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Commentary: Teaching from the heart Published on Monday, January 26, 2009 Email To Friend    Print Version Part I What does it mean to teach from the heart, bubbling with excellence with an eye for the spectacular? Mark Edmundson's book: Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference makes me wonder whether excellent teaching is a promise of nostalgia or simply the art of provoking the mind so that critical intelligence emerges. For Maxine Greene, critical intelligence rekindles in students a faith that things can be made to be different. Put differently, the usual business of teaching becomes the unusual business of educating. Dr Isaac Newton is an international leadership and change management consultant and political adviser who specialises in government and business relations, and sustainable development projects. Dr Newton works extensively in West Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, and is a graduate of Oakwood College, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia. He has published several books on personal development and written many articles on economics, leadership, political, social, and faith-based issues. From her book, The Dialectic of Freedom, Greene issues a mandate for teachers: " Is through and by means of education that they (students) may be empowered to think about what they are doing, to become mindful, to share meaning, to conceptualize, to make varied sense of their lived worlds." Professor Greene underlines her status as one of the foremost philosophers of education at Columbia University. Similarly, implying that students are autonomous and that teachers are persons who dare to care enough to assist them in climbing over walls, Edmundson's book is cast against the typical saga of students being disinteresting in learning for a host of reasons. Then, in comes a life saving teacher, in this case Frank Lears. He gradually becomes intentional about breathing life into the lungs of the students' minds. Lears shifts from his Harvard trained ideals of stirring students with classical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Kant leading into Bertrand Russell's depiction of the logic of science to authentic engagement with the things that interest them. What follows is a big bang unraveling of soulful discovery. The students came to see that at Melford High School, a slow drip culture of malaise had settled in. But with the coming of a caring teacher, their situation would be changed. I define teaching from the heart as a disposition of caring in part I. Part II points out several practices that correlate with teaching with an eye for the spectacular, and part III highlights some challenges with questions to ponder. How can teachers help students dispense with a snoring indifference to learning and boost their sense of wide- awake exploration? Wide-awakeners formulate their own vision about what education is not, and what it should be. This process is predicated upon teachers' ability to spot the spectacular and identify possibilities unaware to their students. Yet, it is within this genre that Edmundson gives broad meaning to the thesis of his book: any caring teacher can awaken the mind of his or her students in unique ways that resonate with that teacher's personality. I believe that teaching from the heart is an operatic adventure in possibilities. It is a festive willingness to expect spectacular things to happen. It is a mindset that evokes triumphal progress and ultimate success in students. Caring Are students always teachable? Perhaps, teaching from the heart boils down to how teachers help students connect less with a particular subject matter like say English or Mathematics, and more with the social undercurrents that entices their interests. This is not to say that learning cannot take place with subject based classes. On mutually created terms of caring, where teachers and students are prepared to explore what it means for each to encounter the other's soul, learning at its best is experienced. Teaching from the heart embodies, at the most profound level of human experience, the act of emptying oneself to the point that the idea of not caring, disappears. While caring reaches the heart, teaching with an eye for the spectacular cradles innovative energies. Excellent teaching happens, when content is connected to context, and where caring teachers are able finds new ways to teach traditional concepts without superimposing on students, the norm of the school's curriculum. As a teacher, do you teach meticulously? Do you exercise cultural prudence? Do you recognize the virtues of parachuting the teaching-learning experience into all of the burdens and woes that your students are encountering, and thus bringing them out of darkness into marvelous light? And, do you find new ways to teach old concepts? I think that's what teaching from the heart with an eye for the spectacular entails. Helping students pause from their computer-technology busy lives to examine thoughtfully, the life that they are created to live, by exposing them to the wonders of learning- creatively. Where form and repetition are given priority over critical probing, teachers must take action to demonstrate a genuine willingness to care. Caring teachers should navigate bureaucracies that are laden with outcomes that treat students' minds as if they are computer programs designed for desired outputs. They must avoid the bank teller knowledge approach, which promotes attitudes of conformity. If Paulo Freire's calculations need reexamination, his undeniable principle of genuine consciousness of teaching students to read the word and the world should be applied with great importance. In their hope to become; and in their dream to become more, caring teachers must direct their students' thinking towards positive rebellion. They should push them to reach after varied possibilities so that moments of self awareness bear fruit in an explosion of readiness to be socially transformative. Short of doing this, teachers tip the scale away from intelligent reasoning with, and soulful caring for, their students; to stone cold activities that produces knock-kneed learning. Given the macro and micro political dynamics that govern many learning-teaching environments, teachers must find ways to break into the hearts of their students by engendering an attitude of eagerness in them. Part II will explore how. Part II To express without restraint and with maturity, even with a sense of eternal depth, the power of influencing another person's destiny, with affection and magical intimacy, so much so that teachers point students to their reason for being is what teaching from the heart with an eye for the spectacular is all about. Excellent teachers add virtue to life in the midst of its discontinuities and contradictions by making education a moral conversation about how best to live. This could be done in infinite ways. Here are some suggestions. First, teachers must be willing to break with tradition of customs or feelings of enslavement to routine. They must invite their students to try something new. This involves providing students with an intelligent outlet for rebellion by motivating them to the discipline of assuming responsibility. How so? Students need the room to be taken seriously. They must be seen and treated as responsible persons. Instead of perpetuating a factory mentality that some schools tend to sentence students to, teaching from the heart must instill a sense of agency by paying attention to students' passions, concerns, connections and desire for ideas. The discipline of assuming responsibility does not limit students' reasoning, but liberates them to see the world around them through different lenses, that of their own. Encouraging accountability is necessary. Second, teaching with an eye for the spectacular releases in students a desire for introspective reflection that frees both their mind and spirit at once. Through attentive listening, probing and encouraging, such teaching cannot ignore the practicality of students' world, or the pains of their unique experiences. This brand of teaching should summon students to think deeply about their fears and the moral actions that inform their choice of existing. By focusing on domains of caring that widened the sphere from an individual student, to include every student, and to re-invent a culture of openness, where each student takes the risk to link real life situations to ideas, brings the spectacular to the surface How often do teachers allow their students the space where meaning making is essential to the process of knowing? Teachers who teach from the heart make their students conscious that learning is best, when all are involved in its creation and sustainability. If you want to see the spectacular emerge, turn students on. Let them envision school, as a place where they are grouped together to redefine topics, decode experiences, and decipher issues that are worth their time and efforts. Third, excellent teachers are mindful of how to convert the range of things that interest students, into a collective enterprise of team-sharing. The point is to get students to be responsible for each other's growth. Responsible sharing is another expression of caring and part of bringing out the spectacular. It helps students to move away from an unhealthy obsession with competitive self performance, and embrace a perspective of collective engagement. Teachers must invoke in students the desire to risk telling their story with the aim of magnifying their unique capacity and consequently, unraveling the intelligences of their colleagues. By building upon what students care about, caring teachers platform their chances of living fulfilled and flourishing lives as adults. They make it possible for students to overcome the world of hidden barriers that inhibit their talents and decompose their hopes. The results are that students will experience the capacity to replace negative emotions with emotional intelligence. But there are significant challenges, which partly cluster around assumed ties between intelligence and caring. Part III will identify these challenges and offer some insightful questions for consideration. Part III What are the challenges when teachers teach from the heart? One is an unspoken assumption that intellectual caring leads to caring for the heart and soul. In the context of teacher and student, both must be willing to give care and receive care. But this network of mutuality that defines a relation of care cannot be coerced and or calculated. Although every student will not accept bouts of caring from teachers, each desires to experience a sense of care that is congruent with their need for respect and dignity. Another challenge is that some teachers view students through myopic labels- 'bright and not so bright.' My experience in the classroom suggest that teaching with an eye for the spectacular recognizes that success is based more on students' status of un-cut diamonds, waiting to be polished by caring teachers. I am not too sure whether it is possible to instill in students a love for learning if in the first place they do not have a bubbling curiosity waiting to be released. That's why I have major difficulty subscribing to the notion of an un-teachable student. A third challenge is duration of commitment. I have seen many gifted teachers walk away only after one, two or three years, especially since they were apparently making such a huge difference in the lives of their students. I suspect a plausible explanation is that schools are so charged with the crippling features of bureaucracies that teachers who are committed to high standards of excellence become highly frustrated or are unlikely to stay. Alternatively, teaching from the heart bubbling with excellence might inspire teachers to discover anew their true calling- a calling to serve with the same spirit of care that characterized their teaching and inspired their students. But when caring teachers leave too soon, their hurried departure might equally suggest that heartfelt teaching is not defined by length of time but by quality of contribution. Also such teaching is predicated on the sterling satisfaction of midwifery that encourages students' Socratic journey to know themselves. Teaching from the heart, bubbling with excellence and with an eye for the spectacular, speaks directly to the nobility of teaching. The teaching profession is one of those areas of life, where a person is driven by possibilities founded in the spectacular. Teachers are not eye witnesses to unfolding events in students' lives. I see them as symphony conductors. They bring harmony to the musical range encoded in students' talent pool. To carve out a difference in students' lives, excellent teachers will have to unshackle their inquisitiveness, highjack their sense of wonder and curiosity, and springboard their passions into a love for life and learning. Teaching from the heart is a calling that requires an ethic of care and a spirit of nurturance. There is a sense that Immanuel Kant in writing his paradigm shifting philosophy (Critique of Pure Reason) senses the limits of reason to tell us about the world beyond our senses. Epistemology following in Kant's tradition results in what we can say meaningfully about how we know, what we know. Caring teachers are emcees on that life-altering spiritual pilgrimage with an eye for the spectacular. They know the profound moral impact they have on students' lifespan. They also relish an epistemological trajectory-one that is likely to acknowledge what Ellen G. White, a famous spiritual leader once remarked: "Higher than the highest human thoughts can reach is God's ideals for his children," in her famous book, Education. Whether Mrs White's observation is true by a priori (reason alone) or by a posteriori (sensory experience) Kant may insightfully agree with me: the practice of educating from the heart, bubbling with excellence with eye for the spectacular must prevail as a character building enterprise. This Kant would consider a categorical imperative blazing with universal appeal. Questions to ponder: · Should teachers expect spectacular things to happen when they teach from a posture of caring? · Is remarkable intelligence a necessary ingredient for excellent teaching? · Is there such a thing as an un-teachable student? · How can teachers teach with an eye for the spectacular in realistic terms? · Is virtue a motivator for becoming an excellent teacher? · If teaching form the heart brings out the spectacular in students, why is it that many failing public schools exist in the Caribbean? Without comparative glamour, what lessons are to be learnt from the few successful private and public schools in the region? · Do schools stifle and isolate the most innovative and non-traditional teachers to the point that the best ones leave or stay and become too frustrated to function? · How can schools attract the brightest and the best minds and create a culture of success for caring teachers and motivated students? · What should the teaching preparatory course work include to help teachers assist students to become lifelong activists for social transformation? · What criteria should be used to identify and recruit excellent teachers? And, what institutional systems should be put in place to keep them?   Reads : 1559