By Andrew Faulstich
It's back to school season. At this time of the year, educators and leaders are thinking about many things: materials to buy, curriculum to plan, classrooms to prepare. But what about our inner preparation as educators? I have found over the years, in my own work and in working with teachers around the world, that it's not what we've planned, but how we've prepared ourselves that will determine our success in the classroom.
To illustrate this idea, I want to tell you a story, what I call “a tale of two guides.”
The first is the non-enlightened guide. The non-enlightened guide believes they can leave their baggage at the door, that the things happening outside of the classroom don't impact them on a day-to-day level. However, that non-enlightened guide will inevitably have an experience with a student or colleague which will trigger them, resulting in a reaction that they wouldn’t otherwise have, because it reminded them of something going on in their lives outside of school. This non-enlightened guide has also not reflected on their own experiences and education. They say things like, "This is how I learned, and I turned out fine," and reproduce the experiences they had with their own students.
The enlightened guide, on the other hand, knows that the experiences they have out in the world come with them into the classroom. They acknowledge how they're feeling with students and make space for honesty and vulnerability. They have reflected on their own educational experiences and can say that their experience in education may not have been ideal, and they are going to do something different for the young people in their care, giving the gift of a more ideal education. The enlightened guide has done their inner work of self-examination, allowing them to separate their own lived experiences from the realities of their students and act appropriately to support their development. Ultimately, the enlightened guide knows that inner development is a journey that will never be finished, but that being on the path of reflection and inner growth is the only sustainable path to being in the field of education.
So, what is this promise of inner development? There are three pieces that I believe are important to highlight: equity, longevity and resilience, and systems transformation.
The Promise of Inner Development
Let's start with equity.
When we examine our own experiences and the way we walk through the world, we are better able to observe and understand the diverse needs of our students and serve them appropriately. We need to recognize that we live in a fundamentally racist society in the US, and our inner preparation allows us to name that reality, our role in it, and shift our role and society at large. As you might have guessed, our work of inner preparation is intimately tied to our work as anti-bias, anti-racist educators. Unlike the non-enlightened guide, who places their own experiences on everyone else or thinks that human development looks the same everywhere, we must be able to see each child and adolescent for who they truly are in their wholeness and complexity.
One of my favorite quotes from Maria Montessori is, "If he who looks through a microscope or telescope has not the habit of observing, he will see nothing" (Montessori 2013, 102). If we do not do our inner work, we don't see the child or adolescent in front of us, and we respond inappropriately to their needs. This can have major ramifications and can result in biased systems that do not serve all our students.
This inner work is not about blame but recognizing that we need to take accountability for the fact that our biases and life experiences cloud what we see and how we react to the young people in front of us.
The second promise is longevity. We are in a time of massive burnout and teacher attrition. We cannot go on as before and must recommit ourselves to investing in our inner preparation because this allows us to continually embrace uncertainty, which is, in my mind, the most important aspect of being an educator.
Finally, the last promise is systems transformation. Even in our progressive schools, there are systems and structures that do not support our inner development, do not support an equity approach to working with young people, and do not foster longevity for educators. By engaging in this reflective work, we can identify those systems and advocate for change.
What is Our Work?
It’s important to remember what we're actually doing when we're teaching and working with young people. We have to consider the garden metaphor: we plant seeds but cannot force the plants to grow. Paolo Freire said it best when he wrote, "The teacher is, of course, an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is make it possible for the students to become themselves" (Freire & Horton 1990, 181). In order to make it possible for our students to become themselves, we must be meaningfully in touch with who we are.
Maria Montessori shared a similar sentiment when she wrote, "The vision of the teacher should be at once precise like that of the scientist and spiritual like that of the saint… Positive and scientific because they have an exact test to perform, and it is necessary that they should put themselves into immediate relation with the truth by means of rigorous observation. Spiritual, because it is to humanity that our powers of observation are to be applied, and because the characteristics of the creature who is to be the particular subject of observation are spiritual" (Montessori 2013, 2). We must recognize by now that we are not here to transmit content. We are here to do something much more difficult and important: support the holistic development of each student in our care.
In order to serve the development of our students, we must learn how to truly serve them. Parker Palmer wrote, "Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some imagery of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks-- we will also find our path of authentic service in the world" (Palmer 1998, 31). When we find our true selves, the true capacity to serve emerges.
Yet, being able to become our true selves requires vulnerability. I will say it now because it's so critical: we must be able to lean out of the “sage-on-the-stage, never vulnerable” cultural image of a teacher. bell hooks discussed this so clearly when she wrote, "When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not simply seek to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive" (hooks 1994, 21)
So what does it mean for adults who are taking on this work with young people?
My mentor, Pat Ludick, said it beautifully when she wrote, "Perhaps we come to see that serving our young people takes a generosity beyond comprehension, a magnanimity of spirit. We are cast into the realm of understanding life, often our own lives, of clarifying citizenship roles, often our own, of sorting spiritual and social dilemmas, of dealing with the grand mysteries of life on this planet, and then embracing the wonder of human development all on a daily basis" (Ludick 2000, 99).
As you prepare for the upcoming school year, don’t just consider the tools at your disposal; consider your inner preparation. What do you need to unlearn that will empower you to be the best teacher you can be? What systems and strategies will help you stay grounded and reflective, even when things get hard? Our work is critically important- I’m rooting for you!
If you're curious about furthering your own inner transformation as an educator, explore more paradigm-breaking conversations at Breaking the Paradigm (breakingtheparadigm.org) on Substack. Join educators from around the world who are questioning unspoken assumptions and discovering how their own inner development becomes the key to creating learning environments that foster flourishing for all children.
Works Cited:
Freire, P., & Horton, M. (1990). We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change (B. Bell, J. Gaventa, & J. Peters, Eds.). Temple University Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Ludick, P. (2000). “The Positive Personality of the Montessori Adolescent.” The NAMTA Journal, 25(2), 99–111.
Montessori, M. (2013). The Advanced Montessori Method: Spontaneous Activity in Education (Vol. 9, The Montessori Series; F. Simmonds, Trans.). Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company. (Original work published 1917).
Palmer, P. J. (1998). The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. Jossey-Bass.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Andrew Faulstich
After working in schools around the world, Andrew is convinced that the education status quo must be disrupted. He is the Director of Education at the Oneness-Family Montessori High School and the Co-Founder of Developing Education, which operates three sub-divisions: Breaking the Paradigm, First Intention, and The Enlightened Educator Project. Andrew is also an Affiliate Instructor of Montessori Teacher Education at the graduate level at Loyola University. He holds a Masters in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, a Bachelors in Anthropology from the University of Rochester, and an AMI Adolescent Diploma.
