The 'Who' of Teaching
Those of us who teach have little difficulty in identifying the "what" and "how" of teaching. We recognize them by their conventional names--"content" and "method." And the debate about their relative importance in the preparation and everyday practice of teachers continues to command attention today, just as it has preoccupied educators for almost three millennia.
To be sure, most of us agree on the importance of both content and method to teachers' effectiveness; teaching, we correctly say, is inconceivable without both. But we differ, and probably always will, on the desirable balance between the two. Those who prepare teachers are likely to favor one at the expense of the other; and those, like us, who have taught, seem to obey an internal sense of the just proportion of each while improvising in the classroom and trying to maintain our knowledge and effectiveness through "in-service" and other programs. Meanwhile, that third component of teaching--the "who" of teaching--goes largely neglected, as it always has.
Yet the truth is that who we are matters to our teaching every bit as much as what we teach and how we choose to teach it. In fact, our characters and personalities determine the quality and effectiveness of our teaching long before what we know and how we present it even come into play. Questions about their teachers, especially about their personal qualities, crowd into our students' minds before they're conscious of the fact: Who is this person? Do I like (or dislike) her? What do I like (or dislike) about him? How can I find out more about her? It is the qualities of our selves and characters that are immediately on display when we try to instruct other people, whether they be kindergarten pupils, graduate students, our own children, or employees and colleagues, and it is these qualities, as much as our knowledge and techniques, that are likely to count in determining our effectiveness with any students. Yet we rarely think about these qualities, are never introduced to them as we try to become teachers, and we are scarcely ever encouraged to discuss them as we pursue our...
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