The NAIS office will be closed Monday, December 23, through Wednesday, January 1, for Winter Break. We will reopen at 9:00 AM ET on Thursday, January 2.
In The Teaching Brain: An Evolutionary Trait at the Heart of Education (2014), author Vanessa Rodriguez makes it clear that expert teachers have not only a multilevel awareness of the learning needs of each and every student but also a multilevel awareness of themselves. All the talk about the importance of student-centered learning these days has its value, she says, but it way oversimplifies the work of teaching. In particular, it misses the essential importance of the teacher’s lived experiences and perspectives. “Teaching is not simply a unidirectional process based on how the teacher downloads information into the learner,” she writes. “Rather, the process is marked by a complicated web of interactions entered into by both the teacher and the learner.”
In essence, Rodriguez is asking teachers to not only get to know their students but also develop a greater self-awareness of both their phenotypic and their personality traits — as well as the influences of culture on their thinking. Expert teachers, she argues, understand that self-reflection on multiple levels makes them more effective in guiding and supporting all students. They know that their core attributes — gender, race, sexual orientation, age, etc. — matter. They know that their dominant personality traits — whether they are introverts or extroverts, high-strung or easygoing, risk takers and routine seekers — matter. They know that their views on cultural issues — political issues, current events, personal interests — matter. And here’s the kicker: These dynamics play out differently with each student in each class every day.
The writers in this issue second this essential truth, reminding us that it’s wise for schools to surface the conversation on self-knowledge. For students, we know it matters to help them develop their identities, to focus on their social-emotional learning alongside their intellectual engagement. But it also matters a great deal for the adults in schools. This is one area of school life where we can improve. Teachers are too often asked to be selfless in the worst ways — to deny their experiences, intuition, personal philosophies, and insights and simply be biological content providers. Wisdom lies in a different route: interweaving professional knowledge and personal experience and identity — seeing one’s experience and identity in connection to others and applying both to one’s work in schools.
I particularly want to thank Peggy McIntosh for encouraging this theme — and for contributing to it. I know that she and her colleagues at the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project have been helping teachers explore their identities for years, with powerful results. McIntosh refers to this work as a “regrounding that can occur for teachers who come to recognize the authority of their own deep experience, and bring it in to their schoolwork.” Put that way, it’s hard to see why we wouldn’t embrace this work and make it central to any conversation on teaching and learning.