What is the role of a teacher?

One of the most important things to consider before you start teaching is to know what you think a teacher’s role is. And if you make a career of teaching, you will revisit this question more often than is comfortable or expedient, but we have to, because our evolution as teachers requires this level of reflection for the work to have any meaning. You see, without meaning, teaching is a boring drudgery, absurd and tedious and a grind. It is intolerable without meaning. For you and for your students. But, having even an idea what your role is can make teaching not merely meaningful, but even rewarding beyond imagination.

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 anyway, I did not feel like an authority. Instead, I acted like an authority, and my students sensed it. I survived a few years teaching like this, but secretly, I felt like a fraud.

I felt that way, because I was a fraud. How could I be, or anyone be an “expert” of writing or reading or literature at 22? So, I did the only thing I could and acted the part of an “expert,” which was, of course, inauthentic, and my students knew that immediately. This prevented me from forming the kind of bond with my students that I later, through my total failure as a teacher, 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, a dynamic I had put into motion.

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 didn’t know how pretentious I was being, because I didn’t know who I was, which my students would have forgiven, since they did not know who they were yet either, but I was not only acting as if I were an expert, but I was acting as if I was sure of myself, too. I pretended that I was more than they were. I thought that students were different from teachers, that they were apart, separate, other. This kind of thinking prevented me from building even a small sense of community in my classroom, which my intuition goaded at me to do. Unfortunately, my head overruled my heart in those days and I kept on acting a role for which I was never cast to play.

I survived my 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 very small, faculty worked in the dorms at night and on the weekends, and we ate meals with our students daily. We were together what seemed like all the time. After days, weeks, moths and years, my identity seeped out around the edges of my mask. I couldn’t pretend to be an expert all the time.

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 also possess internal (personality) barriers and external (social) barriers that often prevent them from being accessible to their students.

My next teaching job, was in a public school, and things got really bad for me. Classroom management became a major problem. My students didn’t buy the expert act at all. Even if I had been an expert at English Language Arts, they didn’t care one bit. Often, many of them didn’t listen to me when I talked. Some even talked over me. They baited me into confrontations. They often did did not complete or even start their classwork. The few students who were interested in learning something in my classes were disgusted with me, because I could not control the class. My attempts to punish bad behavior were completely ineffective.

I dreaded going to work, feeling like (knowing I was) a fraud. 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 in that school, I needed to change my teaching or quit. I decided that I would quit my job, maybe quit teaching all together, because I didn’t know how or what to change in order to get It right. I was in a desperate place, which, although I didn’t know it then, was an unexpected and powerful gift that would change me forever.

But, during the Summer that followed that bad year, I planned to quit, but I couldn’t seem to do it. And, with only a few days before the school year was going to start, I decided not to quit. I am ashamed to admit that my plan for that year was not about improvement. Not at all. I did not have the confidence to even consider that I could improve at that point. Instead, I planned to go back for another year and loaf around until my bosses caught me doing nothing and fired me. It was an irresponsible plan, but I was in a dark place, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.

The good part was that by doing nothing, I stopped trying to be someone I wasn’t. 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 of my failure forced me to explore who I had been, who I was and who I wanted to be. I had thought I might be a defender of the weak and vulnerable children, because I had been bullied in school when I was a child. But, no. That wasn’t me. I had to let that go. It hurt to know that I could not prevent the pervasive meanness that was all around me, but punishing perpetrators only became an opportunity for displaced and unresolved rage for people from my past. I was becoming the perpetrator who I hated so much. I was certainly not any expert. I was not much of a warrior teacher. My old wounds were too deep and unexplored back then to be useful to me, and they became what Carl Jung defined as “the shadow self,” defining me subconsciously and robbing me and my students of the joy that teaching and learning, not only can be, but must be. Stealing from us the possibility of how wonderful our relationship could be.

The role I would eventually embody as a teacher became impossible to ignore the more I let go of being what I was not and owned what I was. This was difficult at first, because my teacher identity did not match the conventional image of teacher, and all I ever wanted to be growing up was normal. And, I was not normal. Embracing the teacher I discovered I am though, made my job infinitely easier. To this day, I still identify myself in this way, partly 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 it’s time to help kids learn to read and write. The pressure was off. I didn’t need to prove anything. I didn’t have to do much either. All there was left to do was to be me. And, that was easier than I had imagined, once I accepted myself. Once I stopped trying to be someone or something else and once I stopped trying to do things that I assumed were the correct things teachers do, I was able to trust myself, and my students were able to trust me.

This was transformative. I showed up one day, and my students sensed the change immediately. I felt like they saw me. They did, because I was there when I had not been before. I had been using coercion, incentives, rewards and force in my teaching, but then I began to see them, listen to them, care about them and accept them for who they were. I accepted that they did not like the books I liked, that they did not want to be in school. The curriculum I had thought must get done, material that I thought I should “cover,” took a back seat to our relationship, and to my curiosity about them.

I learned that it’s never too late to find out who you are and to be that person.

The first day of school that year, when I decided to loaf around, doing nothing, my plan to be unprofessional hit a snag, I was immediately bored and restless. So, instead of merely goofing off, I followed my intuition. I knew I had to stop teaching in a conventional way for me and for them. It was in that moment began actually teaching for the very first time. I did not use the books that the other English teachers were using. Back then English teachers thought of their curriculum in terms of the titles of books. “I’m teaching Catcher in the Rye this month,” a teacher might say to a colleague in the faculty break room. I did not do that. I did not assign homework. I did not give quizzes or tests. I even stopped giving out grades.

My bosses didn’t notice this change at first. The only thing that got their attention was that I had stopped sending students to the office for bad behavior. I didn’t stop teaching. But, I did take a lot of time to get to know my students, and I spent as much time as I could helping my students with their reading and writing, especially their writing — which was pretty bad. I also helped them to behave more nicely. They just didn’t know 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 helped them to understanding what they were doing, helped them see the consequences of their actions and helped them trace back their behavior to the precursors to those moments when they were mean or disrespectful.

It was not a clean process for me or them. It was not organized, and the results varied and sometimes the outcomes were so delayed that I could not see the return on my investments, which was frustrating, at first. I was experimenting, not fully aware of what I was doing, where we were going and what my goals were, except that I had to keep it real. And, I knew when it was real, because I could feel it. I felt alive as a teacher for the first time.

By understanding that my purpose in their lives was to help them, not to be an expert or an authority, they began to understand what they were reading, began questioning the ideas they saw in texts and expressed those thoughts in words both spoken and written for the first time. They even stopped interrupting me and one another. They started asking for help. They started asking questions. They became curious about their worlds.

Knowing the special role that you will play in the lives of your students will be only partially intentional, meaning you will decide to identify with the role both before and during the development of your teacher identity. And, it will partially be automatic, meaning you will “only” need to be yourself, which sounds easy, but it’s not. This will require significant personal reflection. You will try on many hats and feel both deep pain when you wear the wrong hat and absolute joy, when you find the one that was made for you. It will absolutely require as much patience as you can muster, to sit with yourself in this process. You don’t have to be absolutely sure what your role is, but you do need to think about it or else the daily work of the job will lack meaning, focus and direction. Your idea of what teaching is and who you are in it, will become your compass. This idea will guide you in your decision-making for choices big and small.

Whether you are trying to decide what to do tomorrow with your students, what message to communicate in the feedback you give them on their work, or how much or what kind of work to give them, the organizing principles that guide your decisions must coalesce around your idea of who you are as a teacher. Since most of us attended school for many years ourselves, we incorporate our understandings of what a 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 they learn differently. Mine did. Also, maybe we didn’t learn all we could have. 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 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 a metaphor.

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. 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, compliant and passive — willing to learn.

Obviously, I came to reject that particular role, but when I had acted as if I were a banker, daily trying to deposit information into my students’ heads, that perspective governed all my actions. It informed my all my plans, my curriculum and my responses to students. Even my posture was affected. The classroom was a place I tried to control and to maintain control. I saw my students as needing external knowledge rather than internal knowledge, external motivation rather than internal motivation, external approval instead of internal acceptance. I believed that their perspectives had to match mine. Otherwise they were wrong. That perspective required me to place the curriculum in the center of my teaching as opposed to seeing relationship as most important. Believing in the teacher as banker instructional model made me feel entitled to be manipulative, coercive and forceful, because I thought that those means were justified by the ends.

I learned the hard way that I had been wrong about teaching, wrong about my students and wrong about curriculum and most disastrously, wrong about me, so I was hesitant to adopt a new approach. Thank God. Instead, I was open to new ideas and new paradigms. Being wrong is a fantastic learning experience, which is how I learned to become a very good teacher. Being wrong is painful, which motivates us. I know the pain I felt from my failure got me off my ass.

I considered that perhaps my role as teacher should be as a gardener? Would I plant seeds, be patient, observe more and do less? Would I create the conditions for growth instead of trying to force it to happen? My students would be allowed to become what they are, rather than have academic content imposed on them, like the many standards for learning that state and local governments requires teachers to teach. We call those “standards.” As a gardener, curriculum and standards would be less important than individual student’s growth. I think my academic colleagues would call this developmentalist approach. Maybe that was me. Or —

Maybe I was a chef? This metaphor would promote the idea that as a teacher I would construct learning activities that were nourishing and palatable. There would be as much art as science when teaching was like cooking. The students’ fulfillment and ultimately their experience would matter. Timing (ie readiness) would be crucial. Some scholars might say this is a constructivist approach. Perhaps I was a chef, I considered.

Was I a trainer? I could focus mostly on skills, repetition and mastery. I would take a special, individual and diagnostic approach to each student’s performance. Progress would as important as results. The curriculum would be less concerned with cultural literacy, less content-centric and directed on what students can learn to do, rather than what they should know. That might be me, I thought.

Was I more of a coach? I would promote a team approach, facilitate more than lecture, model more than direct. I would understand the game, know my players, their strengths and weaknesses. Strategy would be important. Sometimes heart would matter, sometimes head. That could be my metaphor for teaching.

As I tried on these different teacher identities, I also considered that I might be like a carpenter? Like the chef, I would have an orientation toward methods of construction, toward learning as experience and would be less involved with experimentation, the way the scientist or the artist might be. As a carpenter-as-teacher, I would balance physicality with pragmatism. Craft would be important, as would be engineering. Structural integrity and utility would be offset by architecture and aesthetics. So many of these roles had something to offer.

I considered the role of the artist as teacher which suggested that there are no right ways, only beautiful ones. I would be highly experimental, blending convention with innovation. Both rejecting tradition and embracing it at the same time I would be concerned with mastery, representation and use my special knowledge through various mediums and practice different techniques. The artist is concerned with subjectivity more than objectivity, and I felt as if I might getting closer to a role that could be mine.

But then, I considered the role of the scientist. Even more concerned with experimentation, I would use trial and error with my students, maintaining a high tolerance for error and failure like an artists and entrepreneurs. Learning could be as much about how processes do not work as how processes do work. The attention might not be on success, on achievement, or on getting somewhere but on how we get there, on the journey and authentic understanding of phenomena instead. I wondered if I could I be the artist and the scientist and be one teacher.

I considered that perhaps the philosopher would be a good paradigm for me to emulate as a teacher. That way I could integrate many roles into one. I would be Socratic, asking questions more than answering them. Discussion, dialog, and inquiry would be my means and exploration of meaning would be my primary concern. I would not be the power, I would enhance theirs.

The teacher as librarian could offer a myriad of resources, learning would be about creating a rich educational environment/experience, the decor of my classroom, the availability of books, periodicals and access to the internet and others stores of information would be important, but more so would be my role in helping my students find the right sources to answer their questions. Like being a tour guide, as Virgil was to Dante, I would be their assistant more than their assessor.

I tried on the hat of the narrative teacher, using the power of story to transform, transmit and to relate information, experience and understanding. Using story also transferred that power of innovation to my students, fostering their creativity and their ability to synthesize information and new ideas as well as to reform old ideas. This would give them a freedom through language, and a power through voice that they never had before and maybe would never have otherwise. I was convinced for a long time that I was a narrative teacher. I still think I am sometimes.

There are so many more metaphors that can be used as lenses through which to see which role you want to identify with as you teach. A whole book could be written about it. And the point is not to adopt any one metaphor. It is to think through which one best describes your teaching style, so you can become yourself. 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 such paradigm, but you will just as likely be able to identify one that you do not agree with. Sometimes you will be many of these roles at once, 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. 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 nursing or counseling or social work. If you think children need surveillance, maybe you are like 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 maybe as litigation. I have seen all of these styles in my career as an educator, but often those I observe, are unaware of their identity as a teacher and even unaware of the concept. And, in my work as a university professor of education and an education consultant, I observe many many teachers who do not know what lens they look through when they work with their students.

When a teacher does understand that he or she sees his or her self as the warrior-as-teacher, the monk-as-teacher, performer-as-teacher, or something else, he or she is so effective that they seem magical to anyone who watches them. When teachers are conscious of how they conceive their role, of their teacher-identity, they become present in a whole new way.

Eventually, I became quite good at classroom management, because I managed my students’ behavior less and taught them about emotional regulation more. But, it helped that I had a clue what my role was. I have consistently identified with any role that was a helper. Some days I was like a doctor or nurse, I helped them heal and I cared for them. Other days, I was like a lawyer, defending them from other or even themselves. I was like a coach or trainer, conditioning them, leading them to perform better. Like a librarian, I showed them the resources they could use. Like a priest or rabbi, I nourished their spirts. Sometimes I was like a counselor, acknowledging their pain. And other times, I was tougher on my students challenging them to meet up with their better selves.

No matter what role I embodied, I found it easiest, most natural to frame my teaching as helping, and I still do. I still get stuck sometimes, not knowing whether to do this or that, but all I have to do when that happens is to ask myself, what can I do that will help my students? And then, I know the answer. Now, that’s just me. You may be different.

As Parker Palmer says, in his book The Courage To Teach, “Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives.” I wasn’t a real teacher until I let go of what I thought I should be and embraced who I was and who I was becoming. If we are not real for our students, they won’t show us who they are, and then helping them is impossible.

That’s who I am — as a teacher. Who are you?