Whenever I think about teaching, I always eventually end up hearing Carl Rogers’ wonderfully sensible voice. Maybe I am going bonkers, because of course I have never actually heard his voice. Another more recent realisation about teaching, is that normal people are not teachers so perhaps being bonkers is part of the package.
The latest Rogerian moment of insight is related to thinking about working with students with learning difficulties. I don’t know how they think or how they got to the place of learning difficulties, or in fact anything important about them at all. They don’t know how I think, or why learning is easy for me or how I can help them or why I might be able to help them or anything important about me at all. If we were a Venn diagram our minds would be circles floating in random isolation.
What we need to do is create an intersection. A common space where we can work on the learning difficulty together. I am not psychic and neither are my students, so we have to put the relevant bits of our experience and skills and understanding into the common space where we can work on them together. I need my students to teach me how to teach them. That concept of a common space is what brings Rogers back to me and improves both my teaching practice and my mood. I am most effective as a teacher when I am part of a learning community and my students feel that they are members of that same learning community.
I have been a much nicer and better teacher this week. Carl Rogers would have been pleased.
