For New Teachers

I often teach a seminar for preservice teachers during their final semester at the university. As I was preparing for the last session this spring, I found myself rehearsing what I wanted to tell them, ideas about how to teach that were likely not taught in their university teacher education curriculum. Although I decided to not share these thoughts with my students, below is a draft version of what I wanted to say.

Take your stand as teacher. As a new teacher you likely feel unsure about your ability teach, manage a classroom, work with children, etc. Regardless of these normal insecurities and doubts, is essential that you fully accept your role as teacher. Your students do not need you be their friend or parent, they need to you be their teacher.

This reminds me of a story Koun Franz told about advice he received just before beginning to serve as priest at the Anchorage Zen Community. He wrote:

In 2006, when I was preparing to move to Anchorage, one of my teachers sat me down and offered this advice: “Always stand in your position.” What he meant, essentially, was to accept the role of being a priest, not to apologize for it. It’s easy to refuse to sit in the high seat, to laugh at the silliness of having everyone bow in your direction, to wink and say in a thousand little ways, “Don’t worry—I know we’re just playing. I’m just like you.” People practically beg you to do it. But my teacher’s stance was, and is, that deep down, people do not want the priest to be just like them. They want that person to have the strength to sit in the position of the Buddha, unflinchingly, and to speak and act from that place. Because who else will do that? 

(http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wildfoxzen/2012/01/standing-in-ones-position.html)

In a similar way, your students need you to take your stand as their teacher, to “speak and act from that place.”

Meet your students as complete, right now. Contemporary education focuses on the future and students are portrayed as lacking what they most need for future success. Teachers are told their job is to fill this deficit by giving students knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college, jobs, and the marketplace, all in the future. In this way, education is separated from students’ present lives and sends them the message that what is happening right now is really that what is important.

John Dewey (1929) offered a radically different view when he wrote:

Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. The school must represent life—life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground. (“My Pedagogic Creed”)

Preparing students for the future is certainly part of what you do, but this effect of your efforts does not negate the importance of meeting your students as complete human beings and honoring the process of living right now.

Come back to the present. When feeling overwhelmed by the busyness of the day—lesson preparation, grading, paperwork—and pressures to meet students’ many needs and demands, bring yourself back to the present moment. This can be as simple as noticing your breath, seeing the color of a kid’s shoe, or spotting sunlight streaming in through the window. This is not an escape strategy, nor will it magically make the challenges go away. However, it can create a space where you are more likely to mindfully meet your students and tasks, to fully attend to the busyness of the day. 

Embody what you teach. Your actions—what you do and how you do it—are your most powerful pedagogy. Therefore, pay attention to how you stand, walk, sit; the way you open the classroom door; what and how you speak to a child; and how you react to a parent wanting to talk. Show your students curiosity, openness, and critical thinking by the way you think in front of them. If you want students to treat themselves and others with respect and dignity, you, as their teacher, must embody these ways of being.