ROSS A. LAIRD

Teaching (in its various forms) is one of the most influential roles in society. After parenting, it is perhaps the most crucial, for all ages. And yet, teaching — whether to children or adults — is a profession in which few practitioners have any substantial training. Some instructors have certificates or degrees in teaching, but there’s so much to know about the subject that most good instructors pick up their best skills after training, in the field, thinking on their feet and trying to keep learners awake.

In the West, we have a kind of reverse educational system. Many of the things we do (learners sitting in chairs for long periods, then writing exams; instructors droning on to massive groups of disinterested learners) are precisely the opposite to what is known to work better (learners involved actively, encouraged to make substantive commitments to the process, evaluated by way of collaborative assessment). Most good instructors eventually learn to turn the system around, to craft an environment that is both more holistic and effective. Here are my 40 suggestions for how to accomplish this; one for each week of the year that the average instructor spends in the classroom.

1. Approach Teaching as a Devotion

The quality of an instructor’s presence has more impact on the learning environment than any other single factor. Love what you do, acknowledge the potentially profound role you play in a learner’s life. Get past the politics and the drudgery and the unpaid hours. Develop and bring into the classroom your sense of the sacred trust of learning. It does change the world.

2. Lead From Desire

The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that “the intelligence must be led by desire.” At heart, learning is an emotional endeavor. In turn, good instruction engages our feelings and sympathies and dreams. The most effective teachers and facilitators are those who openly express and evoke such feelings. Their passion — for the subject, for the interactions — is infectious. This is why most dedicated instructors credit a great teacher in their own past as a primary inspiration (thank-you, Lee Whitehead).

3. Lead From Behind

Borrowing a phrase from Gandhi, a good leader leads from behind. Diminish your own authority, create collaborative projects, allow learners to teach each other. A good instructor displays precisely the same interpersonal skills as a good leader. The only difference is that an instructor leads with the imagination.

4. Do What You Love

The content of any course you teach should reflect your own interests. Always teach courses that have been customized to your own style and approach. Part of this customization involves bringing to the learning environment activities and practices that, on the surface, have nothing to do with the subject but which interest you greatly. If you like skateboarding or badminton or wood-turning, find a way to bring these into your teaching. They will imprint the learning environment with your own energy and passion.

5. Fight the Inertia of Seats

Learners sitting in chairs, with an instructor talking at the front, is the worst way to impart anything useful. Yet everyone does it (me included, sometimes). But if you’ve ever learned to play the piano, or windsurf, or program in HTML, or become accomplished at any task requiring a complex set of skills, you will know that the most effective learning derives from casting about, from pacing, from a bodily immersion in the activity. In a classroom, slouching in chairs and talking for any length of time over about 30 minutes is a recipe for somnolence. Try something new: get learners out of the classroom, into the street or the coffee shop or the park. Walk, play, experiment, collaborate. Cook a meal together. Watch a movie. Make the subject what it should be: immensely interesting.

6. Build Containment

Your capacity to hold the energy of learning, to respect and nurture fragile interpersonal connections in the classroom, is a function of your containment capacity; how grounded you can be, with clear boundaries, with sensitivity and gentleness. A good instructor is comfortable with emotions, is adept at encouraging and managing debates, is consistently neutral and clear in dealing with everyone. A good instructor makes the environment feel safe, and this is one of the most difficult teaching skills to master.

7. Make Progress Contingent Upon Opposition

William Blake, the 19th century poet who invented the modern mind, wrote that “without contraries is no progression.” In the learning environment, progress means debate, disagreement, dialog, negotiation, and spirited engagement with the process. Encourage these in your classroom. If you make it safe to do so — if you protect, in other words, the sanctity of diverse views — learners will discover how to think; and, more importantly, how to believe.

8. Talk Less, Facilitate More

At any given time in the typical classroom, only about a fifth of the learners are actually listening to the instructor (remember the film Farris Bueller’s Day Off?). Besides, those who are listening will forget most of what they’ve heard within a few days or weeks. But if you engage them in an unusual process that requires attention and dedication (i.e. by having learners teach each other), they will remember almost everything, and for a long time. If you have specific content that you must impart, break it down into small blocks each of which takes no more than half an hour. Then do something else. If the content cannot be broken down, make it participatory and collaborative.

9. Focus on Process More Than Content

If the educational process feels safe to learners, if it’s challenging and supportive in equal measure, the content is easy. Facts and systems unfold and are readily digested by a cohesive and committed group of learners. Delivering good content is a matter of building it into the process, of integrating it with the activities and aims of the group.

10. Let Learners Teach Each Other (and You)

Learners who have the opportunity to teach each other consistently demonstrate higher levels of skill and knowledge in a given subject. In the classroom, about half the time can be devoted to this collaborative teaching. It’s more fun, more useful, and more lasting. Besides, the instructor gets to learn some new things also.

11. Encourage Learner Responsibility

The learning environment is developed by two main forces: the learners, and the instructor. Each is responsible for half the energy. Typically, instructors take too much. They control too tightly, and they’re anxious about asking learners to do too much. But learners also make the experience for themselves, and if they do not take responsibility — for their own participation, for greater involvement in discussions, for ownership of the space — then everything falls flat. As an instructor, you agree to take half; ask your learners to do the same.

12. Prefer Instincts Over Facts

In all fields, the best scholars or practitioners are those with the most highly developed instincts for their subject — not those who know the most factual details. Paradoxically, the evaluation system in most educational institutions tests solely for facts while completely ignoring instincts. As an instructor, pay attention to this imbalance and attempt to remedy it.

13. Expect Complaints

Always, there will be a few learners who are unhappy with your style of teaching. That’s fine; the relationship between you should be strong enough to contain your differences. But sometimes it’s not. In those cases, and especially if you are teaching in an unconventional (i.e. engaging) style, it can be easy to fall prey to the criticism that you are not like everyone else (especially if the complaining learner approaches the administration, which happens to me about once a year). Of course, you shouldn’t be like everyone else. You should be thoroughly unique. A few weeks ago, I heard a third-hand report of someone describing my teaching style as “crazy.” I couldn’t have been more proud.

14. Give Impossible Assignments

The greatest discoveries begin with seeming impossibilities, paradoxes, conundra. Every subject has its own collection of them (how did the Egyptians build the pyramids, where did life on Earth come from, how can electrons be in multiple places at the same time). Find them in your subject, use them as assignments, and watch learners unfold mystery with wonder.

15. Assign Useful Homework

The best learning happens when there is no fixed boundary between the classroom and the world at large. Listlessly reading a textbook with a hi-liter in hand is not a very impassioned activity, and its results are typically impoverished. Another approach is to make homework applicable to the lives of learners, to their daily experience, to the things that matter to them. Make every homework assignment a field trip, or a research junket, or a personalized work of scholarly writing. As an instructor, an essential part of your job is to discover how to hook the spirit of the learner to the subject. This won’t happen unless you bring the subject out of the classroom and into the learner’s own life.

16. Don’t use PowerPoint

Or, if you do, know how to design and deliver an engaging and lively presentation. Instructional aids of the project-onto-a-screen type are typically evasions from actual involvement with learners. They are, to put it directly, symptoms of laziness and the abrogation of emotional commitment.

17. Build 3D Learning Models

Instead of ubiquitous and mind-numbing onscreen presentations, build dynamic learning models in the classroom. This is not difficult to do: I carry skeins of wool and foam balls in the trunk of my car and use them to make massive diagrams on the floor, to symbolize interactions and dynamics between people, to make whatever images I require in the moment. I have also used found objects, forests, fire (though not in the forest), living sculptures of people, fruit of various kinds, stones, wood, eggs, Star Wars action figures, postcards, live cats, images of Curious George, and so on. You get the idea: more interesting (or more bizarre) equals more effective.

18. Learn and Teach Health Practices

Whether it’s Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Yoga, Aikido, Pilates, or some integrated hybrid, health practices greatly facilitate learning. This is one of the most significant findings of educational research. Learners who move, who practice proper breathing, who take breaks to stretch and unwind — they consistently do better. As an instructor, one of the ways you can enhance the learning environment is by bringing health practices into the classroom. Such practices should be adaptable to any learner, relatively easy to do, and above all should be fun.

19. Connect Everything

Whether inside or outside the classroom, every aspect of every field is connected to every other. Find these connections and you find the means of making learning real.

20. Nothing is Off Topic

Because everything is connected.

21. Use Humor, but Never Try to be Funny

Humor is one of the most powerful teaching tools (as is fear; but fear teaches only the dynamics of fear, whereas humor can teach anything). And yet, humor is vastly under-utilized in the educational environment. But it’s a skill that can be learned. A complex skill, yes, possibly the most complex of the human social skills; nonetheless, it can be developed. The basic key to humor is playfulness, nothing more. Don’t try too hard; just have fun.

22. Don’t Try to Make Everyone Happy

In any given learning activity, the ideal spectrum of experience is one in which most learners are enjoying themselves but at least two are at opposite ends of a spectrum: one is ecstatic (because the learning activity feeds them in some profound way) and one is dejected (because tempermentally they are unsuited to the current activity). An ideal learning experience is one in which every group member generally occupies the center but visits both extremes at least once. A classroom without a shadow is false and dangerous.

23. Nurture the Shadow Carrier

In every classroom (and in every family, group, or organization), there is someone who is generally disliked: they are cranky, or aggressive, or troublesome. People don’t like dealing with such people, who in fact exert a great deal of unspoken psychological influence and control many situations without realizing it. They tend to be isolated, sometimes angry, typically misunderstood, certainly disrespected. Such people are shadow carriers: they hold, by way of projection, the shadow material of a group. They are essential features of any human community, and they are the most important people to befriend. They are straight talkers, they know what’s going on behind the scenes, and they are strong. Dealing with them teaches you about yourself, shows you how to take ownership of your own shadow, and instructs you in humanity. Developing relationships with shadow carriers can be a profound spiritual path, and is generally much more effective then meditation.

24. Fight the Corrosion of Character

Modern economic realities, in education and elsewhere, have a tendency to erode traditional values such as loyalty, commitment, innovation, and creativity. Large educational organizations have great difficulty resisting this corrosion of character (a phrase from Richard Sennett), but individual instructors can make different choices: at the classroom level, where a high degree of daily autonomy exists. Insulate your teaching and your classroom process from those who would homogenize it, block its natural movement, apply arbitrary policies that curtail and diminish the learning experience.

25. Teach in at least Four Different Styles

Most instructors know that different learning styles are a reality, but few actually adapt their teaching to accommodate those styles. Personally, I like to use four different styles, each of which matches one of the four states of the human nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, orient). I introduce debates and spirited dialog for those who need to fight; I employ the imagination for those whose tendency is for flight; I cover material slowly, and with precision, for those who freeze; and I connect everything together so as to provide a framework for those who orient.

26. Know Your Own Style

Especially in stressful or conflictual situations, everyone reverts to one of the four coping styles of the nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, orient). It’s what we learned in childhood, what has helped us to get out of similar situations in the past. But usually, we are so good at one approach that we neglect the others: fighters become rigid when they should back off, those with flight responses become avoidant under stress, freezers fail to act when they are startled, and those with orienting fail to follow through. In any given stressful situation, only one of the four responses is called for; as such, what we do by default is only correct one quarter of the time. Know what you do, what your default is, and learn to balance your approaches so that you can respond appropriately to any situation. In other words, learn to be able to choose and follow through on any of the responses. This is the essence of neutrality.

27. Assist Learners with Overall Health

Many learners are sleep-deprived, sit too long in chairs, and have too much going on in their lives. This is a social as well as an educational problem. As my contribution to its resolution, I frequently try to educate learners about achieving better sleep (which makes them better learners), stopping smoking (my ongoing worldwide campaign), or developing various other health improvement strategies. Everything, after all, is connected. Sometimes I give homework that involves dreams.

28. Learn the Art of Storytelling

Because, when the chatter and posturing of modern professionalism is stripped away, storytelling is what we do.

29. Avoid Terminal Burnout

Expect some type of burnout experience every three to five years. This is simply part of the territory of being deeply committed to what you do. Pay attention to the warning signs — compassion fatigue, cynicism, emotional shutdown, erosion of boundaries, health problems, depression — and try to catch them early, when there is still time to take a break. Know when you need a rest. If you miss the signs, you will damage yourself and others (obviously). Consider burnout as an occupational stage, not as a disability. Simply catch it early (transforming it from a potentially crippling experience into a relaxing break).

30. Debrief

In any context of emotional intensity or dedicated engagement to a shared task, daily debriefing is a minimum requirement. You need to be able to go into the office of a colleague, shut the door, and talk for a few minutes about whatever’s on your mind. You also need to be able to call dependable mentors and peers (paid or otherwise) who will give you supportive and ethical feedback and advice. Without such support, you simply cannot preserve your empathy or your dedication.

31. Learn Communication and Conflict Resolution Skills

Most instructors have no formal interpersonal skills training. This is bizarre, given that teaching (children or adults) is one of the most interpersonal professions anyone can undertake. At a minimum, good instructors should have basic counseling and conflict resolution skills. They must be able to respond empathically, to establish and preserve safe containment for conflicts, to be decent in situations where otherwise they might hide in their authority. Above all, a good instructor is neutral in emotional situations, and this is simply a skill that most people do not possess. It must be learned.

32. Be a Beginner

Perhaps the best instructors are those who are open to their own new learning. Too often, we use the same approaches and materials (handouts, resources, assignments) far too long. We stagnate. Resolve to change one important aspect of your teaching every semester; over time, your entire curriculum will be freshened by new insights and strategies. Moreover, learners appreciate instructor experimentation; it gives them permission to try new things themselves. In the application of those new things, instructors and learners switch places.

33. Use your Quirks

In the educational world, eccentricity is a major virtue. Use it, be proud of it, share it.

34. Practice the Subtle Check-in

In any authentic learning environment, emotional situations arise that require immediate and private intervention (because learning, after all, is an emotional process). Overwhelm, depression, anxiety, and fatigue are perhaps the most common scenarios (though in conflictual situations, anger is most common). To respond to such circumstances, find a reasonably private space (an adjoining empty classroom, for example) in which you and the learner can meet before or after class, or during a break. Deal with emotional situations immediately; they will not go away, and usually will not resolve without your intervention. Make dedicated time to talk (about 10 minutes). Remind yourself to be open and neutral. Focus on the quality of your voice and presence. Trust the process. Let the learner lead the conversation. Emphasize neutrality and good will. Use diplomatic language: “How are things going?”, “I want to check in with you to see how you’re doing...”, “I notice that...”, “It sounds like you’re feeling...”, “I’m curious about...” Be aware of your tendency in this kind of situation (fight, flight, freeze) and try not to do it. Do not get angry, or avoid the situation. Stay neutral. Focus on containment, safety, and trust. Voluntarily suspend your judgments, beliefs, and biases. Stay loose.

35. Openly Distribute Your Materials

In the contemporary climate of increasing restriction on copyright, learners face growing hurdles in accessing information that is essential to their learning (most journal articles, for example, cannot be freely copied and distributed by instructors). By creating and distributing customized course materials using an open source or share alike philosophy, instructors honor their ethical obligation to place learning above politics. Post everything on a public website. Encourage the copying and sharing of your work (simply request that you be properly credited). Free sharing of ideas is the means by which the Western intellectual tradition evolved; we serve that tradition best by honoring its basic principles.

36. Make Participation Worth More

Dedicated participation is required for authentic learning; it is perhaps more important than any other aspect of the process. As such, the role of participation should be acknowledged. In for-credit courses that I teach, I try to make participation (in class, and by way of learner-led presentations) worth at least half of total evaluation. Also, giving more prominent weight to participation has the curious effect of motivating some learners.

37. Encourage Interdisciplinarity

The divisions between fields are entirely arbitrary and have nothing to do with learning. The most dedicated students discover this, and find ways to support their learning by forging diverse connections to other fields. In a world of increasing specialization, the generalist is becoming rare; and yet, generalized intelligence is the core of deep learning.

38. Explore the Mythologies of Your Subject

Every field is founded upon precepts that are a hybrid between solid research and myth-making. Typically, the myths remain unexamined and become accepted norms (which then work for and against the field). To discover the underlying philosophy and mythology (and there’s not much difference between the two) of a given field is to transform it from an abstraction into a living system. Find the shadow of your field, its unspoken heresies and mistakes and limitations. Speak the unspoken.

39. Speak the Unspoken

As a storyteller, the instructor is a truth-speaker — but truthfulness must be delivered with safety, clarity, sensitivity. In any learning environment, and especially when circumstances are awkward or conflicted, the instructor’s job is to articulate what no one has yet voiced. In doing so, you demonstrate that the community is strong enough to contain its own energy.

40. Practice Good Design

Unique course materials that reflect the style and temperament of the instructor are a powerful means of enhancing the learning environment. But take care in such endeavors: poorly-designed materials do more harm than good. At the very least, they erode student enthusiasm and imply unprofessional instruction. Learn to design your documents with a basic level of proficiency (white space, typography, usability). As an instructor, every small thing you do is a holographic representation of your entire presentation. Make everything count.