3 Essentials for Authentic Teaching and Learning

Know Your Students. Know Your Stuff. Know Yourself.

If we have the courage, when we truly immerse ourselves in the process of teaching and learning, it becomes transformative – and is deeply personal.

As Parker Palmer (2017) writes in The Courage to Teach, “teaching holds a mirror to the soul” (p. 3).

And that mirror is for both students and teachers.

In this shared journey in our classrooms, whether online or on campus, we continuously encounter new ideas, new concepts, and new information, that lead to deep thinking, new connections, and meaning making. We transform not just our minds, but our souls as well.

Know Your Stuff

As faculty, we often carry the weight of believing we must enter our classrooms as the expert. And while we must, of course, know our stuff, the best learning experiences – especially in higher education -- provide an opportunity for students to engage in inquiry that expands or deepens our own knowledge.

While we may want to be the expert, the problem, of course, is that “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” (Palmer, 2017, p. 2).

Even as we strive to deepen our disciplinary expertise, we must also continually remind ourselves that we are called to be a “guide on the side” not a “sage on the stage” (King, 1993). We are learning right beside our students. So, while we need to “know our stuff,” we also need to enter our teaching experiences with a learning posture as well.

Know Your Students

We must also recognize that knowing our discipline is not enough; we must also know our students. After all, we are teaching students – not subjects. We strive to know who our students are, to adapt our teaching practices to the learners we have in our class, in accordance with Knowles’ (1970) adult learning theory. We ask questions. We encourage students to share their experiences and perspectives and identities, and to bring these fully into our classrooms and into their learning.

But despite our efforts, our attempts to know our students also fall short, because as Palmer (2017) argues, “the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex” (p. 3).

Know Your Self

Therefore, alongside our pursuit of knowledge and our commitment to knowing our students, it is essential that we, as educators, engage in the reflective process of knowing ourselves more deeply. 

Palmer (2017) is one of the courageous educators who reminds us that good teaching also requires that we know ourselves – that this self-knowledge is, in fact, the cornerstone for knowing both our subject and our students.

“Knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on self-knowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life – and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject – not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning. I will know it only abstractly, from a distance” (Parker, 2017, p. 3).

All 3 are Essential to Authentic, Transformative Teaching and Learning.

Today, remember that it’s not just enough to knowing our stuff – we also need to know our students and know ourselves. All three are essential to authentic, transformative teaching.

As Palmer (2017) writes, “Reduce teaching to intellect and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual and it loses its anchor to the world” (p. 5). 

Know your stuff. Know your students. Know yourself.