On the path to subject mastery every learner comes up against a wall.
That wall, a learning block, is a cold and hard season when feelings of confusion, helplessness, fear and discouragement take over. Every step forward feels Sisyphean. Past failures haunt the mind while present circumstances ravage the passion for knowledge. What was once an exciting adventure filled with exploration and discovery becomes boring.
Great teacher’s are not only aware of this phase. They expect it.
At this critical moment educators must assume new roles for the dilemmas they and their students find themselves in. By switching to one of three alter egos, teachers can resuscitate a learner’s confidence.
These three fronts: The Champion, The Healer; The Challenger are powerful tools for navigating these crises.
I address each in turn.
The Champion: In her popular Ted Talk professional educator and counselor Rita Pearson discusses the role of “the teacher as a champion.”
She identifies human connection as key to unlocking student potential. Quoting George Washington Carver: “All learning is understanding relationships,” she asks parents and educators to connect with kids when learning inevitably slows down.
All of us have been affected by the best, and worst attitudes of teachers and adults:
Author and organizational psychologist, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, in Personality Isn’t Permanent relates the learning tragedy of Rosalie. Rosalie, a pleasant woman in her eighties, has never made her dream of writing children’s books come true. According to her, “she's never been good at drawing.”
When he coaxed her for an explanation, Rosalie detailed an experience that ran more than 50 years back. In the late 1960s, Rosalie decided to take evening art classes. One night the teacher gave the class a drawing exercise. As he went around the room checking student’s work he stopped at Rosalie, “grabbed her chalk and ‘corrected’ her drawing.”
Here’s how she relates the rest of the story:
“During the sixty or so seconds that the teacher was drawing over her work, Rosalie felt extremely embarrassed. None of the other students had been corrected in this manner. All eyes were on her. This was all too painful for her to handle. In the emotional swirl of the moment, a thought entered her mind: I must not be very good at this. Rosalie never attempted drawing again.”
A Champion believes in her students and is committed to connecting with them on a personal level. No kid should be left alone to battle discouragement, poverty, low attendance and peer pressure. These moments are opportunities to explore human nature, and when they’re exploited with tact and sensitivity they can alter learning trajectory.
Photo by mariel reiser on Unsplash
The Healer: When the greed of an usurper to the throne threatens to destroy an Empire, you call a teacher.
In the movie King Arthur: Legend of the Sword an orphan boy whose right to the throne was stolen must assert his right. Arthur pulls out Excalibur from a stone: a magical sword that’s the symbol of the rightful heir to Britain.
To take back the Empire he must learn how to wield Excalibur so that he can defeat his uncle. But Arthur is stuck in the scene of his father’s death. Whenever he holds the sword, the bloody scene flashes before him making him freeze. Arthur badly needs a teacher.
Actor Astrid Bergès-Frisbey plays The Mage: a magician-healer-teacher who must help Arthur understand his father’s death.
Everyone carries “a backlog of pain that has never been heard.” In the documentary The Wisdom of Trauma, Dr. Gabor Mate recognizes “the need for narratives to help us share, witness and hold space for each other’s deepest wounds.”
The Healer helps wayward students find their way to healing. She understands that troubling behavior and learning resistance can be signs of a wounded soul.
The Mage becomes Arthur’s emotional guide. She helps him revisit the last memory he has of his father. A memory he has been avoiding. As they work around the past, Arthur is able to re-frame the narrative he had of his father’s death. His father wasn’t murdered. He killed himself with Excalibur and then he turned into stone. The stone from which Arthur pulled out the sword.
Teachers can help stuck students create new meanings of the past. Rosalie’s lack of access to what Alice Miller called “an empathetic witness” killed her dreams. An empathetic witness is someone who can help you work through past pain and confusion.
While pain can’t “always be conquered, fixed, or resolved…it can be heard, held and loved.”
The Challenger: The previous strategies help learners and educators better understand the context of learning crises, but they stop short of producing results.
Therefore educators must bet on a mode that’s more active and cooperative; directed towards achieving learning milestones.
Hiko Seijūrō, in the Japanese Manga series Samurai X, is a potter and swordsmanship instructor. He adopts and trains a boy he rescued from a group of bandits in the hope that the boy, Kenshin, will succeed him. Kenshin grows up and after a disagreement splits ways with his master, abandoning completion of his course work. He runs off to fight in a war as a hired swordsman, against his master’s wish.
Years later master and apprentice cross paths again. Kenshin wants to finish his lessons. To complete his training, he will have to learn the ultimate fighting technique that’s unique to Hiko Seijūrō. There’s a catch, Kenshin must spend a whole night reflecting on what is holding him back. But he’s unable to figure it out. In a moment of insight, the master reveals to the apprentice that his past as an assassin is the source of his brokenness, loneliness, and instability. Kenshin must kill his master to prevent his assassin-self from re-emerging and for his own good the master says.
While today’s student isn’t training to be a hired hit man, failure and pain from the past can pollute present advancement towards growth.
When teachers challenge unhealthy beliefs, and biased assumptions in their students with courage and candid discussions meant to inspire the best, learners can grow beyond a limiting past towards promising futures.
Like Hiko Seijūrō, The Challenger teases complacent habits that create stagnation. She provides a mirror for the student that enables him to assess and cure his weaknesses while also making peace with the past, and accepting himself.
The Challenger wants and works for the the student’s good.
This system of alter egos works well for teaching as well as any situation that calls for a coaching mindset . Rather than viewing them as distinct phases or sequential steps, master teachers reflexively switch between these modes, adapting to the unique demands of each moment.
Great descriptions of three strong archetypes of teaching. I especially appreciated the story example for each!