Some background

 I was thinking, this morning, about what got me started really thinking about teaching.  I began teaching the summer after my first semester of graduate school.  I'm not sure why I was asked but a more senior graduate student was supposed to teach, I think, critical thinking or, perhaps, introduction to philosophy and was unable to.  I was asked and I, of course, agreed.   And, I really enjoyed it.  There were very few students in the class (maybe 5?) and so perhaps the reason that other grad student backed out was that the pay would be less.  Regardless, I found that I both enjoyed teaching the class and felt like I was doing a good job.

I then spent my remaining years in graduate school teaching in the summer, for the university's night school, then 'graduating' to teach during the day and also teaching at another university.  

Two moments stand out as the first time I really began to think about teaching and both were in the summer prior to starting my tenure track position.  The first was simply about grading and how to make it easier to be consistent in how I graded papers.  I'd been grading, obviously, in my classes and as a teaching assistant but I had no thought through approach to what made one paper deserving of one grade and another deserving of another.  It was more that I just intuited the essence of the paper and gave it that grade.  Obviously, not an ideal approach to grading.  So, I sat with a friend in her backyard and offered my thoughts on what a paper had to do to merit each grade A-F, she provided feedback and together we ended up with a document that I used from the outset in my new job. 

Importantly, I was sitting with my friend in her backyard with my brand new puppy. I'd wanted a dog ever since I knew people had dogs but my parents waited until the summer before I went to college to get one (yes, still a source of bitterness); so this dog (a German Shepherd puppy) was the first dog I'd ever had.  And, crucial to my thinking about teaching, I got the book The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete.  My primary take-away from this book was to look at the world from the vantage point of the puppy.  While I may have thought I was teaching her one thing, I was actually, inadvertently, teaching her something else.  For example, if your dog constantly runs away from you and when your dog returns you yell at it for having run away from you, your dog simply experiences getting yelled at for returning and so, well, you've just taught your dog to avoid returning to you.  

I took this nugget about learning -- that everyone is always learning but not necessarily what you want them to -- very seriously and began to think about what was it I was actually encouraging students to do even as I was telling them I wanted them to do something else.  And so I was off and running thinking about my teaching.

The third crucial moment in my evolution as a thinker was going to a ANAC conference at Hampton University with a handful of administrators  all of whom were incredibly thoughtful teachers.  It was at this conference when I heard for the first time about intellectual development of students and, with that, began to think about what students bring to the classroom in terms of their own growth and how that shapes what makes or doesn't make sense to them.

These three things stand out to me as the most important and it's clear to met that what I learned from the Monks of New Skete made it possible for me to understand the importance of what I heard at the conference.  

And then a final important event was attending the first of a handful of programs at Harvard's Graduate School of Education that were all focused on the integration of neuroscience and education -- part of their Minds, Brains and Education programming.  It was here that I began to get immersed in the research about learning both in terms of what's happening in our brains, the importance of educational psychology and attending to what student experience is prior to coming to my classroom.  In particular, two things stand out in my mind at this moment: (a) every student is recovering from K-12 education and (b) learning is difficult (and includes lots and lots of unlearning).

But, I think, really the key idea in all of this is what the Monks of New Skete had to say about the importance of seeing the word from the perspective of the other, that is, empathy.