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The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life
"This book is for teachers who have good days and bad -- and whose bad days bring the suffering that comes only from something one loves. It is for teachers who refuse to harden their hearts, because they love learners, learning, and the teaching life."
- Parker J. Palmer [from the Introduction] Teachers choose their vocation for reasons of the heart, because they care deeply about their students and about their subject. But the demands of teaching cause too many educators to lose heart. Is it possible to take heart in teaching once more so that we can continue to do what good teachers always do -- give heart to our students? In The Courage to Teach , Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students -- and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavors.
- Parker J. Palmer [from the Introduction] Teachers choose their vocation for reasons of the heart, because they care deeply about their students and about their subject. But the demands of teaching cause too many educators to lose heart. Is it possible to take heart in teaching once more so that we can continue to do what good teachers always do -- give heart to our students? In The Courage to Teach , Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students -- and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavors.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published November 21, 1997
About the author
Parker J. Palmer
61 books502 followersParker J. Palmer (Madison, WI) is a writer, teacher and activist whose work speaks deeply to people in many walks of life. Author of eight books--including the bestsellers Courage to Teach, Let Your Life Speak, and A Hidden Wholeness--his writing has been recognized with ten honorary doctorates and many national awards, including the 2010 William Rainey Harper Award (previously won by Margaret Mead, Paulo Freire, and Elie Wiesel). He is founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage Renewal, and holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 430 reviews
May 13, 2012
I think the genius of this book was just lost on me. I really resonated with the beginning that talked about the "teacher within" and the "unique subjectivity" that each person can bring to the profession. I certainly feel like I have a unique perspective, and that my viewpoints and even personality makes my classroom unique (If I was given the freedom to unleash my style freely).
But the core of the book, I just didn't have the mental patience at this time in my life to take the time to fully process and appreciate. When he started the whole metaphysical debate about the nature of reality and how to establish genuine communities... I just stopped reading. At least for now, I need something more tangible--something I could do in class tomorrow to make a difference in my classroom.
But the core of the book, I just didn't have the mental patience at this time in my life to take the time to fully process and appreciate. When he started the whole metaphysical debate about the nature of reality and how to establish genuine communities... I just stopped reading. At least for now, I need something more tangible--something I could do in class tomorrow to make a difference in my classroom.
June 21, 2021
The Cothran Center for Vocational Reflection where I work offered this as a summer group read for faculty and staff, and I'd meant to read it forever, so jumped in. Tomorrow we'll have a Zoom session with the author. There are a lot of good things to talk about and a lot of directions the discussions have led us in. I'm interested in hearing more.
July 28, 2007
The one complaint I have, even though this is a book I keep near me all school year, is that it's a little bit too "self-helpy/new-agey/mystical". But, that aside, it's helped me to be a more confidant teacher. Palmer talks about how teaching is a profession where you HAVE to be yourself or you won't have integrity. It's about letting who you are as a person inform your instruction. Once you've lost the ability to do that, it's impossible to do your job well. Full of anecdotes from Palmer's own career.
June 3, 2009
This book teaches teachers how to teach like the teachers they already are.
"The personal can never be divorced from the professional. 'We teach who we are' in times of darkness as well as light." (pg. xi)
Consider a teacher's "heart-deep commitment that keeps them coming back to the classroom - their commitment to the well-being of our children." (pg. xii)
"But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused - and I am powerless to do anythign about it - that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham." (pg. 2)
"The subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. The students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve." (pg. 2)
"Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so powerless to strike back." (pg. 3)
"Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives." (pg. 6)
"Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher." (pg. 10)
"Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students." (pg. 11)
"The more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be." (pg. 11)
"Identity and integrity have as much to do with our shadows and limits, our wounds and fears, as with our strengths and potentials." (pg. 13)
"Part of the mystery of selfhood is the fact that one size does not fit all: what is integral to one person lacks integrity for another." (pg. 16)
"Many of us became teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people learn...We lose heart, in part, because teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability." (pg. 17)
"We became teachers because we once believed that ideas and insight are at least as real and powerful as the world that surrounds us." (pg. 20)
"[Good teaching:] comes in many forms, the imprint of good teachers remains long after the facts they gave us have faded, and it is important to thank our mentors, no matter how belatedly - partly because we owe them gratitude and partly as a cosmic counterpoint to the apparent ingratitude of our own students." (pg. 22)
Consider speaking with "the hesitancy that comes from speaking of sacred things." (pg. 24)
"All heroes have feet of clay." (pg. 28)
"Measuring the value of inner dialogue by its practical outcomes is like measuring the value of friendship by the number of problems that are solved when friends get together." (pg. 33)
"As a teacher, I am at my worst when fear takes the lead in me, whether that means teaching in fear of my students or manipulating their fears of me." (pg. 36)
"When a class that has gone badly comes to a merciful end, I am fearful long after it is over - fearful that I am not just a bad teacher but a bad person, so closely is my sense of self tied to the work I do." (pg. 37)
"As soon as we admit pluralism, we are forced to admit that ours is not the only standpoint, the only experience, the only way, and the truths we have built our lives on begin to feel fragile." (pg. 38)
"We still face one final fear - the fear that a live encounter with otherness will challenge or even compel us to change our lives. This is not paranoia: the world really is out to get us!" (pg. 39)
"Faced with the Student from Hell, I committed the most basic mistake of the greenest neophyte: I became totally obsessed with him, and everyone else in the room disappeared from my screen." (pg. 44)
"Self-pity and projected blame - the recipe for a well-lived life!" (pg. 44)
"The Student from Hell is not born that way but is created by conditions beyond his or her control. Yes one or two of them may have been sent here directly by Satan to destroy Western civilization as we know and love it. But..." (pg. 45)
"Students are marginalized people in our society." (pg. 45)
"In unguarded moments with close friends, we who teach will acknowledge a variety of fears: having our work go unappreciated, being inadequately rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we chose the wrong profession, spending our lives on trivia, ending up feeling like frauds. But many of us have another fear that we rarely name: our fear of the judgment of the young." (pg. 48)
"Teachers age at a geometric rate: my best guess is that most teachers reach midlife by the time they turn twenty-nine!" (pg. 49)
"Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know." (pg. 55)
"Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives." (pg. 58)
"My intent is to rebalance the scales. But in a polarizing culture, it is hard to do that without slamming the scales in the opposite direction." (pg. 64)
"In certain circumstances, truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and." (pg. 65)
"I ask each teacher to write brief descriptions of two moments in teaching: a moment when things were going so well that you knew you were born to teach and a moment when things were going so poorly that you wished you had never been born...Remembering such moments is the first step in exploring one of the true paradoxes of teaching: the same person who teaches brilliantly one day can be an utter flop the next!" (pg. 69)
"Every strength is also a weakness, a limitation, a dimension of identity that serves me and others well under some circumstances but not all the time." (pg. 74)
"Teaching and learning require a higher degree of awareness than we ordinarily possess." (pg. 76)
"The teacher's task is to listen for what the group voice is saying and to play that voice back from time to time so the group can hear and even change its own collective mind." (pg. 78)
"Psychologists say that a typical group can abide about fifteen seconds of silence before someone feels the need to break the tension by speaking." (pg. 80)
"The silences that interest me are the ones that occur midstream in a discussion, when a point is made or a question is posed that evokes no immediate response." (pg. 85)
"We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restirct their freedom in certain situations...and there is no formula to tell me whether this is a moment for freedom or discipline or some alchemy of both." (pg. 87)
"Community is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace." (pg. 92)
"Of course, we cannot demand intimacy of each other - and when we try, we only drive each other off, as many failed communal experiments have shown." (pg. 93)
"Most of us will achieve genuine intimacy with only a handful of people in a lifetime." (pg. 93)
"High school and college classrooms contain a broader cross section of people engaged in common work - and often doing it with civility, media-fueled 'political correctness' wars notwithstanding - than one can find in many settings." (pg. 95)
"We lack reliable mechanisms for evaluating teaching, unless one believes that all varieties of good teaching can be crammed into the scales of a survey questionnaire." (pg. 96)
"Students who have been well served by good teachers may walk away angry - angry that their prejudices have been challenged and their sense of self shaken. This sort of dissatisfaction may be a sign that real education has happened." (pg. 96-97)
"Experts, people trained to know [objects of knowledge:] in their pristine form without allowing their own subjectivity to slop over into the purity of the objects themselves. This training transpires in a far-off place called graduate school, whose purpose is so thoroughly to obliterate one's sense of self that one becomes a secular priest, a safe bearer of the pure objects of knowledge." (pg. 102)
"At its best, the community of truth advances our knowledge through conflict, not competition. Competition is a secretive, zero-sum game played by individuals for private gain; conflict is open and sometimes raucous but always communal." (pg. 106)
"Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline." (pg. 106)
"The things of this world call to us, and we are drawn to them - each of us to different things." (pg. 108)
"We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves, but the outcome is always the same: a distortion of the humble yet exalted reality of the human self, a paradoxical pearl of great price." (pg. 113)
"I am well aware that the marriage of knowing and the sacred has not always produced admirable offspring. But the history of education will show that spirituality is no worse than secularism in its propensity to sow bad seed." (pg. 114)
"Access to the mysterium tremendum is not a staple of my daily experience, so I cannot depend on a steady stream of muminosity to renew my teaching." (pg. 114)
"It is possible to respond differently to surprises, to allow one new idea to generate yet another in us - a process sometimes called thinking." (pg. 115)
"One of the most vital needs our students have: to be introduced to a world larger than their own experiences and egos, a world that expands their personal boundaries and enlarges their sense of community." (pg. 122)
"Though we persist in believing that competition is the best way to motivate people to learn, students are far more motivated by the fact that their individual learning enables them to contribute to the communal inquiry - or at least not embarrass themselves by letting the group down." (pg. 131)
"It is said that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone." (pg. 131)
"Like most professionals, I was taught to occupy space, not open it: after all, we are the ones who know, so we have an obligation to tell others about it! Even though I have rejected this nonsensical norm, I still feel guilty when I defy it. A not-so-small voice within me insists that if I am not filling all the available space with my own knowledge, I am not earning my keep." (pg. 135)
"Our resistance to opening rather than filling the space is compounded by the fact that if we decide to change the way we practice our craft, it takes time to make the transition - and while we are in transit, we are not very good at what we are doing. En route to a new pedagogy, there will be days when we serve our students poorly, days when our guilt only deepens." (pg. 135)
"My students will learn much more when I turn their eyes from always looking at me and help them look at one another." (pg. 137)
"I feel that challenge most urgently when a student says something utterly untrue - and everything in me wants to rise up and smite this falsehood with the Sword of Truth...How quickly do I need to do the smiting? Can it wait?" (pg. 137)
"Drama does not mean histrionics." (pg. 140)
"The real threat to community in the classroom is not power and status differences between teachers and students but the lack of interdependence that those differences encourage. Students are dependent on teachers for grades - but what are teachers dependent on students for? If we cannot answer that question with something as real to us as grades are to students, community will not happen." (pg. 142)
"When we can say 'please' because we need our students and 'thank you' because we are genuinely grateful for them, obstacles to community will begin to fall away." (pg. 144)
"There are no formulas for good teaching, and the advice of experts has but marginal utility. If we want to grow in our practice, we have two primary places to go: to the inner ground from which good teaching comes and to the community of fellow teachers from whom we can learn more about ourselves and our craft." (pg. 146)
Though we teach in front of students, we almost always teach solo, out of collegial sight - as contrasted with surgeons and trial lawyers...Surgeons operate under the gaze of specialists who notice if a hand trembles, making malpractice less likely. But teachers can lose sponges or amputate the wrong limb with no witnesses except the victims." (pg. 146)
Consider how "academic freedom" often looks like this: "My classroom is my castle, and the sovereigns of other fiefdoms are not welcome here." (pg. 147)
"There is only one honest way to evaluate the many varieties of good teaching with the subtlety required: it's called being there." (pg. 148)
"I am especially touched when young teachers, who believe their struggles are unique, find relief in the revelation that older faculty still struggle with problems of their own." (pg. 151)
"Though teaching sometimes feels like a linear flow of experience from one session to the next, it is actually an intricate patterning of life...a kind of creative chaos we can learn to enjoy." (pg. 151)
"I sometimes ask people to fill in the blank: 'When I am teaching at my best, I am like a __________.'" (pg. 152)
"When people are willing to feel a bit foolish among colleagues, the payoff in self-understanding can be considerable." (pg. 152)
"Quick fixes make the person who shared the problem feel unheard and dismissed...We must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard." (pg. 156)
"We humans have a curious conceit that just because we have said something, we understand it." (pg. 160)
"[Leadership:] involves offering people excuses and permissions to do the things that they want to do but cannot initiate themselves." (pg. 161)
"Only in the face of...opposition has significant social change been achieved." (pg. 170)
"I begin to see here a "movement mentality," in which resistance is received as the place where everything begins, not ends...Not only does change happen in spite of institutional resistance, but resistance helps change happen." (pg. 171)
"We inhabit institutional settings, including school and work and civic society, because they harbor opportunities we value. But the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our hearts...That tension can be creative up to a point. It becomes pathological when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization." (pg. 174)
"Had Rosa Parks sat there calculating the odds of making history, she might well have moved to the back of the bus." (pg. 175-176)
"In deciding to live divided no more, the individual goes beyond criticizing an institution and becomes self-critical as well." (pg. 176)
"People involved in movements often have more friends far away than they have at home; the reform agenda that is so inspiring on a national scale turns out to be threatening locally." (pg. 181)
"Visibility is not easy because it may bring recrimination. But when we declare our values in a visible and viable way, we will sometimes be amazed at the way allies gather round." (pg. 181)
"There is so much 'soul force' in making the decision to live an undivided life, and so much reinforcement when people who have made it come together, that the shadow of self-righteousness is almost certain to emerge. The only way to minimize the shadow and maximize the light is to expose the movement to public critique - and to take that critique seriously." (pg. 182)
"The outcomes of most movements are modest. They rarely resemble nirvana, Most movements do not overturn the prevailing order but make incremental adjustments to it." (pg. 187)
"Integrity, as the cynics say, does not put bread on the table." (pg. 189)
"It has occurred to me from time to time that No Child Left Behind is a scheme to create such massive failure in public education that privatization would become an appealing option to more Americans." (pg. 194)
"The mission of the profession must never be confused with the institutional structures in which it is pursued. The fact that we have schools does not mean we have education." (pg. 204)
"The institutions are neither external to us nor constraining, neither separate from us nor alien. In fact, institutions are us! The shadows that institutions cast over our ethical lives are external manifestations of our own inner shadows." (pg. 206)
"We do not live by science alone. To survive and thrive, we also rely on the knowledge embedded in our feelings. In fact, science itself begins in the hunches, intuitions, and bodily knowledge that lie behind testable hypotheses." (pg. 208)
"Whatever our data source is, the key question is always the same: How much of what I claim to know can be verified from viewpoints other than my own, and how much of it is my projection?" (pg. 210)
"Therapy done by amateurs is usually an especially ugly form of psychological violence." (pg. 210)
"Our students need to see how we, their elders, deal with these vagaries of fate while refusing to sell out either our professions or our own identity and integrity. And they need to see how, when we fail and fall down, as everyone does, we manage to get up again." (pg. 211)
"Opening one's mouth to challenge what is wrong is a way to stay sane." (pg. 212)
"The personal can never be divorced from the professional. 'We teach who we are' in times of darkness as well as light." (pg. xi)
Consider a teacher's "heart-deep commitment that keeps them coming back to the classroom - their commitment to the well-being of our children." (pg. xii)
"But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused - and I am powerless to do anythign about it - that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham." (pg. 2)
"The subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial. No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. The students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon that few of us achieve." (pg. 2)
"Teachers make an easy target, for they are such a common species and so powerless to strike back." (pg. 3)
"Technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives." (pg. 6)
"Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher." (pg. 10)
"Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students." (pg. 11)
"The more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be." (pg. 11)
"Identity and integrity have as much to do with our shadows and limits, our wounds and fears, as with our strengths and potentials." (pg. 13)
"Part of the mystery of selfhood is the fact that one size does not fit all: what is integral to one person lacks integrity for another." (pg. 16)
"Many of us became teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people learn...We lose heart, in part, because teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability." (pg. 17)
"We became teachers because we once believed that ideas and insight are at least as real and powerful as the world that surrounds us." (pg. 20)
"[Good teaching:] comes in many forms, the imprint of good teachers remains long after the facts they gave us have faded, and it is important to thank our mentors, no matter how belatedly - partly because we owe them gratitude and partly as a cosmic counterpoint to the apparent ingratitude of our own students." (pg. 22)
Consider speaking with "the hesitancy that comes from speaking of sacred things." (pg. 24)
"All heroes have feet of clay." (pg. 28)
"Measuring the value of inner dialogue by its practical outcomes is like measuring the value of friendship by the number of problems that are solved when friends get together." (pg. 33)
"As a teacher, I am at my worst when fear takes the lead in me, whether that means teaching in fear of my students or manipulating their fears of me." (pg. 36)
"When a class that has gone badly comes to a merciful end, I am fearful long after it is over - fearful that I am not just a bad teacher but a bad person, so closely is my sense of self tied to the work I do." (pg. 37)
"As soon as we admit pluralism, we are forced to admit that ours is not the only standpoint, the only experience, the only way, and the truths we have built our lives on begin to feel fragile." (pg. 38)
"We still face one final fear - the fear that a live encounter with otherness will challenge or even compel us to change our lives. This is not paranoia: the world really is out to get us!" (pg. 39)
"Faced with the Student from Hell, I committed the most basic mistake of the greenest neophyte: I became totally obsessed with him, and everyone else in the room disappeared from my screen." (pg. 44)
"Self-pity and projected blame - the recipe for a well-lived life!" (pg. 44)
"The Student from Hell is not born that way but is created by conditions beyond his or her control. Yes one or two of them may have been sent here directly by Satan to destroy Western civilization as we know and love it. But..." (pg. 45)
"Students are marginalized people in our society." (pg. 45)
"In unguarded moments with close friends, we who teach will acknowledge a variety of fears: having our work go unappreciated, being inadequately rewarded, discovering one fine morning that we chose the wrong profession, spending our lives on trivia, ending up feeling like frauds. But many of us have another fear that we rarely name: our fear of the judgment of the young." (pg. 48)
"Teachers age at a geometric rate: my best guess is that most teachers reach midlife by the time they turn twenty-nine!" (pg. 49)
"Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know." (pg. 55)
"Fear is so fundamental to the human condition that all the great spiritual traditions originate in an effort to overcome its effects on our lives." (pg. 58)
"My intent is to rebalance the scales. But in a polarizing culture, it is hard to do that without slamming the scales in the opposite direction." (pg. 64)
"In certain circumstances, truth is found not by splitting the world into either-ors but by embracing it as both-and." (pg. 65)
"I ask each teacher to write brief descriptions of two moments in teaching: a moment when things were going so well that you knew you were born to teach and a moment when things were going so poorly that you wished you had never been born...Remembering such moments is the first step in exploring one of the true paradoxes of teaching: the same person who teaches brilliantly one day can be an utter flop the next!" (pg. 69)
"Every strength is also a weakness, a limitation, a dimension of identity that serves me and others well under some circumstances but not all the time." (pg. 74)
"Teaching and learning require a higher degree of awareness than we ordinarily possess." (pg. 76)
"The teacher's task is to listen for what the group voice is saying and to play that voice back from time to time so the group can hear and even change its own collective mind." (pg. 78)
"Psychologists say that a typical group can abide about fifteen seconds of silence before someone feels the need to break the tension by speaking." (pg. 80)
"The silences that interest me are the ones that occur midstream in a discussion, when a point is made or a question is posed that evokes no immediate response." (pg. 85)
"We want our children and our students to become people who think and live freely, yet at the same time we know that helping them become free requires us to restirct their freedom in certain situations...and there is no formula to tell me whether this is a moment for freedom or discipline or some alchemy of both." (pg. 87)
"Community is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace." (pg. 92)
"Of course, we cannot demand intimacy of each other - and when we try, we only drive each other off, as many failed communal experiments have shown." (pg. 93)
"Most of us will achieve genuine intimacy with only a handful of people in a lifetime." (pg. 93)
"High school and college classrooms contain a broader cross section of people engaged in common work - and often doing it with civility, media-fueled 'political correctness' wars notwithstanding - than one can find in many settings." (pg. 95)
"We lack reliable mechanisms for evaluating teaching, unless one believes that all varieties of good teaching can be crammed into the scales of a survey questionnaire." (pg. 96)
"Students who have been well served by good teachers may walk away angry - angry that their prejudices have been challenged and their sense of self shaken. This sort of dissatisfaction may be a sign that real education has happened." (pg. 96-97)
"Experts, people trained to know [objects of knowledge:] in their pristine form without allowing their own subjectivity to slop over into the purity of the objects themselves. This training transpires in a far-off place called graduate school, whose purpose is so thoroughly to obliterate one's sense of self that one becomes a secular priest, a safe bearer of the pure objects of knowledge." (pg. 102)
"At its best, the community of truth advances our knowledge through conflict, not competition. Competition is a secretive, zero-sum game played by individuals for private gain; conflict is open and sometimes raucous but always communal." (pg. 106)
"Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline." (pg. 106)
"The things of this world call to us, and we are drawn to them - each of us to different things." (pg. 108)
"We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves, but the outcome is always the same: a distortion of the humble yet exalted reality of the human self, a paradoxical pearl of great price." (pg. 113)
"I am well aware that the marriage of knowing and the sacred has not always produced admirable offspring. But the history of education will show that spirituality is no worse than secularism in its propensity to sow bad seed." (pg. 114)
"Access to the mysterium tremendum is not a staple of my daily experience, so I cannot depend on a steady stream of muminosity to renew my teaching." (pg. 114)
"It is possible to respond differently to surprises, to allow one new idea to generate yet another in us - a process sometimes called thinking." (pg. 115)
"One of the most vital needs our students have: to be introduced to a world larger than their own experiences and egos, a world that expands their personal boundaries and enlarges their sense of community." (pg. 122)
"Though we persist in believing that competition is the best way to motivate people to learn, students are far more motivated by the fact that their individual learning enables them to contribute to the communal inquiry - or at least not embarrass themselves by letting the group down." (pg. 131)
"It is said that all of us together are smarter than any one of us alone." (pg. 131)
"Like most professionals, I was taught to occupy space, not open it: after all, we are the ones who know, so we have an obligation to tell others about it! Even though I have rejected this nonsensical norm, I still feel guilty when I defy it. A not-so-small voice within me insists that if I am not filling all the available space with my own knowledge, I am not earning my keep." (pg. 135)
"Our resistance to opening rather than filling the space is compounded by the fact that if we decide to change the way we practice our craft, it takes time to make the transition - and while we are in transit, we are not very good at what we are doing. En route to a new pedagogy, there will be days when we serve our students poorly, days when our guilt only deepens." (pg. 135)
"My students will learn much more when I turn their eyes from always looking at me and help them look at one another." (pg. 137)
"I feel that challenge most urgently when a student says something utterly untrue - and everything in me wants to rise up and smite this falsehood with the Sword of Truth...How quickly do I need to do the smiting? Can it wait?" (pg. 137)
"Drama does not mean histrionics." (pg. 140)
"The real threat to community in the classroom is not power and status differences between teachers and students but the lack of interdependence that those differences encourage. Students are dependent on teachers for grades - but what are teachers dependent on students for? If we cannot answer that question with something as real to us as grades are to students, community will not happen." (pg. 142)
"When we can say 'please' because we need our students and 'thank you' because we are genuinely grateful for them, obstacles to community will begin to fall away." (pg. 144)
"There are no formulas for good teaching, and the advice of experts has but marginal utility. If we want to grow in our practice, we have two primary places to go: to the inner ground from which good teaching comes and to the community of fellow teachers from whom we can learn more about ourselves and our craft." (pg. 146)
Though we teach in front of students, we almost always teach solo, out of collegial sight - as contrasted with surgeons and trial lawyers...Surgeons operate under the gaze of specialists who notice if a hand trembles, making malpractice less likely. But teachers can lose sponges or amputate the wrong limb with no witnesses except the victims." (pg. 146)
Consider how "academic freedom" often looks like this: "My classroom is my castle, and the sovereigns of other fiefdoms are not welcome here." (pg. 147)
"There is only one honest way to evaluate the many varieties of good teaching with the subtlety required: it's called being there." (pg. 148)
"I am especially touched when young teachers, who believe their struggles are unique, find relief in the revelation that older faculty still struggle with problems of their own." (pg. 151)
"Though teaching sometimes feels like a linear flow of experience from one session to the next, it is actually an intricate patterning of life...a kind of creative chaos we can learn to enjoy." (pg. 151)
"I sometimes ask people to fill in the blank: 'When I am teaching at my best, I am like a __________.'" (pg. 152)
"When people are willing to feel a bit foolish among colleagues, the payoff in self-understanding can be considerable." (pg. 152)
"Quick fixes make the person who shared the problem feel unheard and dismissed...We must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard." (pg. 156)
"We humans have a curious conceit that just because we have said something, we understand it." (pg. 160)
"[Leadership:] involves offering people excuses and permissions to do the things that they want to do but cannot initiate themselves." (pg. 161)
"Only in the face of...opposition has significant social change been achieved." (pg. 170)
"I begin to see here a "movement mentality," in which resistance is received as the place where everything begins, not ends...Not only does change happen in spite of institutional resistance, but resistance helps change happen." (pg. 171)
"We inhabit institutional settings, including school and work and civic society, because they harbor opportunities we value. But the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our hearts...That tension can be creative up to a point. It becomes pathological when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization." (pg. 174)
"Had Rosa Parks sat there calculating the odds of making history, she might well have moved to the back of the bus." (pg. 175-176)
"In deciding to live divided no more, the individual goes beyond criticizing an institution and becomes self-critical as well." (pg. 176)
"People involved in movements often have more friends far away than they have at home; the reform agenda that is so inspiring on a national scale turns out to be threatening locally." (pg. 181)
"Visibility is not easy because it may bring recrimination. But when we declare our values in a visible and viable way, we will sometimes be amazed at the way allies gather round." (pg. 181)
"There is so much 'soul force' in making the decision to live an undivided life, and so much reinforcement when people who have made it come together, that the shadow of self-righteousness is almost certain to emerge. The only way to minimize the shadow and maximize the light is to expose the movement to public critique - and to take that critique seriously." (pg. 182)
"The outcomes of most movements are modest. They rarely resemble nirvana, Most movements do not overturn the prevailing order but make incremental adjustments to it." (pg. 187)
"Integrity, as the cynics say, does not put bread on the table." (pg. 189)
"It has occurred to me from time to time that No Child Left Behind is a scheme to create such massive failure in public education that privatization would become an appealing option to more Americans." (pg. 194)
"The mission of the profession must never be confused with the institutional structures in which it is pursued. The fact that we have schools does not mean we have education." (pg. 204)
"The institutions are neither external to us nor constraining, neither separate from us nor alien. In fact, institutions are us! The shadows that institutions cast over our ethical lives are external manifestations of our own inner shadows." (pg. 206)
"We do not live by science alone. To survive and thrive, we also rely on the knowledge embedded in our feelings. In fact, science itself begins in the hunches, intuitions, and bodily knowledge that lie behind testable hypotheses." (pg. 208)
"Whatever our data source is, the key question is always the same: How much of what I claim to know can be verified from viewpoints other than my own, and how much of it is my projection?" (pg. 210)
"Therapy done by amateurs is usually an especially ugly form of psychological violence." (pg. 210)
"Our students need to see how we, their elders, deal with these vagaries of fate while refusing to sell out either our professions or our own identity and integrity. And they need to see how, when we fail and fall down, as everyone does, we manage to get up again." (pg. 211)
"Opening one's mouth to challenge what is wrong is a way to stay sane." (pg. 212)
June 10, 2013
I got to meet Parker Palmer at a conference. He wasn't a very dynamic keynote speaker, but what an inspiration. I reread this book when I'm feeling overwhelmed by my job. This one sustains me.
So -- I just reread it for a project...some things feel dated to me, and impossibly idealistic, but then that is exactly what I love about Palmer and his book. He reminds me WHY I teach (taught) -- to be an authentic human. I am authentic when I am with students. I am real.
I was intrigued by his challenge to think of the metaphor that most closely describes your teaching: "When I am teaching at my best, I am like a ____" Palmer's personal metaphor is a sheepdog -- a Border collie. i'm struggling...At my best I almost feel like a student...that I'm there, learning with my students. This will keep me thinking for a long time.
He ends his book with a discussion of the stages of a movement. His examples are the Civil Rights movement, and women's rights, but you can clearly see he's thinking of education reform. Stage 1 -- individuals make an inward decision to live 'divided no more.' Stage 2 -- These individuals discover each other and form communities. Stage 3 -- Communities go public. Stage 4 -- Alternative rewards emerge to sustain the community and put pressure for change on institutions.
I can see it happening...I can see it in my own life, in finding others who sustain me, and in finding my voice.
The book stands the test of time...and it reminds me I was at my best when I taught with my heart open.
"Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."
So -- I just reread it for a project...some things feel dated to me, and impossibly idealistic, but then that is exactly what I love about Palmer and his book. He reminds me WHY I teach (taught) -- to be an authentic human. I am authentic when I am with students. I am real.
I was intrigued by his challenge to think of the metaphor that most closely describes your teaching: "When I am teaching at my best, I am like a ____" Palmer's personal metaphor is a sheepdog -- a Border collie. i'm struggling...At my best I almost feel like a student...that I'm there, learning with my students. This will keep me thinking for a long time.
He ends his book with a discussion of the stages of a movement. His examples are the Civil Rights movement, and women's rights, but you can clearly see he's thinking of education reform. Stage 1 -- individuals make an inward decision to live 'divided no more.' Stage 2 -- These individuals discover each other and form communities. Stage 3 -- Communities go public. Stage 4 -- Alternative rewards emerge to sustain the community and put pressure for change on institutions.
I can see it happening...I can see it in my own life, in finding others who sustain me, and in finding my voice.
The book stands the test of time...and it reminds me I was at my best when I taught with my heart open.
"Good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher."
November 29, 2021
Such a helpful companion for teachers of every age student in every field!
July 7, 2010
I agree with a lot of what Parker Palmer has written in this book. Teaching is not a magic wand; One can't just quickly conjure up a lesson without thinking of oneself, the subject, and the students' needs in the class. The book was extremely difficult for me to read. "We must find an approach to teaching that respects the diversity of teachers and subjects, which methodological reductionism fails to do." I had to reread and reread to figure out Palmer's meaning. Much of the book was written with too much fancy rhetoric. The long and short of his message is, " Teachers should have a passion for a subject that they deeply care about. That passion is what that teacher is all about, who he/she is. A teacher has to remain true to this passion while learning the techniques that respect the subject, the teacher, and the students. Teachers should encourage students to voice their opinions and speak for themselves. Mutual inquiry between the teacher and the student is the best teaching community.
Another important community is the community of teachers, looking at their own classroom practices with new lenses. It is in this community where teachers can explore their strengths and weaknesses with ease, knowing that what is said will remain in confidence. When teachers meet to together, their dialogue is valued and their ideas are stretched and tested. "It is our commitment to the conversation itself, our willingness to put forward our observations and interpretations for testing by the community and to return the favor to others. To be in the truth, we must know how to observe and reflect and speak and listen, with passion and with discipline, in the circle gathered around a given subject."
I loved this Hasidic tale: "We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are." A community of learners will help us find our true selves, and help us discover ways we need to grow "ourselves and our craft."
Palmer talks about teachers asking good questions. I have been exploring for a long time what good inquiry looks like. I wish that Palmer would have written more about the practice of asking questions that "open an inner space to receive another person- a space that closes down when we are worrying about how to fix someone or preparing the next comment we want to make."
It's obvious that Parker J. Palmer is brilliant. I understood and agreed with his ideas, but got lost in the rhetoric. I am hoping that his "guide" to teaching with courage is more clear and that I can use some of his thoughts to practice with a group of my own 2nd, 3rd year teachers.
Another important community is the community of teachers, looking at their own classroom practices with new lenses. It is in this community where teachers can explore their strengths and weaknesses with ease, knowing that what is said will remain in confidence. When teachers meet to together, their dialogue is valued and their ideas are stretched and tested. "It is our commitment to the conversation itself, our willingness to put forward our observations and interpretations for testing by the community and to return the favor to others. To be in the truth, we must know how to observe and reflect and speak and listen, with passion and with discipline, in the circle gathered around a given subject."
I loved this Hasidic tale: "We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are." A community of learners will help us find our true selves, and help us discover ways we need to grow "ourselves and our craft."
Palmer talks about teachers asking good questions. I have been exploring for a long time what good inquiry looks like. I wish that Palmer would have written more about the practice of asking questions that "open an inner space to receive another person- a space that closes down when we are worrying about how to fix someone or preparing the next comment we want to make."
It's obvious that Parker J. Palmer is brilliant. I understood and agreed with his ideas, but got lost in the rhetoric. I am hoping that his "guide" to teaching with courage is more clear and that I can use some of his thoughts to practice with a group of my own 2nd, 3rd year teachers.
October 18, 2010
What I look for when reading a book about teaching is twofold; that it gives me ideas that I want to apply to my classroom, and it confirms the direction I have chosen in my life as teacher. The Courage to Teach supplied both.
Palmer clarified why we teach and linked that to why we learn. A good read for anyone who is a teacher or is thinking about becoming a teacher.
Palmer clarified why we teach and linked that to why we learn. A good read for anyone who is a teacher or is thinking about becoming a teacher.
December 16, 2008
Palmer is a little bit gushy about the great ineffable glory and torment of being a teacher, and I found myself skimming vast swaths of the book. However, I did find several important points to that I am trying to integrate into my thinking about teaching.
One is a frank acknowledgment that teaching is scary, that we can be so desperate to be liked by our students and to get them to learn that we can lose track of our own identities. We should not become over-invested in technique. Not every technique is right for every teacher. This flies in the face of evidence-based teaching in physics—but while pre- and post-testing with large groups can prove certain techniques that should be successful for most teachers, this ignores the unique things that we can do that work well for me and my students that may or may not work for anyone else. As teachers, we can embrace the techniques that reinforce our integrity, and not be worried about the rest.
Another important idea that I took away from the book is the "subject-centered" classroom, in contrast to the teacher-centered or student-centered classroom. I really like the idea of all of us approaching the subject together, with the instructor, not a source of knowledge or an ultimate authority, nor a sometimes distant "guide on the side", but an active participant who serves to model our approach to knowledge in our field.
This book is widely recommended amongst academics who care about teaching, and I will probably recommend it to others, though I personally am more practical-minded and probably got a lot more out of Advice for New Faculty Members by Robert Boice.
August 18, 2019
This book works on you rather than telling you what to do. Definitely not a book to tell you all the answers but a book to remind you why teach and how that can be done wholistically for teachers and their students. I'll have to revisit this one in a few years.
July 23, 2016
I thought this an excellent book. Palmer mentioned how he wrote and rewrote the manuscript again and again, and it shows in a good way--it was very well written. I loved the thoughtful way he worded things and the poetic nature of some of his pros.
Palmer emphasized the importance of the inner life of teacher, and how this is just as (and maybe even more) important than technique. Among Palmer's students who shared about their favorite teachers; there were those interactive types who encouraged discussion, and yet also educators who only lectured with no room for questions. Unsurprisingly, students delighted in the fun loving educator, yet the very serious teachers also were among the students favorites. What was consistently true of those teachers they loved, was that the teacher was truly "there" and was enthusiastic about the subject matter. The point taken is that the teaching style is not the most important factor, rather it's the teachers love for the topic of study. Students will sense whether or not the teach enjoys the subject and sincerely desires to help the students discover, learn and love it as well.
I liked that Palmer shared about the failures, his insecurities and the many things he learned during his years as an educator. He had some excellent thoughts on teaching from our identity. He has a chapter about about the influence fear has upon the teacher and the student and how they need to be brought to light and dealt with. He has a chapter on paradox that would have made G.K Chesterton proud. I really did relate with a lot in the first section of his book. Its definitely a book I want to return to and remember.
I really liked his reflections on knowledge, which seem to me very in line with William James understanding of truth. Palmer wrote:
"As far as I can tell, the only "Objective" knowledge we possess is the knowledge that comes from a community of people looking at a subject and debating their observations within a consensual framework of procedural rules. I know of no field, from science to religion, where what we regard as objective knowledge did not emerge from long and complex communal discourse that continues to this day, no field where the facts of the matter were delivered fully formed from on high.
The firmest foundation of all our knowledge is the community of truth itself. This community can never offer us ultimate certainty--not because its process is flawed but because certainty is beyond the grasp of finite hearts and minds. Yet this community can do much to rescue us from ignorance, bias, and self-deception if we are willing to submit our assumptions, our observations, our theories--indeed, ourselves--to its scrutiny.
In rejecting the objectivist model, I have not embraced a relativism that reduces truth to whatever the community decides, for the community of truth includes a transcendent dimension of truth-knowing and truth-telling that takes us beyond relativism and absolutism alike. The clearest and most compelling naming of that dimension is found in a couplet by Robert Frost: "We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
Frost honors the transcendent secret of the subject at the center of the community of truth, a secret that is equally obscured by absolutism, which claims that we can know the full reality of things, and by relativism, which claims that things have no reality save what we know. The subject knows itself better than we can ever know it, and forever evades our grasp by keeping its own secrets.
If this were no the case, the process of knowing world have long ago come to a halt. Why did we not settle for the pre-Socratic view of the nature of the physical world or the medieval view or the view of early modern science? Why are we pressing, even now, on the view we hold today? Because at the center of our attention is a subject that continually calls us deeper into its secret, a subject that refuses to be reduced to our conclusions about it."
Palmer emphasized the importance of the inner life of teacher, and how this is just as (and maybe even more) important than technique. Among Palmer's students who shared about their favorite teachers; there were those interactive types who encouraged discussion, and yet also educators who only lectured with no room for questions. Unsurprisingly, students delighted in the fun loving educator, yet the very serious teachers also were among the students favorites. What was consistently true of those teachers they loved, was that the teacher was truly "there" and was enthusiastic about the subject matter. The point taken is that the teaching style is not the most important factor, rather it's the teachers love for the topic of study. Students will sense whether or not the teach enjoys the subject and sincerely desires to help the students discover, learn and love it as well.
I liked that Palmer shared about the failures, his insecurities and the many things he learned during his years as an educator. He had some excellent thoughts on teaching from our identity. He has a chapter about about the influence fear has upon the teacher and the student and how they need to be brought to light and dealt with. He has a chapter on paradox that would have made G.K Chesterton proud. I really did relate with a lot in the first section of his book. Its definitely a book I want to return to and remember.
I really liked his reflections on knowledge, which seem to me very in line with William James understanding of truth. Palmer wrote:
"As far as I can tell, the only "Objective" knowledge we possess is the knowledge that comes from a community of people looking at a subject and debating their observations within a consensual framework of procedural rules. I know of no field, from science to religion, where what we regard as objective knowledge did not emerge from long and complex communal discourse that continues to this day, no field where the facts of the matter were delivered fully formed from on high.
The firmest foundation of all our knowledge is the community of truth itself. This community can never offer us ultimate certainty--not because its process is flawed but because certainty is beyond the grasp of finite hearts and minds. Yet this community can do much to rescue us from ignorance, bias, and self-deception if we are willing to submit our assumptions, our observations, our theories--indeed, ourselves--to its scrutiny.
In rejecting the objectivist model, I have not embraced a relativism that reduces truth to whatever the community decides, for the community of truth includes a transcendent dimension of truth-knowing and truth-telling that takes us beyond relativism and absolutism alike. The clearest and most compelling naming of that dimension is found in a couplet by Robert Frost: "We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows."
Frost honors the transcendent secret of the subject at the center of the community of truth, a secret that is equally obscured by absolutism, which claims that we can know the full reality of things, and by relativism, which claims that things have no reality save what we know. The subject knows itself better than we can ever know it, and forever evades our grasp by keeping its own secrets.
If this were no the case, the process of knowing world have long ago come to a halt. Why did we not settle for the pre-Socratic view of the nature of the physical world or the medieval view or the view of early modern science? Why are we pressing, even now, on the view we hold today? Because at the center of our attention is a subject that continually calls us deeper into its secret, a subject that refuses to be reduced to our conclusions about it."
July 16, 2018
I read this book years ago, and not until re-reading it did I realize how profoundly it shaped my teaching philosophy. Rich. Meaningful. Inspiring. Challenging. I think I should re-read every couple of years.
April 2, 2011
Palmer writes eloquently & honestly about the challenges of teaching, especially why the current debate will not lead to any meaningful change. While some readers may dislike the reflection & introspection that makes up this book (Palmer disdains "technique talk" or "quick fixes"), this book really helped me sort out my anxiety & baggage from my own imperfect & difficult seven years in the classroom. It helped me see where I "lost heart," & better, how I can gain it back again. It helped me see myself as a teacher in an entirely new & powerful way!!! This was my kind of book--kind of like an "Artist's Way" for educators. I kept a notebook of notes, exercises, & reflections as I studied this book. I intend to go back & review them as I make my way through my first year back into the classroom.
July 19, 2014
Occasionally Parker J. Palmer can be wordy, and his concepts delivered in a cumbersome prose. Most often, though, his crystalline insights on teaching from a whole heart describe both the research and practice of sound pedagogy. Two concepts are particularly salient and lifegiving: education that does no violence to the teacher or the learner, and teaching from authenticity and integrity rather than fraudulence and fear. His storytelling and Quaker variety of discernment make it an engaging read or listen.
May 6, 2018
“We became teachers because we once believed that ideas and insight are at least as powerful as the world that surrounds us,” Parker Palmer writes in the early chapters of The Courage to Teach. We teach because we are called to “creativity on the service of the young.” We teach because this vocation, as Frederick Buechner described the word, is “the place where (our) deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” We teach because it is through generative connectedness with our students that we get to experience “the grace of great things.” I could go on and on. This book has given me a wealth of language for exploring my teaching identity and my relationships with students and colleagues. I will probably read this book every April and May for years to come, and it deserves a place on every teacher and administrator’s shelf.
Read
February 7, 2023Lots of great stuff in here, and empowering exhortations to the heart of a teacher. Palmer’s ambiguous mysticism might be off-putting to some, but it didn’t bother me. Suspend cynicism and you’ll find much goodness here.
July 15, 2023
LOVED the beginning of this book! I was able to connect and relate to so much that the author wrote about regarding why we teach. Then... it went downhill. I STRUGGLED through the last half of the book and when I finished the book I looked over to Zach, took a deep breath and said "bruh that was rough." I'm glad it's over lol.
April 15, 2010
AGREE / DISAGREE
The whole idea of learning in community is new to me, but something I’ve been introduced to before reading this book. Our church, Life on the Vine, is a very community oriented church that has opened my eyes to that idea. I was, therefore, open to the ideas of the 2nd part of Palmer’s book which focused on learning in community. Our American culture places so much value on individualism that we limit ourselves incredibly.
I also found myself in agreement with the ideas he presented in the first part of the book, in that teaching is first about who we are as people. I don’t think this is limited to the realm of teaching, and I think Palmer would agree.
QUESTION
Although I was stimulated by this book in many ways, and I do agree in large part, I have some lingering questions. He pushes his “subject” theory so far that it nearly places the teacher and learner on the same plane. I do agree that students have a lot to offer to the learning process, much more than traditional education models allow for. Yet, there must be a place where the teacher is viewed with some level of expertise that is far above the students. Otherwise, any of the students are just as valid to teach any given class. The whole point of education, no matter what the model or focus is to help other people grow in knowledge and experience in subjects in which they are currently deficient.
Palmer was careful to distinguish his model from the learner based approach, but I feel that he didn’t draw a clear enough line. It may be that I misunderstood the exact place of his conviction, but it just seemed a bit too post-modern and student focused to me. That said, I am more in his camp than I am in the traditional object based approach.
WORTHY OF MORE THOUGHT
The whole book and his approach to teaching is honestly worthy of more thought. I was heading his direction before reading this book, and feel affirmed by it. As I consider the possibility of teaching in the future, I definitely want to incorporate some of the principles here. Although I agree with his subject based theory, I’m thinking over the extremes to which he goes with it.
GENERAL COMMENTS
Palmer did a decent job balancing the abstract and the concrete. There were many times I found myself barely hanging on to the abstract and saying to myself, “Ok, that sounds good, but what do you mean? Or, “What does that look like exactly?” Then, he would go on and answer my question, so kudos to Palmer! Otherwise, I would have found the book frustrating.
The whole idea of learning in community is new to me, but something I’ve been introduced to before reading this book. Our church, Life on the Vine, is a very community oriented church that has opened my eyes to that idea. I was, therefore, open to the ideas of the 2nd part of Palmer’s book which focused on learning in community. Our American culture places so much value on individualism that we limit ourselves incredibly.
I also found myself in agreement with the ideas he presented in the first part of the book, in that teaching is first about who we are as people. I don’t think this is limited to the realm of teaching, and I think Palmer would agree.
QUESTION
Although I was stimulated by this book in many ways, and I do agree in large part, I have some lingering questions. He pushes his “subject” theory so far that it nearly places the teacher and learner on the same plane. I do agree that students have a lot to offer to the learning process, much more than traditional education models allow for. Yet, there must be a place where the teacher is viewed with some level of expertise that is far above the students. Otherwise, any of the students are just as valid to teach any given class. The whole point of education, no matter what the model or focus is to help other people grow in knowledge and experience in subjects in which they are currently deficient.
Palmer was careful to distinguish his model from the learner based approach, but I feel that he didn’t draw a clear enough line. It may be that I misunderstood the exact place of his conviction, but it just seemed a bit too post-modern and student focused to me. That said, I am more in his camp than I am in the traditional object based approach.
WORTHY OF MORE THOUGHT
The whole book and his approach to teaching is honestly worthy of more thought. I was heading his direction before reading this book, and feel affirmed by it. As I consider the possibility of teaching in the future, I definitely want to incorporate some of the principles here. Although I agree with his subject based theory, I’m thinking over the extremes to which he goes with it.
GENERAL COMMENTS
Palmer did a decent job balancing the abstract and the concrete. There were many times I found myself barely hanging on to the abstract and saying to myself, “Ok, that sounds good, but what do you mean? Or, “What does that look like exactly?” Then, he would go on and answer my question, so kudos to Palmer! Otherwise, I would have found the book frustrating.
October 25, 2018
This book resonated in my heart more than nearly any book I have ever read, but with a caveat. While the themes Palmer discussed resonated with my heart, I didn't always find the specific example or the writing to be on par with the "truths" explored. The key truths for me were: Teach out of identity and core not technique. Fear and alienation are the enemies of effective teaching. Greater truths are often paradoxes. Trying to resolve paradoxes too quickly short-circuits learning. The tension from paradoxes can leave us open provide we have fuel to endure the tension which requires love and suffering. Finding truth as a community centered around a subject rather than "objective facts" and experts. Teaching from the microcosm. From an impact in my life this is a five start. From a completeness of the topic / writing quality, this is a three star.
June 17, 2014
I finished the last page of this book and said, "Thank God! I've finished!" And that accomplishment came only from sheer determination and force of will. What a disappointment! I started this book mid-January when I was starting to get the mid-year, I-just-can't-do-this-anymore blues. "The Courage to Teach" - it sounded uplifting, encouraging, renewing... just what I needed at the school year's half-way point. Instead, what I got was a bunch of philosophical ramblings. Ok... that's a little harsh. But what I needed from this book... no, what I expected from this book, was a massive anabolic steroid shot of "Teaching Enthusiasm" and instead I got a half-dose of children's strength "Explore Your Heart and Mind." Maybe if I had gone into the book with different needs and expectations I would have enjoyed it more. But for me, this book just fell flat.
April 9, 2019
At last year’s ISA, Andy Paras and Patrick Jackson had us read Parker Palmer’s earlier work To Know as We are Known (1993), which I liked a bit better than The Courage to Teach (1998). Both books annoyed me even as I found them appealing. Courage, more than To Know has a preachy sales-pitch undertone that had me wishing for more story-telling and less expounding of principles. Still, every ten pages, I found myself noting something I wanted to keep as a memento or a reminder. For example, I like very much Palmer’s emphasis on wholeness (4) and on what certain types of Marxists and Hegelians might call “expressive holism” (122). I second his call that we recognize teachers’ vulnerabilities (17) and I agree that academics hurt themselves when we distrust what he calls “personal truths.” I enjoy his criticism that we are, in fact, “blaming the victims” (41) when we complain about our students. He affirms my experience that nearly all pedagogic conversation devolves into “technique talk” (145). I confirm his claims that the power of the “sacred” is in play in the classroom (111) and that truth is not attained via democratic processes (92). His diagnosis that our need to be liked is a crucial problem (49) is central to my own vision of reforming teaching. And, I love his language when he asks how long we should wait before we “smite” students for uttering statements that are totally false or utterly offensive (134). (The subtext here – in those rare moments when Palmer provides the relief of a subtext – is that we should wait a very long time, perhaps forever, before smiting students with our power, knowledge, and skill.)
I love, most of all, two passages that produce vital questions. One because the form of the question solves my problem about what to do with student praise. Usually, I say, “But I didn’t do anything. You did all the work.” Here is what I will say in the future (21): “what is about you, that allowed…[my] mentoring to happen?” The second is a very Hegelian/Lacanian question that teachers almost never ask (139): What need do students fill in teachers?
Nevertheless, the book also hides elements that need exposure. If we think of the medium as painting, then Parker paints in bright colors, perhaps in pastels, and his strokes are impressionistic. Too much so. Missing are the darker hues and those quiet waves of understanding that come only when we are drowned in a sense of resignation. In sum, I need less Gustav Klimt and more Mark Rothko.
The short list of my complaints follows: Parker’s two books are too internalized for me (20); they are absent both the macro-structures of political economy and the microstructures of (Freudian) psychology. As a result, he does not have a strong enough response to the charge that when we practice his methods, we are “doing therapy” (64). A better response might be that what we do is both different from and better than therapy since we connect dynamic micro-structures to dynamic macro-structures, instead of severing them from each other – a severing that is integral to therapy and therefore to therapy’s ultimate failure.
My third problem with Parker’s work is that while he provides a key insight about the role of organizations, namely that they “represent the principle of order and conservation…[and]… they are the vessels in which society holds hard won treasures from the past” (164), he misses that they also contain an active denial of genocide, slavery, sexism, and war-crimes – what Adorno calls “barbarism.” In sum, I might say that while Parker briefly addresses “pessimism,” he does not consider the difference between pessimism and resignation and therefore is unaware of the tremendous energy released from submitting to resignation.
This absence of gravitas leads Parker to produce the condition he fears, namely, that he is peddling “false hope about the renewal of teaching and learning” (164).
Where can we find a better analysis?
***
I turn to Theodor Adorno’s remarkable 10-page lecture, “Taboos of the Teaching Vocation.” (But I could also have turned to Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment (2007) or to Marshall Alcorn’s Changing the Subject in English Class (2002), and his Resistance to Learning (2013). Or, I might have considered these two remarkable films about pedagogy: Whiplash (2013) and Waterland (1987)).
Adorno asks why and how society devalues teachers. University professors, he suggests, receive more respect than their colleagues in schools, but they too are painted with this same degrading brush. Adorno responds to his question by speculating on society’s, specifically, German society’s “‘unconscious’ or ‘pre-conscious’ aversion to the teaching profession” (178). He looks for taboos which he defines as “a collective manifestation of ideas...that have lost their real basis… and that nonetheless tenaciously persist as psychological and social prejudices and in turn influence reality, become real forces.” 178
Adorno then begins a series of speculations with what he admits is little evidence. He hopes that his presentation can produce hypotheses that lead to a research agenda.
Historically, German society, he says, connects teachers with servants, monks, and scribes. Each of these derive ultimately from the role of slaves (180). He notes, further, that, since even today society is unified only by means of force, it is force and not ideas that carry the day (183). All of us, he insists, harbor the disdain that warriors carry for those who traffic in ideas and in conversations instead of strength (180). He asserts that all of us but especially children strongly identify with the soldier (180).
Society’s contempt for teachers is due not merely to the bias that favors force, warriors, and soldiers. It is also that the pedagogue is a kind of non-expert; teachers, at least non-university teachers, usually have no specialization and therefore they are amateurs in all fields. They do not have their own subject-matter (181).
Further, teachers’ power is over children – a lowly power. Whereas judges and even administrators can lord it over adults, teachers’ command over children actually infantilizes teachers (181). We might say that teachers are a child/adult hybrid entity who never attain the full status of adulthood (184).
Teachers are also “unfair” and “not a good sport[s]” (182) because they necessarily have greater knowledge than the student which they use to establish their authority and power. This rift is constitutive of the teacher-student relationship:
Such unfairness—and every teacher, even the university teacher senses this—somewhat taints the advantage of the teacher’s knowledge over that of his pupils, an advantage the teacher asserts without having the right, because indeed the advantage is indivisible from his function, whereas he continually bestows upon that advantage an authority he can disregard only with great difficulty. (182)
Adorno summarizes: “Unfairness lies… in the ontology of the teacher…” (182).
The difference between Parker Palmer and Theodor Adorno is that the latter thinks of society as essentially riven and then (falsely?) constituted as a unity via force. Thus, three elements define society: (1) essential divisions – whether on the axis of culture, politics, or economics, (2) power used to contain and suture division, and, most important, (3) the denial of the division, the use of force, and the suturing. Adorno describes it like this: “… it is essential for the inner structure of this complex that the physical violence any society based on domination requires must at all costs not be acknowledged, insofar as the society takes itself to be bourgeois-liberal” (183, emphasis added).
Adorno derives two further claims from this statement: that force must not be acknowledge as the Real (to use Lacanian language) of the classroom, and that the teacher is the entity who sustains the fiction that force is unnecessary -- both in the classroom and in society. Society forces the teacher to personify force in the classroom while also requiring the teacher to deny the centrality of that force.
Adorno concludes that society can “achieve the so-called integration….only with the potential of physical violence” 183.
As such, the unconscious imagery of the teacher is as a “flogger” (182), a “jailer,” and a “drill sergeant” (183). (The film “Whiplash” (2013), for example, certainly portrays the music teacher, “Fletcher” as a superior officer trying to break the will of his students.) Adorno writes,
I consider this complex, even after the abolition of corporal punishment, to be decisive for the taboos on the teacher’s vocation. This imago presents the teacher as the physically stronger who beats the weaker…. [t]his function [is] still ascribed to him even after the official function was abolished…182
Undoing this image, for Adorno, requires going beyond the abolition of corporeal punishment. What is further necessary is the disappearance of the “last memory trace of corporal punishment” in schools (183).
If the historical traces and the macro sociological context weren’t enough, Adorno turns to problems of psychology. Children learn that “parents do not live up to the ego ideal they instill in their children” (186). Children then encounter the teacher as a second opportunity with which to identify their ego ideal. But here too they are let down because teachers are themselves children that produced unsatisfying projections on to their own parents and their own teachers. Alienated societies cannot but produce both alienated students and alienated teachers (186).
This “complex” of problems which Adorno also calls an “archaism” is, of course, internalized by teachers and it expresses itself as “bickering, grousing, scolding, and the like and in reactions that are always close to physical violence and betray a certain weakness and lack of self-confidence” (187). Adorno, therefore endorses psychoanalytic training for teachers.
He closes the article by asking the question of “What is to be done?” Of course, the cure is already in his diagnosis: the most important element is to create “enlightenment about the entire complex” (188). This means producing a frank, honest, and clear-eyed assessment of the magnitude of the problem. In case we think that such a fix might be quick, Adorno warns that, “one should not expect too much from intellectual engagement alone” and that we should “target the ideology of schooling” (188).
He ends on what I experience as his most powerful insight, that teaching and reforms to teaching work within the process of “debarbarization”: “By barbarism I do not mean the Beatles, although their cult is related to it, but the utmost extreme: delusional prejudice, oppression, genocide, and torture…”(190).
Delusion, oppression, genocide, and torture. These are what society, schooling, and teaching support. To substantiate this claim, Adorno brings the full weight of his historical reflection:
My generation experienced the relapse of humanity into barbarism, in the literal, indescribable, and true sense. Barbarism is a condition where all the formative, cultivating influence, for which the school is responsible, is shown to have failed. It is certain that as long as society itself engenders barbarism, the school can offer only minimal resistance to it. But if barbarism, the horrible shadow over our existence, is in fact the contrary to culture, then it is also essential that individuals become debarbarized (190, emphasis mine).
Schooling, indeed the Enlightenment itself, has already failed. We are trying again. It is already “after the end of the world” -- as the poet/Jazz musician Sun Ra would say. Our first step then is to understand how schooling, society, and “civilization” align with barbarism.
Parker Palmer delivers no such indictment in his two books. While his work is enjoyable and insightful it falls considerably short of plumbing the necessary depths required in a diagnosis of our troubles.
I love, most of all, two passages that produce vital questions. One because the form of the question solves my problem about what to do with student praise. Usually, I say, “But I didn’t do anything. You did all the work.” Here is what I will say in the future (21): “what is about you, that allowed…[my] mentoring to happen?” The second is a very Hegelian/Lacanian question that teachers almost never ask (139): What need do students fill in teachers?
Nevertheless, the book also hides elements that need exposure. If we think of the medium as painting, then Parker paints in bright colors, perhaps in pastels, and his strokes are impressionistic. Too much so. Missing are the darker hues and those quiet waves of understanding that come only when we are drowned in a sense of resignation. In sum, I need less Gustav Klimt and more Mark Rothko.
The short list of my complaints follows: Parker’s two books are too internalized for me (20); they are absent both the macro-structures of political economy and the microstructures of (Freudian) psychology. As a result, he does not have a strong enough response to the charge that when we practice his methods, we are “doing therapy” (64). A better response might be that what we do is both different from and better than therapy since we connect dynamic micro-structures to dynamic macro-structures, instead of severing them from each other – a severing that is integral to therapy and therefore to therapy’s ultimate failure.
My third problem with Parker’s work is that while he provides a key insight about the role of organizations, namely that they “represent the principle of order and conservation…[and]… they are the vessels in which society holds hard won treasures from the past” (164), he misses that they also contain an active denial of genocide, slavery, sexism, and war-crimes – what Adorno calls “barbarism.” In sum, I might say that while Parker briefly addresses “pessimism,” he does not consider the difference between pessimism and resignation and therefore is unaware of the tremendous energy released from submitting to resignation.
This absence of gravitas leads Parker to produce the condition he fears, namely, that he is peddling “false hope about the renewal of teaching and learning” (164).
Where can we find a better analysis?
***
I turn to Theodor Adorno’s remarkable 10-page lecture, “Taboos of the Teaching Vocation.” (But I could also have turned to Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment (2007) or to Marshall Alcorn’s Changing the Subject in English Class (2002), and his Resistance to Learning (2013). Or, I might have considered these two remarkable films about pedagogy: Whiplash (2013) and Waterland (1987)).
Adorno asks why and how society devalues teachers. University professors, he suggests, receive more respect than their colleagues in schools, but they too are painted with this same degrading brush. Adorno responds to his question by speculating on society’s, specifically, German society’s “‘unconscious’ or ‘pre-conscious’ aversion to the teaching profession” (178). He looks for taboos which he defines as “a collective manifestation of ideas...that have lost their real basis… and that nonetheless tenaciously persist as psychological and social prejudices and in turn influence reality, become real forces.” 178
Adorno then begins a series of speculations with what he admits is little evidence. He hopes that his presentation can produce hypotheses that lead to a research agenda.
Historically, German society, he says, connects teachers with servants, monks, and scribes. Each of these derive ultimately from the role of slaves (180). He notes, further, that, since even today society is unified only by means of force, it is force and not ideas that carry the day (183). All of us, he insists, harbor the disdain that warriors carry for those who traffic in ideas and in conversations instead of strength (180). He asserts that all of us but especially children strongly identify with the soldier (180).
Society’s contempt for teachers is due not merely to the bias that favors force, warriors, and soldiers. It is also that the pedagogue is a kind of non-expert; teachers, at least non-university teachers, usually have no specialization and therefore they are amateurs in all fields. They do not have their own subject-matter (181).
Further, teachers’ power is over children – a lowly power. Whereas judges and even administrators can lord it over adults, teachers’ command over children actually infantilizes teachers (181). We might say that teachers are a child/adult hybrid entity who never attain the full status of adulthood (184).
Teachers are also “unfair” and “not a good sport[s]” (182) because they necessarily have greater knowledge than the student which they use to establish their authority and power. This rift is constitutive of the teacher-student relationship:
Such unfairness—and every teacher, even the university teacher senses this—somewhat taints the advantage of the teacher’s knowledge over that of his pupils, an advantage the teacher asserts without having the right, because indeed the advantage is indivisible from his function, whereas he continually bestows upon that advantage an authority he can disregard only with great difficulty. (182)
Adorno summarizes: “Unfairness lies… in the ontology of the teacher…” (182).
The difference between Parker Palmer and Theodor Adorno is that the latter thinks of society as essentially riven and then (falsely?) constituted as a unity via force. Thus, three elements define society: (1) essential divisions – whether on the axis of culture, politics, or economics, (2) power used to contain and suture division, and, most important, (3) the denial of the division, the use of force, and the suturing. Adorno describes it like this: “… it is essential for the inner structure of this complex that the physical violence any society based on domination requires must at all costs not be acknowledged, insofar as the society takes itself to be bourgeois-liberal” (183, emphasis added).
Adorno derives two further claims from this statement: that force must not be acknowledge as the Real (to use Lacanian language) of the classroom, and that the teacher is the entity who sustains the fiction that force is unnecessary -- both in the classroom and in society. Society forces the teacher to personify force in the classroom while also requiring the teacher to deny the centrality of that force.
Adorno concludes that society can “achieve the so-called integration….only with the potential of physical violence” 183.
As such, the unconscious imagery of the teacher is as a “flogger” (182), a “jailer,” and a “drill sergeant” (183). (The film “Whiplash” (2013), for example, certainly portrays the music teacher, “Fletcher” as a superior officer trying to break the will of his students.) Adorno writes,
I consider this complex, even after the abolition of corporal punishment, to be decisive for the taboos on the teacher’s vocation. This imago presents the teacher as the physically stronger who beats the weaker…. [t]his function [is] still ascribed to him even after the official function was abolished…182
Undoing this image, for Adorno, requires going beyond the abolition of corporeal punishment. What is further necessary is the disappearance of the “last memory trace of corporal punishment” in schools (183).
If the historical traces and the macro sociological context weren’t enough, Adorno turns to problems of psychology. Children learn that “parents do not live up to the ego ideal they instill in their children” (186). Children then encounter the teacher as a second opportunity with which to identify their ego ideal. But here too they are let down because teachers are themselves children that produced unsatisfying projections on to their own parents and their own teachers. Alienated societies cannot but produce both alienated students and alienated teachers (186).
This “complex” of problems which Adorno also calls an “archaism” is, of course, internalized by teachers and it expresses itself as “bickering, grousing, scolding, and the like and in reactions that are always close to physical violence and betray a certain weakness and lack of self-confidence” (187). Adorno, therefore endorses psychoanalytic training for teachers.
He closes the article by asking the question of “What is to be done?” Of course, the cure is already in his diagnosis: the most important element is to create “enlightenment about the entire complex” (188). This means producing a frank, honest, and clear-eyed assessment of the magnitude of the problem. In case we think that such a fix might be quick, Adorno warns that, “one should not expect too much from intellectual engagement alone” and that we should “target the ideology of schooling” (188).
He ends on what I experience as his most powerful insight, that teaching and reforms to teaching work within the process of “debarbarization”: “By barbarism I do not mean the Beatles, although their cult is related to it, but the utmost extreme: delusional prejudice, oppression, genocide, and torture…”(190).
Delusion, oppression, genocide, and torture. These are what society, schooling, and teaching support. To substantiate this claim, Adorno brings the full weight of his historical reflection:
My generation experienced the relapse of humanity into barbarism, in the literal, indescribable, and true sense. Barbarism is a condition where all the formative, cultivating influence, for which the school is responsible, is shown to have failed. It is certain that as long as society itself engenders barbarism, the school can offer only minimal resistance to it. But if barbarism, the horrible shadow over our existence, is in fact the contrary to culture, then it is also essential that individuals become debarbarized (190, emphasis mine).
Schooling, indeed the Enlightenment itself, has already failed. We are trying again. It is already “after the end of the world” -- as the poet/Jazz musician Sun Ra would say. Our first step then is to understand how schooling, society, and “civilization” align with barbarism.
Parker Palmer delivers no such indictment in his two books. While his work is enjoyable and insightful it falls considerably short of plumbing the necessary depths required in a diagnosis of our troubles.
February 27, 2022
A fascinating book about the relational and transformational nature of teaching. This book open my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about teaching and learning. Slightly dated, but the basics are there for sure. I would be curious to see an updated version incorporating new research and cultural insights.
schools with the highest standardized test scores also showed a high level of trust in the school.
a strong correlation between relational trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for factors such as racial and economic disparities...on what does relational trust depend? it depends on an educators capacity to explore the inner landscape of his/her own life, learning how to negotiate that tricky terrain in a way that keeps trust alive.
I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my innerlife...teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I have the courage to look into that mirror and analyze what I see, I have the capacity for self knowledge.
When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject-not at the deepest level of embodied personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a conjury of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth.
The question we most commonly ask is the what question-what subjects shall we teach?...when the question goes a bit deeper we ask the how question-how will we teach it-occasionally, we ask the why question-for what purpose & to what end. Seldom do we ask the who question? Who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form or deform the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?
Reduce teaching to intellect and it becomes a cold abstraction. Reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcacistic. Reduce it to the spiritual and it loses it anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit, depend on one another for wholeness. they are interwoven in the human self and in education at it's best.
In the training of therapists, the technique is what you use until the therapist arrives. good methods can help a therapist find a way into the client's dilemma. But good therapy does not begin until the real live therapist joins with the real life of the client. the same goes for teaching.
Chapter 1:
Every class comes down to this: my students and I, face to face, engaging in an ancient and exacting exchange called education. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but neither do they suffice.
In every story...good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.
There are subtle dimensions of the complex, demanding, and life long pursuit of self-discovery. Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life. Integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life, rather than fragmentation and death.
In the undivided self, every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connection on which teaching depends.
What I care about helps define my selfhood...teaching is always done at the dangerous interaction of personal and public life.
We make ourselves as well as our subjects vulnerable to indifference, judgement, ridicule. to reduce our vulnerability we disconnect from students, from subjects, and even from ourselves. we build a wall between inner truth and outer performance.
The key to my mentors power was the connection between his method and himself...as we learn more about who we are, we can learn techniques that reveal rather than conceal the personhood from which good teaching comes. We no longer need to use technique to mask the subjective self...we can use technique to manifest the best self that comes from teaching.
How did we come to be where the main goal of academia turned out to be about performance instead of who we are as teachers?
an image of vocation: the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet...if a work is mine to do, it will make me glad over the long-haul, despite the difficult days. Even the difficult days will ultimately gladden me, because they pose the kinds of problems that help me grow in a work if it is truly mine...if a work does not truly gladden me in these ways, I need to consider laying it down.
what brings more security in the long run? holding this job or honoring my soul? The teacher in our soul is a voice of integrity and identity...it speaks of what is real for us.
In classical understanding, education is the attempt to weed out from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth. not by external norms but my reasoned and reflective self-determination
How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? solitude, silence, meditative reading, walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will listen...we need to learn as many ways as we can of talking to ourselves.
Ch2
The self is not a scrap of turf to be defended, but a capacity to be enlarged. if we embrace the promise of diversity, of creative conflict, and of losing in order to win, we still face one final fear: the fear that a live encounter with otherness will challenge or even compel us to live our lives...otherness, taken seriously, always invites transformation, calling us to new facts and theory and values but also to new ways of living our lives. and this is the most daunting of all.
the fear that shuts down the capacity for connectedness is often at work in our students..if we could learn to address our student's fears, rather than exploit them, we would move toward better teaching.
the way we diagnose our students condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.
a good teacher is one who can listen to those voices, even before they are spoken. so that some day, they can speak with truth and confidence. what does this mean? it means making space for the other. Being aware of the other. paying attention to the other. honoring the other. it means not rushing to fill out student's silences
generativity becomes creativity in the service of the young. a way in which the elders serve not only the young but their own wellbeing. teachers must turn towards student, not away from them..."not matter how wide a perilous the gaps between us might be, I am committed to bridging them. Not only because you need me to help you on your way, but because I need your insight and energy to help me renew my own life"
the fear I want to get rid of is rooted in my need to be popular among young people...one that keeps us from serving our students well...I hope to never get rid of the fear that I feel when I am not in life-giving communion with the young. I hope never to encounter a student sitting in the backrow of the class and act weather he or she never exists....when the student from hell does not seem relevant to me, my life becomes less relevant to the world.
the teacher's hospitality to the student, results in a world more hospitable to the teacher.
when we distance ourselves from something, it becomes an object. When it becomes an object, it no longer has life. when it is lifeless, it cannot touch or transform us, so our knowledge of the thing remains pure.
the highest form of love: love that allows for intimacy, without the animation of difference...this describes the heart of every authentic relationship that a human being might have...a way of knowing and living that has moved beyond fear of the other into respect for, even a need for, its otherness
ch 3
how can we escape the grip of either/or thinking?...to develop a habit of mind that supports a habit of connectedness in our teaching. The opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.
Profound truth-where, if we want to know what is essential, we must stop thinking the world into pieces and start thinking it together again. Profound truth, rather than empirical fact, is the stuff of which paradoxes are made...My inward and invisible sense of identity only becomes known to me only as it manifests itself in encounters with external and invisible otherness.
To take a hard experience and leap immediately to practical solutions is to evade the insight into ones identity that is always available in moments of vulnerability. Inishgt that comes only as we are willing to dwell more deeply into the dynamics that made us more vulnerable. Eventually the how to question is worth asking, but understanding my own identity is the first and crucial step to understanding how I teach.
I will not make any difference to anyone if the technique I am using is not rooted in my nature....every gift goes hand in hand with a liability...a strength is also a weakness...a dimension of my identity serves myself and others at some points, but not all the time.
To embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is dependent on others dancing with me, and that I still have a self when no one wants to dance....this is a true paradox. my sense of self is so deeply dependent on others, what I will always suffer a bit when others refuse to relate to me...at the same time. I still have the sense of self when others fail. I need to learn that the pain I sometimes experience in teaching is as much a sign as the joy I feel when the dance is in full swing.
the space should be bounded and open.
the space should be hospitable and charged
the space should invite the voice of the individual and of the group
the space should honor the little stories of the students and the bit stories of the discipline and the tradition
the space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of a community
the space should welcome both silence and speech
suppose students are not wasting time, bu doing a more reflective form of learning. I miss all such forms of learning when I assume the silence signifies a problem, reacting to it from my own need for control, rather than their need to learn.
helping students become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations....neither our students or our children share this knowledge...there is no formula to tell us if moments of conflict are times for freedom or for discipline but good teachers and good parents find their way through such minefields everyday by allowing such moments of tension to pull them open to a larger and larger love. a love that resolves these dilemmas that looks past the self-interest of ourselves and looking towards the best interest of the student or child.
when we pretend, we fall out of the common center that is both the root and fruit of teaching at it's best. when we understand that the point is to live everything, we recover all that is lost.
ch4
community is an outward sign of an inward and invisible grace. the flowing of personal identity and integrity into the world of relationships.
to teach is to create a space in which a community of truth is practiced.
the community we seek is one that can embrace, guide, and define the mission of teaching. the mission of knowing, teaching, and learning. to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced
we experience humility not because we have fought and loss, but because humility is the only lens through wich great things can be seen. and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible. We become free men and women through education because tyranny in any form can be overcome by invoking the grace of great things.
Ch 5
to see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour-william blake
in religious life-when a community attaches ultimacy to its ordained leadership or to the mass mind of its members, it will fall into idolatry until it turns to a transcendent center that can judge both partitioners and priests.
passion for the subject, propels that subject, not the teacher to the center of the learning circle. and when a great thing is in their midst, students have direct access to learning and of life.
why do we keep trying ot cover the field...each discipline has an inner logic that is so profound that every critical piece of it contains the information necessary to intersect the whole, if it is illuminated by a laser, a highly organized beam of light. that lazer is the act of teaching.
in every great novel, that when deeply understood reveals how the author understands character, establishes tension, creates dramatic movement. with that understanding, the student can read the rest of the novel more insightly.
patterning is what happens when students learn their medical facts when they learn it through a patient's story.
our resistance to opening rather than filling the space is compounded by the fact that it takes time t make the transition to changing our craft...on route to a new pedagogy there are days we will serve poorly
ch 6
clearness committee
if we want to support each others inner lives, we must remember a simple truth. the human soul does not want to be fixed. it wants simply to be seen and heard. if we want to see and hear a person's soul. we must remember the soul is like a wild animal. tough, resilient, and yet shy.
allowing the person to hear more clearly the guidance that comes form within. as we let the process unfold we are reminded of a certain truth: because we cannot get in the mind and soul of another person, we cannot know the answer to another's problem...we cannot know exactly what the problem is.
community does not emerge spontaneously from some relational reflex...if we are to have communities of discourse about teaching and learning teaching communities that are intentional about the topics to be pursued and processed...we need leaders to call us to that vision....conversation must be a free choices. but in the privatized academy, the conversation begins only as leaders invite us out of isolation into generative ways of using our freedom.
the notion of the new professional revives the anciet meaning of the word. the new professional is a person who can say, in the midst of the powerful forcefield of institutional life whereas so much might compromise my core values, I have found firm ground on which to stand. the ground on my identity and my integrity, of my own soul.
Ccu recommendation on what makes good teachers
schools with the highest standardized test scores also showed a high level of trust in the school.
a strong correlation between relational trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for factors such as racial and economic disparities...on what does relational trust depend? it depends on an educators capacity to explore the inner landscape of his/her own life, learning how to negotiate that tricky terrain in a way that keeps trust alive.
I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my innerlife...teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I have the courage to look into that mirror and analyze what I see, I have the capacity for self knowledge.
When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject-not at the deepest level of embodied personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance, a conjury of concepts as far removed from the world as I am from personal truth.
The question we most commonly ask is the what question-what subjects shall we teach?...when the question goes a bit deeper we ask the how question-how will we teach it-occasionally, we ask the why question-for what purpose & to what end. Seldom do we ask the who question? Who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form or deform the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?
Reduce teaching to intellect and it becomes a cold abstraction. Reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcacistic. Reduce it to the spiritual and it loses it anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit, depend on one another for wholeness. they are interwoven in the human self and in education at it's best.
In the training of therapists, the technique is what you use until the therapist arrives. good methods can help a therapist find a way into the client's dilemma. But good therapy does not begin until the real live therapist joins with the real life of the client. the same goes for teaching.
Chapter 1:
Every class comes down to this: my students and I, face to face, engaging in an ancient and exacting exchange called education. The techniques I have mastered do not disappear, but neither do they suffice.
In every story...good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work.
There are subtle dimensions of the complex, demanding, and life long pursuit of self-discovery. Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life. Integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life, rather than fragmentation and death.
In the undivided self, every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connection on which teaching depends.
What I care about helps define my selfhood...teaching is always done at the dangerous interaction of personal and public life.
We make ourselves as well as our subjects vulnerable to indifference, judgement, ridicule. to reduce our vulnerability we disconnect from students, from subjects, and even from ourselves. we build a wall between inner truth and outer performance.
The key to my mentors power was the connection between his method and himself...as we learn more about who we are, we can learn techniques that reveal rather than conceal the personhood from which good teaching comes. We no longer need to use technique to mask the subjective self...we can use technique to manifest the best self that comes from teaching.
How did we come to be where the main goal of academia turned out to be about performance instead of who we are as teachers?
an image of vocation: the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet...if a work is mine to do, it will make me glad over the long-haul, despite the difficult days. Even the difficult days will ultimately gladden me, because they pose the kinds of problems that help me grow in a work if it is truly mine...if a work does not truly gladden me in these ways, I need to consider laying it down.
what brings more security in the long run? holding this job or honoring my soul? The teacher in our soul is a voice of integrity and identity...it speaks of what is real for us.
In classical understanding, education is the attempt to weed out from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth. not by external norms but my reasoned and reflective self-determination
How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? solitude, silence, meditative reading, walking in the woods, keeping a journal, finding a friend who will listen...we need to learn as many ways as we can of talking to ourselves.
Ch2
The self is not a scrap of turf to be defended, but a capacity to be enlarged. if we embrace the promise of diversity, of creative conflict, and of losing in order to win, we still face one final fear: the fear that a live encounter with otherness will challenge or even compel us to live our lives...otherness, taken seriously, always invites transformation, calling us to new facts and theory and values but also to new ways of living our lives. and this is the most daunting of all.
the fear that shuts down the capacity for connectedness is often at work in our students..if we could learn to address our student's fears, rather than exploit them, we would move toward better teaching.
the way we diagnose our students condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.
a good teacher is one who can listen to those voices, even before they are spoken. so that some day, they can speak with truth and confidence. what does this mean? it means making space for the other. Being aware of the other. paying attention to the other. honoring the other. it means not rushing to fill out student's silences
generativity becomes creativity in the service of the young. a way in which the elders serve not only the young but their own wellbeing. teachers must turn towards student, not away from them..."not matter how wide a perilous the gaps between us might be, I am committed to bridging them. Not only because you need me to help you on your way, but because I need your insight and energy to help me renew my own life"
the fear I want to get rid of is rooted in my need to be popular among young people...one that keeps us from serving our students well...I hope to never get rid of the fear that I feel when I am not in life-giving communion with the young. I hope never to encounter a student sitting in the backrow of the class and act weather he or she never exists....when the student from hell does not seem relevant to me, my life becomes less relevant to the world.
the teacher's hospitality to the student, results in a world more hospitable to the teacher.
when we distance ourselves from something, it becomes an object. When it becomes an object, it no longer has life. when it is lifeless, it cannot touch or transform us, so our knowledge of the thing remains pure.
the highest form of love: love that allows for intimacy, without the animation of difference...this describes the heart of every authentic relationship that a human being might have...a way of knowing and living that has moved beyond fear of the other into respect for, even a need for, its otherness
ch 3
how can we escape the grip of either/or thinking?...to develop a habit of mind that supports a habit of connectedness in our teaching. The opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.
Profound truth-where, if we want to know what is essential, we must stop thinking the world into pieces and start thinking it together again. Profound truth, rather than empirical fact, is the stuff of which paradoxes are made...My inward and invisible sense of identity only becomes known to me only as it manifests itself in encounters with external and invisible otherness.
To take a hard experience and leap immediately to practical solutions is to evade the insight into ones identity that is always available in moments of vulnerability. Inishgt that comes only as we are willing to dwell more deeply into the dynamics that made us more vulnerable. Eventually the how to question is worth asking, but understanding my own identity is the first and crucial step to understanding how I teach.
I will not make any difference to anyone if the technique I am using is not rooted in my nature....every gift goes hand in hand with a liability...a strength is also a weakness...a dimension of my identity serves myself and others at some points, but not all the time.
To embrace the profoundly opposite truths that my sense of self is dependent on others dancing with me, and that I still have a self when no one wants to dance....this is a true paradox. my sense of self is so deeply dependent on others, what I will always suffer a bit when others refuse to relate to me...at the same time. I still have the sense of self when others fail. I need to learn that the pain I sometimes experience in teaching is as much a sign as the joy I feel when the dance is in full swing.
the space should be bounded and open.
the space should be hospitable and charged
the space should invite the voice of the individual and of the group
the space should honor the little stories of the students and the bit stories of the discipline and the tradition
the space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of a community
the space should welcome both silence and speech
suppose students are not wasting time, bu doing a more reflective form of learning. I miss all such forms of learning when I assume the silence signifies a problem, reacting to it from my own need for control, rather than their need to learn.
helping students become free requires us to restrict their freedom in certain situations....neither our students or our children share this knowledge...there is no formula to tell us if moments of conflict are times for freedom or for discipline but good teachers and good parents find their way through such minefields everyday by allowing such moments of tension to pull them open to a larger and larger love. a love that resolves these dilemmas that looks past the self-interest of ourselves and looking towards the best interest of the student or child.
when we pretend, we fall out of the common center that is both the root and fruit of teaching at it's best. when we understand that the point is to live everything, we recover all that is lost.
ch4
community is an outward sign of an inward and invisible grace. the flowing of personal identity and integrity into the world of relationships.
to teach is to create a space in which a community of truth is practiced.
the community we seek is one that can embrace, guide, and define the mission of teaching. the mission of knowing, teaching, and learning. to teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is practiced
we experience humility not because we have fought and loss, but because humility is the only lens through wich great things can be seen. and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible. We become free men and women through education because tyranny in any form can be overcome by invoking the grace of great things.
Ch 5
to see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour-william blake
in religious life-when a community attaches ultimacy to its ordained leadership or to the mass mind of its members, it will fall into idolatry until it turns to a transcendent center that can judge both partitioners and priests.
passion for the subject, propels that subject, not the teacher to the center of the learning circle. and when a great thing is in their midst, students have direct access to learning and of life.
why do we keep trying ot cover the field...each discipline has an inner logic that is so profound that every critical piece of it contains the information necessary to intersect the whole, if it is illuminated by a laser, a highly organized beam of light. that lazer is the act of teaching.
in every great novel, that when deeply understood reveals how the author understands character, establishes tension, creates dramatic movement. with that understanding, the student can read the rest of the novel more insightly.
patterning is what happens when students learn their medical facts when they learn it through a patient's story.
our resistance to opening rather than filling the space is compounded by the fact that it takes time t make the transition to changing our craft...on route to a new pedagogy there are days we will serve poorly
ch 6
clearness committee
if we want to support each others inner lives, we must remember a simple truth. the human soul does not want to be fixed. it wants simply to be seen and heard. if we want to see and hear a person's soul. we must remember the soul is like a wild animal. tough, resilient, and yet shy.
allowing the person to hear more clearly the guidance that comes form within. as we let the process unfold we are reminded of a certain truth: because we cannot get in the mind and soul of another person, we cannot know the answer to another's problem...we cannot know exactly what the problem is.
community does not emerge spontaneously from some relational reflex...if we are to have communities of discourse about teaching and learning teaching communities that are intentional about the topics to be pursued and processed...we need leaders to call us to that vision....conversation must be a free choices. but in the privatized academy, the conversation begins only as leaders invite us out of isolation into generative ways of using our freedom.
the notion of the new professional revives the anciet meaning of the word. the new professional is a person who can say, in the midst of the powerful forcefield of institutional life whereas so much might compromise my core values, I have found firm ground on which to stand. the ground on my identity and my integrity, of my own soul.
Ccu recommendation on what makes good teachers
July 1, 2022
Parker Palmer is an author of the inner life, and his exploration of that world with regards to education is well-done. The Courage to Teach is beautiful in an intellectual way. However, having enjoyed it, I find the genuine wisdom within abstract and ephemeral - difficult to wrangle.
Quotes:
- “The inward quest for communion becomes a quest for outward relationship: at home in our own souls, we become more at home with each other.”
Quotes:
- “The inward quest for communion becomes a quest for outward relationship: at home in our own souls, we become more at home with each other.”
- "Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. The methods used by these weavers vary widely: lectures, Socratic dialogues, laboratory experiments, collaborative problem solving, creative chaos. The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts meaning heart in its ancient sense, as the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self.
"As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart-and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. The courage to teach is the courage to keep one's heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning, and living, require.”
January 4, 2018
Very interesting teaching philosophy- interweaving spirituality and authentic selfhood into the education profession. Palmer urges teachings to tend to what he calls their inner landscape, convinced that good teaching can only rise from a genuine knowledge of self and a respect of your students' dignity. Instead of giving into the myth that teacher must display of power and authority, functioning as the objective arbiter of facts and information, Palmer suggests that the teacher "opens space instead of occupying it." He is a proponent of the dialogical method of education first espoused by Paulo Freire, that learning happens when all members of the community function as both teachers and learners. This is impossible if the teacher is teaching from fear, a desire to prove herself, or as a performance. Instead, a teacher needs to convey their passion for the subject and students by being courageously vulnerable about his own ideas and thoughts, therefore creating the opportunity and safety for students to do the same. "The conclusion seems clear: we cannot know the great things of the universe until we know ourselves to be great things."
December 23, 2022
I wish I could remember who recommend this book to me so I could ask them what they were thinking. This book spend the majority of its time in the weeds and really offers nothing as much substance until the afterword.
He tells the story at the end, of a surgical resident who is managing 34 patients when one of her patients under her care died tragically. The resident had said she felt “overwhelmed”. To which the author has the audacity to say,“ instead of riding that feeling into action she allowed it to shut her up and shut her down”.
This is gaslighting.
The author is aligned with the system of medical training (the ACGME). He is doing what the system has done to residents for years now: placing the burden of change and wellbeing on the individual. Eschewing the system from any responsibility of change.
Residents make hard decisions everyday of where they are and are not willing to compromise their values to get through a required system that will allow them to practice their calling.
His white male voice is exhausting. Overplayed. Out of touch.
He tells the story at the end, of a surgical resident who is managing 34 patients when one of her patients under her care died tragically. The resident had said she felt “overwhelmed”. To which the author has the audacity to say,“ instead of riding that feeling into action she allowed it to shut her up and shut her down”.
This is gaslighting.
The author is aligned with the system of medical training (the ACGME). He is doing what the system has done to residents for years now: placing the burden of change and wellbeing on the individual. Eschewing the system from any responsibility of change.
Residents make hard decisions everyday of where they are and are not willing to compromise their values to get through a required system that will allow them to practice their calling.
His white male voice is exhausting. Overplayed. Out of touch.
April 13, 2020
This text is very philosophical and not at all practical, which for better or worse makes it very unlike most teaching books. Read it if you want to mull over the question “Why was I called to teach and how do I teach in a way that honors that calling?” There are many quotable nuggets and plenty to think about. (Given current events, his reflections on the difference between social movements and fascist “pseudo movements” and failures in medical institutions stood out in the closing chapters.) I took notes and made a lists of things I should be journaling about. But, in the end, I think there are more relevant texts and talks out there for K-12 teachers in this present moment. I’ve been simultaneously rereading We Got This by Cornelius Minor and it is practically a playbook for putting Palmer’s philosophy into action in the K-12 classroom. Anything by Brené Brown, Angela Watson, or Elena Aguilar more accessibly addresses teaching with authenticity and attending to your “inner teacher landscape.”
August 9, 2018
Every time I caught a glimpse of this book on my nightstand, Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” popped into my head. I wish I was crafty enough to come up with some deep metaphor comparing flying to teaching but after spending a day teaching, my brain is jello. No matter how many years as an educator, “The Courage To Teach” provides a much needed reminder to all teachers to keep trekking; despite the many obstacles we face, our students need us.
June 18, 2020
This book was definitely interesting! I did it alongside fellow teachers in a book study.
Many of the ideas were still pretty abstract for me, though, and hard to grasp, even after reading the paragraphs a few times.
He offers good insight into teaching from your own “identity and integrity” and I enjoyed reading especially the first few chapters. I think that it may be a bit more applicable to those who teach at the college level, but still somewhat applicable to K-12 teachers.
Many of the ideas were still pretty abstract for me, though, and hard to grasp, even after reading the paragraphs a few times.
He offers good insight into teaching from your own “identity and integrity” and I enjoyed reading especially the first few chapters. I think that it may be a bit more applicable to those who teach at the college level, but still somewhat applicable to K-12 teachers.
October 6, 2020
Valuable reflection on the community and how teaching, learning and building of this community happens in a class setting. I appreciate the focus on the adult learning, though the language of pedagogy is used. Meaningful concepts backed up with author's experience in teaching and faculty development.
August 31, 2018
It was long-winded without reason to be. I loved the idea that a good teacher is someone who brings themselves as a person into their classroom and isn’t necessarily the teacher who employs the best techniques.
I had trouble getting through this book- he lost me. I wouldn’t recommend it even though I liked his message.
I had trouble getting through this book- he lost me. I wouldn’t recommend it even though I liked his message.
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