posture would be affected. The classroom would be a place where I would have control — and have to maintain control. If I saw my role as banker, my students would require external rather than internal motivators, and their perspectives would have to match mine, or they would be wrong. Although such a perspective is not ultimately dualistic, it does promote the idea of correctness as opposed to appropriateness or readiness. The banker sees the curriculum as central to teaching. The banker sees facts as static, not dynamic, and he sees language as a fixed artifact instead of an evolving organic phenomenon. Being a banker in the classroom is ok, maybe even great, as long that is who you are.
If I saw my role as a gardener, for example, then I would observe more and do less. I would create the conditions for growth. And, students would be allowed to become what they are rather than have content imposed on them. The curriculum would be less important than the development of the individual. The gardener prunes the dead parts from the plant, to encourage new growth. And the pedagogy of a gardener is focused on cultivating life, caring for plants, nurturing them, exposing them to the light and planting seeds in fertile ground.
The chef would promote the idea that a teacher constructs learning activities that are nourishing and palatable. There would be as much art in the teaching as science. The students’ fulfillment would matter to the chef. Measurement would be balanced with aesthetics and students’ personal sense of taste, their individual health would be considered carefully.
The trainer would focus on skills, repetition and mastery. He would take a diagnostic approach to each student’s performance. Progress, not perfection, would also be important to the trainer. And the students would be pushed to their limits, like athletes but not beyond them. This requires the trainer to know his students well, what they can do, and what they can’t do — almost better than they do themselves. Assessment would be critical to the trainer, so he or she could make decisions about setting and revising performance goals, as if his students were athletes. And, the trainer would make his or her students aware of the data related to their performance, so they could begin to assess themselves and adjust their practice.
The coach has all the same qualities that the trainer has but also promotes an ethic of teamwork, facilitating more than lecturing, modeling more than directing, encouraging more than shaming and developing community among the team, so they support one another.
The carpenter, like the chef, would have an orientation toward technical methods of construction, toward learning as experience and would be less involved with experimentation, the way the scientist or the artist might be. The carpenter would balance physicality with pragmatism. She or he would use scaffolding to support structures that can’t stand on their own yet. His or her students would be apprentices, learning a craft that has a long tradition of experiential learning embedded within it.
For the artist, is no one right way, only beautiful ones. His or hers is an experimental role, and the scientist as teacher experiments like the artist does. They both use trial and error, especially error, with their students, but the scientist also collects data systematically along the way to determine whether their assumptions about their students’ ability is on target or still unknown, while the artist relies on intuition to accomplish the same goal. The artist’s and the scientist’s tolerance for error and failure is very high. It would have to be, because the scientist fails more often than succeeds, and the artist sometimes turns error into art. Serendipity factors into their teaching as well. For the scientist the happy accident is just as important as spontaneity is for the artist.
For the entrepreneur, learning is as much about how processes do not work as how they do work. She or he is a disruptive force, facilitating perturbation in order to stimulate new ideas, new answers to old questions and even new questions. The attention of the entrepreneur is not on success but understanding, innovation, creativity and invention.
The philosopher is Socratic, asking more than answering. Discussion is his means of teaching. And, settling on one right answer is not as important as remaining open to all other possibilities. The philosopher seeks truth more than knowledge, and believes that teaching is as intuitive as it is logical. Helping his or her students understand the why? and the so what does that mean? is far more important than the answer to the what?
The librarian offers a myriad of resources, and for her or him, learning is about the environment, the availability of information and about fast and open access to it. The librarian is assistant not assessor. Learning is self-directed. The librarian is a guide, like Virgil was to Dante, pointing out the levels of reality, the various subjects and disciplines, the taxonomy of the academy. She is a polymath and an expert of the systems of knowledge, but she is neither prescriptive, nor demanding of her students.
The storyteller uses the power of narrative to transform, transmit and to relate knowledge, experiences, values, morals and ideas. This may be the oldest paradigm for teaching. The teacher who uses story also gives that power to his or her students, fostering creativity, synthesis and freedom through words — in them. The storyteller sparks his students’ imagination, tapping into a means of instructing that is so primal, the listeners of the story, remember the symbols, characters, plot and landscapes conveyed in the tale, forever associating them with the concepts their teacher intends for them to be linked in their minds. The storyteller’s lessons live on in his students’ dreams, and they are inspired to act by their plots.
There are so many more lenses with which we may view the role of teacher. And the point is not to adopt one. It is to think through which one best already describes your teaching style, so you can orient yourself to your work. This will help you understand your own beliefs about how people learn, so you can own your philosophical ground, or — change it. You likely will adopt more than one paradigm, but you will just as likely be able to identify one that you do not agree with. Sometimes you will be two of these roles at the same time, and over the years you will likely change hats many times as you learn who you are and what works with your students.
Do you see teaching as the working of a machine? Then you are an engineer. Then, you may be interested in backward design. Maybe you see instruction as diagnostic and therapeutic. Then, teaching follows the medical model for you. Perhaps your ethic is one of care, so you see being a teacher like being a nurse or counselor or social worker. If you think children are usually up to no good, are you a prison guard or police officer? If you are trying to convince your students to assimilate new knowledge, then you might see teaching as sales or litigation. Do you associate teaching with adventure? Then, perhaps you are an explorer, and experiential learning will be an instructional model that you are going to lean toward.
I have seen all of these styles and more in my career as an educator, but rarely do those whom I have observed a teacher who knows what lens the or she is looking through when seeing his or her own professional practice. But, in those rare cases, when I have met a teacher who does know what role he or she identifies with, that person is one of the best.
Whether you are warrior-as-teacher, a monk-as-teacher or a performer-as-teacher, you will be more effective if you are conscious of your role identification. The challenges, the heartaches and the victories of teaching will likely stimulate you to know yourself better in the long run, and as you learn about yourself, you will begin to form an identity that is more sophisticated, more dynamic and has more integrity than you would have otherwise.
You don’t have to settle on one particular archetype or two or three, and you don’t have to keep any of them. You can let one role go as you grow, but knowing which one(s) you are now, and which ones you are discovering you might become, will make teaching more meaningful, purposeful, easier and joyful to you. And, your students will learn more widely, more deeply too. They will grow, develop and become who they are, as well.
If you are yourself, when you are with your students, they will have someone to look up to, as they search for their true selves. But first, you must know who you are. Once I understood who I was, I could own it, and that was alchemistic. I was changed. My teaching was changed, and my students were changed.