On Being a Teacher: The Human Dimension

CHAPTER ONE

On Being a Teacher

Who was the best teacher you ever had? Which mentor immediately stands out as the one who has been most influential and inspirational in your life? This could have been a teacher from elementary school, or high school, or college. It could be a coach or a neighbor or a relative. Whoever it was, your teacher was someone who was an absolute master at helping you learn far more than you ever imagined possible.

Bring to mind a clear image of this remarkable teacher. Hear your teacher’s voice, concentrating on not only its unique resonance and tone but also some special message that still haunts you. Feel the inspiration that still lives within you as a result of your relationship with this teacher. Think about the personal qualities this person exuded that commanded your respect and reverence.

As you recall memories of this individual who was such a powerful model in your life, it is likely that you can identify and list certain personal characteristics that were most powerful. As you review this list of qualities, it may surprise you to realize that very few of these notable attributes have to do with the content of what this teacher taught or even with personal teaching methods.

What is ironic about this phenomenon is that much of teacher preparation continues to be focused on methods courses and in areas of content specialty. The assumption behind this training for elementary and secondary teachers is that when you study a subject in depth and learn the proper methods of instruction, presumably you then become a more competent and outstanding teacher. Not included in this process are a number of other variables that make up the essence of all great educators and infuse them with power—their distinctly human dimensions, including personality traits, attitudes, and relationship skills.

This is not to say that the best educators are not experts in their fields, because they are. Current legislation under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 calls for a highly qualified teacher in every classroom by the end of the 2005–2006 school year and the use of research-based practices (Ryan & Cooper, 2004; Yell & Drasgow, 2005.) Teachers in core academic areas must be licensed by their state demonstrating they possess content knowledge through college coursework, examination, or through a process in which the district examines teacher qualifications in terms of subject expertise known as the high objective uniform state standard of evaluation or HOUSSE. The core academic areas are English, reading-language arts, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics, government, economics, art, history, and geography. There are some outstanding resources to help build your technical expertise (see Bellon, Bellon, & Blank, 1992; Borich, 2004; Johnson & Johnson, 1999; Joyce, Weil, Calhoun, & Joyce, 2003; Slavin, 2002), as well as solid advice from master practitioners (see Gill, 1998; Kottler, Kottler, & Kottler, 2004; Palmer, 1998; Scheidecker & Freeman, 1999; Stone, 1999). Nor are we implying that it is possible to be a superlative teacher, coach, mentor, or parent without extensive knowledge of human learning and mastery of interpersonal communication. But all the knowledge and skills in the world are virtually useless to teachers who cannot convey their meaning to learners in a personally designed way. Likewise, all the methods crammed into a teacher’s bag of tricks are of little help to someone who cannot translate their value in a style that commands others’ attention and influences their behavior.

It is the human dimension that gives all teachers, whether in the classroom, the sports arena, or the home, their power as effective influencers. When you review the list of qualities that made your best teachers effective, you probably noticed that so much of what made a difference in your life was not what they did, but who they were as human beings. They exhibited certain characteristics that helped you to trust them, to believe in them. It did not matter whether they taught physics or ballet, grammar or bicycle repair; you would sit at their feet and listen, enraptured by the magic they could create with the spoken word and with their actions. They could get you to do things that you never dreamed were possible. It was not so much that you cared deeply about what they were teaching as that you found yourself so intrigued by them as people. You respected them and felt connected to them in some profound way that transcended the content of their instruction. You responded to their example and encouragement. You began to see dimensions of yourself you were previously unaware of—special gifts, skills, ideas. Under their caring instruction, you began to know and value your unique self and find confidence in your personal voice.

NEGLECT OF THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF TEACHING

In spite of your own personal experiences in being profoundly influenced by mentors and teachers who were eccentric, unique, or otherwise showed a distinctive character, there has not been a lot of attention directed to this important subject. In a classic handbook for teachers, Arthur Jersild (1955) was among the first of modern-day educators to focus attention on the connection between teachers’ personal lives and their professional effectiveness. Jersild maintained that understanding yourself is the single most important task in the growth toward developing healthy attitudes of self-acceptance. The basic idea is that to help others, you must be intimately aware of your own strengths and limitations so that you can present yourself in ways that are optimally effective.

The influence of Jersild’s little book was short-lived. Soon after it was published, Sputnik, the first space vehicle, was launched by the Soviet Union. The United States began a frenzied focus not on teachers’ needs, but on the perceived national security imperative to train teachers of scientists and technicians. The human dimensions of teaching were considered too soft to be of great priority.

In the 1960s, during the brief moments of The Great Society and its relevance in education, writers and researchers began to pay more attention to the human aspects of teaching and learning. Carl Rogers (1939, 1969a, 1980), a strong voice for a focus on self in teacher education, wrote extensively about the need for teachers to be process oriented rather than exclusively content oriented in their approach. This means spending time in the class discussing not only the poems of Emily Dickinson, the location of national capitals, or the nervous system, but also how children feel about these subjects, about themselves in relation to their learning, and about one another as they continue the dialogue. According to Rogers, teachers must spend considerable time and effort building positive relationships with children, allowing their authenticity, genuineness, and caring to shine through. When these human dimensions are cultivated, a teacher can genuinely act as a person, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement, or a sterile pipe through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next (Rogers, 1969b, p. 107).

As the 1960s came to an end, there began a gradual and continuing shift toward the technology of teaching, as championed by B. F. Skinner and the behaviorists. In opposition to the view of Rogers, Skinner asserted that teachers fail not because of any human limitations, but because they are not prepared to manage student behaviors (Skinner, 1969, p. 167). Many useful research efforts soon followed to develop a technology of classroom behavior management, although a side effect of this effort was that the more human aspects of education were criticized as imprecise and unnecessary.

One singular exception to this neglect of the human dimensions of education in the 1970s was presented by Angelo Boy and Gerald Pine (1971) in their book on the personal growth of teachers. They were convinced that continuous, balanced development in human, vocational, spiritual, and recreational areas was essential for all teachers to thrive in their work and lives. They also made the compelling point that the goal of education is not to teach subject matter but to promote the development of productive and positive human beings. They contended that the teacher must be well adjusted and well prepared professionally in order to nurture these qualities in others.

With the advent of the 1980s, the accountability measures of Reaganomics, and the plethora of nation-at-risk types of reports, attention was further drawn away from a focus on growing teachers as human beings as well as professionals. Several other phenomena during the 1980s also contributed to the failure to focus on the human aspects of our profession. The first was a conservative religious response to anything in education that could even be remotely associated with secular humanism, a philosophy that emphasized freedom and permissiveness. Many teacher educators who believed in building a solid professional base on a strong, mature human foundation were fearful of being branded secular humanists.

The Yuppie phenomenon was a second factor that prevented others from focusing on the human dimension of teaching, due to the selfish, materialistic fascination of the me generation. Finally, the popularity of the so-called effective schools movement riveted the attention of North American educators on classroom climate, academic expectations, administrative leadership, and high test scores. There was little room in the effective schools model for consideration of human dimensions of teaching and learning, which were thought to be tangential.

The 1980s were years of great promise, but with little personal or professional payoff for teachers. During this nerve-wracking decade for education, there were many books and articles written about reducing stress and avoiding burnout (as examples, see Humphrey & Humphrey, 1986; Swick, 1985). There were, however, few systematic attempts to aid understanding and strategies for cultivating the human dimension of teachers.

The 1990s provided a more fertile field for attending to the human aspects of what it means to be a teacher. There were several signals indicative of a grassroots readiness and demand for attention to the human side of the educational endeavor. The call for restructuring and reform in education was based on the shared convictions of teachers and administrators that unless educators were empowered to shape the personal and professional dimensions of the educational enterprise, there would be no durable reform of education.

This decade also placed an emphasis on multicultural education (see Campbell & Delgado-Campbell, 2000; Hernandez, 2000; Manning & Baruth, 1999; Noel, 1999) and constructivist teaching (see Henderson, 1996; Mintzes, Wandersee, & Novak, 1998; Selley, 1999). These unusually human dimensions of learning represented a significant expansion of humanistic philosophy in that rather than stressing individual perceptions, they adopted a postmodern view of learning as influenced and shaped by one’s culture and language.

Many of the hoped-for reforms of the 1990s, including sitebased management of schools, empowerment of teachers, charter schools, revitalization of inner-city schools, bilingual learning for all students, national performance standards, accelerated learning programs, and a number of other national and local initiatives to improve education, produced limited degrees of success. The 1990s were so mired in divisive partisan political battles that the needs of teachers went largely ignored.

Currently, under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the focus of education is on stronger school accountability as measured by annual testing of student achievement (Goldberg, 2004). States are required to administer standards-based reading and mathematics assessments in grades 3 through 8 and at one grade level 10 through 12 during the 2005–2006 school year, adding science assessments during 2007–2008 at least once at the elementary, middle, and high school level. Additionally, schools must raise student achievement levels to meet annual objectives so that students will meet set levels of proficiency or face a series of consequences and disaggregate the data by student subgroups to track achievement for all students in order to close achievement gaps. Progress is reported in annual school report cards, and results serve as the basis for determining promotion, graduation, financing, and school governance. As a consequence of these high stakes tests, teachers today are learning to use data-driven analysis of test scores to design their lessons to make sure students meet or exceed the standards on which their students will be tested. Perhaps lost in the focus on accountability are the human dimensions of teaching.

There is no doubt that this is a complicated law. Yell and Drasgow (2005) note that although NCLB increases the amount of federal funding by 25%, it increases the role of the federal government in education with its mandates for states, school districts, schools, and teachers. The main implications of these measures for teachers are in the need for expertise in raising student achievement in (a) developing and using progress monitoring and data collection systems, and (b) matching instruction programs and strategies to students’ progress (Yell & Drasgow, 2005, p. 117).

The pressures teachers face under test-based accountability policies are resulting in a narrowing of information and educational experience for students (Goldberg, 2004; Pedulla, 2003). It is no surprise that Teachers are spending a sizable amount of instructional time to prepare students for state tests. (Abrams & Madaus, 2003, p. 35). They develop and administer pre-tests and post-tests for units of study and quarterly benchmark tests to track the progress or lack of progress of their students and deliver remediation as needed. It is not uncommon for schools to offer a second period in a given subject, for example, math, to provide students with additional support.

With respect to student relationships, in the March 2003 issue of Educational Leadership, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which notably devoted the issue to creating caring schools, Schaps (2003) states Community building should become—at a minimum—a strong complement to the prevailing focus on academic achievement. Schaps notes that … the evidence for the importance of building caring school communities is clear and compelling (Schaps 2003, p. 33). Additionally, Bryk and Schneider (2003) review the literature that supports building relational trust as the link bringing individuals together as a source of school reform. Distinct role relationships characterize the social exchanges of schooling: teachers with students, teachers with other teachers, teachers with parents, and all groups with the school principal (Bryk and Scheider, 2003, p. 41). Schools with daily productive exchanges in a safe and secure environment that recognize respect, personal regard, individual responsibility, and personal integrity are more likely to have improvements in student achievement.

In spite of the limited successes in the past and the challenges of high-stakes testing today, we remain optimistic that we are entering a more enlightened age that more genuinely attends to the preparation of the whole teacher. It seems clear, not only from our own experience, but from others’ as well, that being a teacher involves a special blend of personal dimensions combined with technical and instructional expertise. What you do is certainly important, but so is who you are.

ATTRIBUTES OF A GREAT TEACHER

There may be considerable debate among educational theoreticians and practitioners about the optimal curriculum, the most appropriate philosophy of teaching for today’s schools, the best methods of instruction and strategies for discipline, but there is a reasonable consensus about what makes a teacher great, even if these characteristics are uniquely expressed.

Take a minute away from your reading and reflect on how you ended up where you are right now. What inspired you, or rather who inspired you, to consider teaching as a profession? It is likely that you had both negative and positive models—those who struck you as absolutely hopeless as teachers, as well as those who were true masters. If you are like most of us, you are taking this course of study right now because one or more of your own teachers had certain attributes that you greatly admired. In fact, you so envied their lives and work that you are now following in their footsteps.

On your personal list—on almost anyone’s agenda—is a collection of those human characteristics that are common to the best teachers. These are the attributes that regardless of subject area, instructional methods, and educational assignment, supply the energy behind the ability to influence others in constructive ways. The extent to which you can work to develop these same human dimensions in yourself will determine how effective you will be as a mentor to others and how satisfied you will feel with your choice to be, or to continue to be, part of this profession.

As we review the personal and professional dimensions of what makes teachers great, we are not so much encouraging you to compare yourself to this ideal as we are suggesting that you take inventory of your personal functioning to assess your own strengths and weaknesses. Such an honest self-examination can help you to identify unexpressed potential that is lying dormant in you—reserves of positive energy just waiting for you to activate them.

Take comfort in the reality that there are really many ways that a teacher can capitalize on personal dimensions to help and inspire others. You have witnessed extraordinary instructors who were loud and dramatic and others who were soft and understated. You have had great teachers who were kind and supportive and others who were stern and demanding. You have enjoyed the benefits of working with teachers who were great speakers; others who were captivating one-on-one; and still others who excelled in small, informal groups. You have known wonderful teachers who may, at first, seem to be quite different in their style and personality, yet what they all had in common is that they found ways to maximize their personal strengths. With considerable reflection and some preparation, you can do the same thing.

The decision to be, or to continue to be, a teacher is one with far-reaching consequences. You have committed yourself not only to a lifestyle in which you must become an expert in your field, but also to one in which you have tremendous incentives to be the most well adjusted, fully functioning, and satisfied human being you can possibly be. What exactly does that involve? Return to your own experiences with the best teachers you ever had. Think again about their personal characteristics that you believe made the most difference to you. Compare these attributes with those in the following paragraphs. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but rather a sampling of what many people mention as most significant. As you review these qualities, consider the extent to which you are working to develop them more in yourself.

Charisma

Since the beginning of human time, those who were tapped for the calling of teacher, whether as priests, professors, or poets, were those who had developed the capacity to inspire others. They emanated a personality force that others found attractive, compelling, even seductive in the sense that there was a strong desire to know more about and from them. In the words of the novelist and former teacher Pat Conroy (1982), charisma in teachers occurs when they allow their personality to shine through their