Center for Teaching Excellence

Northern Virginia Region and the Loudoun Campus

Spring Colloquy
Co-Sponsored by Tea and Pedagogy and CTE, Loudoun Cam pus

The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and

Integrity in Teaching
A Conversation with Dr. Parker J. Palmer

Friday, April 21, 2006

Reynolds Building, Room 144
1:00pm-4:00pm
Northern Virginia Community College, Loudoun Campus
1000 Harry Flood Byrd Highway
Sterling, Virginia 20164

Dr. Rosalyn M. King, CTE Chair and Discussion Facilitator

Parker Palmers Philosophy on Teaching and Learning:

An Autobiographical Portrait
The Courage to Teach
The Inner Life of a Teacher
The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity of Teaching
Importance of Reflection
Teaching as a Craft
Importance of Community
Finding Connectedness and Wholeness
Leading from Within

The Courage to Teach

The word courage comes from a root that means heart.

The question becomes: How can we develop and sustain, in ourselves

and each other, the heart for good teaching?

Good teaching requires couragethe courage to explore ones ignorance

as well as insight, to yield some control in order to empower the group,
to evoke other peoples lives as well as reveal ones own.

Many of us lose heart in teaching. How shall we recover the courage

that good teaching requires?

This means overcoming fears that block good teaching and learning.

When our fears as teachers mingle and multiply with the fears inside our
students, teaching and learning become mechanical, manipulative,
lifeless.

The term professor means a person able to make a profession of faith

in the midst of a dangerous world. It comes from a soul-deep sense of
being at home in the world despite its dangers. This is the gift that good
teachers pass on to their students.

P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Only when we take heart as professors can we give heart to

our studentsand that, finally is what good teaching is all
about. Parker Palmer

The courage to teach is about reconnecting to spirit.

A journey toward discovering the true spirit of teaching.

Palmer guides us through the inner work of teaching to help us create

communities of learning.
To educate is to guide students on an inner journey
toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the
world. How can schools perform their mission
without encouraging the guides to scout out that inner
terrain? Parker Palmer (6)

The Inner Life of a Teacher

Seldom, if ever do we ask the who questionwho is the self
that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood formor
deformthe way I relate to my students, my subject, my
colleagues, my world.? How can educational institutions sustain
and deepen the selfhood from which good teaching comes?
Parker Palmer (4)

We must reclaim our relationship with the teacher within.

A teacher who invites me to honor my true self-not my ego or

expectations or image or role, but the self I am.
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

The teacher within stands guard at the gate of selfhood, warding off
whatever insults our integrity and welcoming whatever affirms it.

The voice of the inward teacher reminds me of my potentials and limits

as I negotiate the force field of my life.

What we teach will nevertake unless it connects with the inward, living
core of our students lives, with our students inward teachers.

We can only speak to the teacher within our students when we are
speaking with the teacher within ourselves.
We can, and do, make education an exclusively outward enterprise,
forcing students to memorize and repeat facts without ever appealing
to their inner truth - and we get predictable results: many students
never want to read a challenging book or think a creative thought once
they get our of school. The kind of teaching that transforms people
does not happen if the students inward teacher is ignored.
How does one attend to the voice of the teacher within? I have no
particular methods to suggest, other than the familiar ones: solitude
and silence, meditative reading and walking in the woods, keeping a
journal, finding a friend who will simply listen. I merely propose that
we need to learn as many ways as we can of talking to ourselves.
Parker Palmer (31-32)

Listening to the inner teacher also offers an answer to a basic question:

how can I develop the authority to teach, the capacity to stand my
ground in the midst of the complex forces of both the classroom and my
own life?
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

I am painfully aware of the times in my own teaching when I

lose touch with my inner teacher, and therefore with my own
authority. In those times I try to gain power by barricading
myself behind the podium and my status while wielding the
threat of grades. But when my teaching is authorized by the
teacher within me, I need neither weapons nor armor to teach.
Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity,
remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation. Then
teaching can come from the depths of my own truth--and the
truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in
kind. Parker Palmer (33)

The more familiar we are with our inner self, the more sure-footed our
teachingandliving becomes.

If we want to develop the identity and integrity that good teaching

requires, we must do something that is alien to the academic culturewe
must talk to each other about our inner lives which is risky business in a
profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the
distant, and the abstract.

How can schools educate students if they fail to support the teachers
inner life? To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward
more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world. How can schools
perform their mission without encouraging the guides to scout out that
inner terrain?

P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Our task is to create enough safe spaces and trusting

relationships within the academic workplacehedged about by
appropriate structural protectionsthat more of us will be able
to tell the truth about our own struggles and joys as teachers in
ways that befriend the soul and give it room to grow.
Parker Palmer

The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching

We teach who we are.

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes

from the identity and integrity of the teacher.

All good teachers share a strong sense of personal identity that infuses
their work.
Good teachers join self, subject, and students in the fabric of
life because they teach from an integral and undivided self; they
manifest in their own lives, and evoke in their students, a
capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a
complex web of connections between themselves, their subjects,
and their students, so that students can learn to weave a world
for themselves. The methods used by these weavers vary
widely: lectures, Socratic dialogues, laboratory experiments,
collaborative problem-solving, creative chaos. The connections
made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in
their hearts meaning heart in its ancient sense, the place where
intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human
self. Parker Palmer

P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

We should teach with a sense of connectedness and community.

Identity is the intersection between the inner and outer forces that make
you who you are.

Integrity is whatever wholeness one is able to find as a nexus to forming

the pattern of ones life and a discernment of what is integral to ones
selfhood; and, the ability to choose life-giving ways of relating to the
forces that converge within ones self.

Choosing integrity leads to wholeness and the acknowledgment of who I

am.
As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with
students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the
threads are tied: the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the
fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs
at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heartand the
more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be.
Parker Palmer

We became teachers for reasons of the heart...but many of us lose heart

as the years of teaching go by.

The question becomes: How can we take heart in teaching once more,
so we can do what good teachers always dogive heart to our students?

Importance of Reflection

There must be an inner dialogue of reflection.

P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Creating a dialogue for inner reflection and renewal.

Critical Moments.
-One when a learning opportunity will either open up or shut down for
your students depending, in part, on how you respond. (Translation:
Taking advantage of a teachable moment).
-Creates triangulating conversations. Invites free exchange about
teaching.
-Creates a community of discourse about teaching and learning.

We must take colleagues into the deep places where, we might grow in
self-knowledge for the sake of our professional practice.

Teaching as a Craft

What is good teaching?

Emphasizes the human condition of the teacher and learners.
Comes from the integrity of the teacher.
-Comes in an array of forms.
-Methods emerge from their own integrity.
-Teaching is never reduced to technique.
-Teaching and learning are authentic.
-Involves telling stories about the origins of our teaching as well as
stories about great teaches who set us on this path.
-Creating a learning space in which the community of truth is practiced.
To teach is to create a space in which the community of truth is
practiced. Parker Palmer
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

I needed to learn how to create a learning space for my

students, a space in which they could feed themselves by
moving freely within limits, limits created by the demands of
subject matter and by my own sense of what they needed to
learn about that subject matter....The image of teaching that I
had absorbed from the academy requires the professor not to
create space but to fill it up, a task I had learned to perform with
a vengeance. Parker Palmer

-Community or connectedness is the principle behind good teaching,

but different teachers with different gifts create community in surprisingly
diverse ways, using widely divergent methods.
-Good talk about good teaching is what we needto enhance both our
professional practice and the selfhood from which it comes.
This includes: topics that take us beyond technique and into
the fundamental issues of teaching, ground rules that keep us
from defeating ourselves before the talk can go very deep, and
leaders who expect and invite us to join the conversation.
Parker Palmer

-The point is not to get fixed but to gain deeper understanding of the
paradox of gifts and limits, the paradox of our mixed selves, so that we
can teach, and live, more gracefully, within the whole of our nature.
I learn that my gift as a teacher is the ability to dance with my
students, to co-create with them a context in which all of us can teach
and learn, and that this gift works as long as I stay open and trusting
and hopeful about who my students are. Parker Palmer (72)

P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Designing space - physical arrangement, feeling of room, conceptual

framework of topic, emotional ethos, ground rules to guide inquiry.
Space shaped with a series of paradoxes. (See pages 74-77 of Th e C o u r a g e t o
Te ac h , for a further delineation of the six paradoxical principles of space.)

Define the course - in engaging ways to encounter subject, each other

and themselves. Provide readings with substance that students need to
know, but with gaps in which students can think their own thoughts.
Create exercises that invite and probe the unknown. Exercises that
reveal what they have learned. Allow time for the unexpected.
Preparing a learning space requires at least as much
competence as preparing a good lectureand more than
preparing a bad one. Parker Palmer (133)

Learn to ask good questions - and turn it into a session between

teacher and students in a complex communal dialogue that bounces
around the room. Also learn to lift up and reframe what students are
saying so there is a benchmark of progression and remaining growth.

On content and coverage of information:

-Deliver facts beforehand on the web, on the printed page, etc., where
they can be read over and over.
-Use the classroom for various exercises in generating facts,
understanding facts, using facts, seeing through the factsexercises that
might draw students into the community of truth.

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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

On intersecting knowledge and autobiography:

-Get students inside a subject.
-Telling stories about the origins of our teaching and about great
teachers.
-Help students see the persons behind the ideas.

On hearing students into speech:

-Allowing silent voices to be heard.
-When those responses come, teachers can hear people into speech by
respecting their voice and their responses.
-Get quiet students to share by providing them with a 3x5 card and ask
for their personal opinion on an issue being discussed.

On building consensual learning environments:

A consensual classroom assumes that truth requires
many views and voices, much speaking and listening, a
high tolerance for ambiguity in the midst of a tenacious
community. Parker Palmer.

-Consensual truth is not the outcome of majority vote. It is a continuing

revelation that comes as we air differences in public, pay special heed to
those who dissent, and seek deeper insights.

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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

-Toward this end, teachers must make the classroom a hospitable place.
- A teacher whose class is too large to allow the outward conflict of a
learning community can evoke the inward conflict of critical thinking.

On creating a subject-centered classroom:

-Characterized by a presence, real, vivid and vocal, that holds teacher
and student accountable for what they say and do. It is the power of a
subject that transcends our self-absorption.
-Gives the subject-and the student-lives of their own.
In a subject centered classroom, the teachers central task is to
give the great thing an independent voicea capacity to speak its
truth quite apart from the teachers voice in terms that students
can hear and understand. When the great thing speaks for
itself, teachers and students are more likely to come into a
genuine learning community, a community that does not
collapse into the egos of students or teacher but knows itself
accountable to the subject at its core. Parker Palmer (118)

Effectively Incorporating Assessment

The first step is firmly to reject the notion that grading
on the curve, with its forced competition, has any
educational merit, and to insist, instead, that if everyone
receives an A it might be the result of superb teaching
and learning rather than sloppy standards.
ParkerPalmer
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Teachers can give students a chance to have their work

evaluated several times before it must be finished. Grading
then becomes more a tool of learning and growth than a final
judgment on the final product. But the largest leap a teacher
can take beyond competition and toward consensus is to stop
attaching grades exclusively to individuals and start assigning
group tasks for which every member receives the same grade.
When the academic reward system is used to make students rely
on each other, the skills of consensus are more like to be
learned. Parker Palmer

Students also need to have the opportunity for open reflection about
every second or third class, about how they think things are going so
that mid course corrections can be made. This helps both students and
teacher.

The intent of evaluation is to offer guidelines for learning rather than

terminal judgments.

Students are given assignments that require them to work together on a

projectwith an understanding they will receive the same grade for the
final product.
Grading represents power, and the question we should ask is
not how to get rid of our power but how to use it toward better
ends. Parker Palmer (138)

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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

The Importance of Community

Community is vital and important, but it is also terribly difficult work for
which we are not well prepared.
Community is that place where the person you least want to
live with always lives....When that person moves away,
someone else arises immediately to take his or her place.
Parker Palmer

Higher education needs a way of thinking about community that relates

it to the central mission of the academythe generation and transmission
of knowledge.

The way we think about community in higher education needs to be

different from how we think about community in other settings, such as
the neighborhood, the civil society, etc.

Within the academy we must think about community in ways that

deepen the educational agenda.

Questions are: How do we know? How do we learn? Under what

conditions and with what validity?

We shape souls by the shape of our knowledge in our modes of

knowing.

Community is a capacity for relatedness within individualsrelatedness

not only to people but to events in history, to nature, to the world of
ideas, and yes to things of the spirit.
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Community must become a central concept in ways we teach and learn.

Knowing and learning are communal acts. They require many eyes and
ears, many observations and experiences. They require a continual
cycle of discussion, disagreement, and consensus over what has been
seen and what it all means. This is the essence of the community of
scholars, and it should also be the essence of the classroom.
The kind of community I am calling for is a community that
exists at the heart of knowing, of epistemology, of teaching and
learning, of pedagogy; that kind of community depends on two
kinds of love... the love of learning and ...the love of learners, of
those we see every day, who stumble and crumble, who wax
hot and cold, who sometimes want truth and sometimes evade
it at all costs, but who are in our care and whofor their sake,
ours, and the worlds deserve all the love that the community
of teaching and learning has to offer. Parker Palmer

In the community of truth, the connective core of all our relationships is

the significant subject itselfnot intimacy, not civility, not accountability,
not experts, but the power of the living subject.
As we try to understand the subject in the community of truth,
we enter into complex patterns of communicationsharing
observations and interpretations, correcting and complementing
each other, torn by conflict in this moment and joined by
consensus in the next. The community of truth, far from being
linear and static and hierarchical, is circular, interactive and
dynamic. Parker Palmer (103)

Teaching and learning in community calls for making meaningful

connections, in a community of data. The community of truth has
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
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pedagogical power because it allows students to do their learning

together.
Though we persist in believing that competition is the bet way
to motivate people to learn, these students are far more
motivated by the fact that their individual learning enables them
to contribute to the communal inquiryor at least not embarrass
themselves by letting the group down. Learning together also
offers them a chance to look at reality through the eyes of
others, instead of forcing them to process everything through
their own limited vision. They can check and correct what they
see from various vantage points, thus having a chance to come
closer to getting it right. Parker Palmer (128)

The Leader As Teacher: Leading from Within

The problem is that people rise to leadership in our society by
a tendency towards extroversion, which means a tendency to
ignore what is going on inside themselves. Leaders rise to power in our
society by operating very competently and effectively in the external world,
sometimes at the cost of internal awareness. Parker Palmer

Some leaders screen out the inner consciousness and have more
confidence and their confidence in the external world is so high that they
regard the inner life as illusory, as a waste of time, as a magical fantasy
trip into a region that doesnt even exist.

The link between leadership and spirituality calls us to re-examine that

denial of inner life.
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

Some leaders operate with a deep, unexamined insecurity about their

own identity. These leaders create institutional settings which deprive
others of their identity as a way of dealing with the unexamined fears in
the leaders themselves.
Everywhere I look I see institutions that are depriving large
numbers of people of their identity so that a few people can
enhance theirs. Parker Palmer
On the inner journey we learn that co-creation leaves us free
to do only what we are called and able to do, and to trust the
rest to other hands. With that learning, we become leaders who
cast less shadow and more light. Parker Palmer

The fourth shadow among leaders is fear-- of the natural chaos of life.
Good talk about good teaching can take many forms and
involve many conversation partnersand it can transform
teaching and learning. But it will happen only if leaders expect
it, invite it, and provide hospitable space for the conversation to
occur. Leaders who work this way understand that good
leadership sometimes takes the form of teaching. They lead
from the same model we have been exploring for teaching itself,
creating a space centered on the great thing called teaching and
learning around which a community of truth can gather.
Parker Palmer (160)
Becoming a leader of that sortone who opens, rather than
occupies spacerequires the same inner journey we have been
exploring for teachers. It is a journey beyond fear and into
authentic selfhood, a journey toward respecting otherness and
understanding how connected and resourceful we all are. As
those inner qualities deepen, the leader becomes better able to
open spaces in which people feel invited to create communities
of mutual support. Parker Palmer (161)
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P ar k e r P al m e r s P h i l o s o p h y o n Te ac h i n g an d L e ar n i n g :
A n A ut obiogr aphic al P ort rait

EPILOGUE

Teachers also have to work to reform education.

Teachers also need to extend their cause to the world, using the world
as a classroom as well.
So we come full circle....to the power within each of us that in
communion with powers beyond ourselves, co-creates the
world, for better or worse. The poet Rumi says, :If you are here
unfaithfully with us, youre causing terrible damage.
The evidence of his claim is all around us, not least in
education: when we are unfaithful to the inward teacher and to
the community of truth, we do lamentable damage to ourselves,
to our students, and to the great things of the world that our
knowledge holds in trust.
But Rumi would surely agree that the converse is equally true.
If you are here faithfully with us, you are bringing abundant
blessing. It is a blessing known to generations of students
whose lives have been transformed by people who had the
courage to teachthe courage to teach from the most truthful
places in the landscape of self and world, the courage to invite
students to discover, explore, and inhabit those places in the
living of their own lives. Parker Palmer (183)

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References

Palmer, Parker J. (1993). Community, conflict and ways of knowing: Ways to deepen our
educational agenda. Change (September/October).
_____. (2006). Divided no more: A movement approach to educational reform. Online:
http://www.teacherformation.org.
_____. (1999). Evoking the spirit in public education. Educational Leadership 56(4), 6-11.
_____. (1993). Good talk about good teaching. Change 25(6), 8-13.
_____.(1999). Good teaching: A matter of living the mystery. Online:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/afc99/articles/goodteaching.html
_____.(1990). Leading from within. Online: http://www.teacherformation.org
_____. (2006). Reflections on a program for The Formation of Teachers. Occasional
Paper of the Fetzer Institute. Online:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/?q=book/print/67
_____. (2006). The clearness committee: A communal approach to discernment. Online:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/?q=book/print/70.
_____. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teachers life.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
_____.(2006). The grace of great things: Reclaiming the sacred in knowing, teaching and
learning. Online: http://www.couragerenewal.org/?q=book/print/74.
_____.(2006). The heart of a teacher: Identity and integrity in teaching. Online:
http://www.teacherformation.org.
Rittenhouse, L..J. (2001). Leadership and the inner journey: An interview with Parker
Palmer. Leader to Leader, 26-32.

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