Guest post by Robert Ward
All teachers must find or rediscover their passion for educating and nurturing children because their personal and professional sense of excitement, pleasure, and purpose is just as vital for their students as it is for themselves.
No one can argue that academic learning is a crucial goal of teaching, but educators, parents, and the public are now also embracing the importance of social and emotional learning. Yet we all must go one step further- or deeper- and equally accept the profound impact of soulful learning.
Meaning is magnetic! Passion is powerful! Charisma is contagious!
If you want to engage your students, you yourself must be engaged. Your students will be entranced by and feed off of your sincere passions. Your specific passions may never become your students’ passions, but you will have nevertheless provided them with three vital life lessons:
* A passionate, purpose-driven life is the only life worth leading.
* When a person chooses a path full of self-expression, creativity, and meaning, wonderful opportunities arise, doors open, and adventures await.
* One’s passions should be openly and generously shared with others because what each individual offers is a glorious gift that benefits and inspires others.
If you want to maintain a rewarding career in education that lasts thirty years or more, you must be deeply invested in what happens in your classroom. Please abundantly give the gifts of inspiration and creativity to your students because it is within these avenues of exploration that children dare to dream, invest fully, and achieve their potential.
The following questions will assist you in reinvigorating your teacher passion so that joy, fulfillment, and meaning become the nourishing foundations of your day.
1. What is it about the subject/s that I teach that connects with my core values and beliefs?
2. What aspects of my curriculum are particularly exciting and interesting to me?
3. What beauty, artistry, wisdom, or wonder am I compelled to impart to my students?
4. Why have I chosen to devote my professional life to this field of study? What longing does it fulfill in me?
5. What is sustaining and revitalizing about what I teach and about teaching itself?
6. Am I ever learning something new that is useful, important, and intriguing, both to me as a professional and to me as a person?
7. What qualities do I personally bring to the table that make my particular instruction uniquely valuable to those I teach?
You must be coming up with some very compelling answers to these questions because if not, you are probably going through the motions and merely collecting a paycheck. Neither of these results are much good for your life as a teacher—and with the amount of time you spend in the classroom, this is a major part of your life!—nor for your students’ lives and education.
If you yourself cannot articulate why what you teach in general, as well as why each specific lesson matters—both to you personally and to your students—then how are you expecting to sustain your students’ interests, let alone your own?
Robert Ward is a dedicated educator who has taught English at middle schools in Los Angeles for twenty-three years. He is also the author of two powerful books for teachers, and Rowman and Littlefield will publish his next book, A Teacher’s Inside Advice to Parents, in November 2016. Contact Robert via his website: http://www.rewardingeducation.com/
This article is adapted from chapter 9: Engendering Fascination in The Firm, Fair, Fascinating Facilitator.
Click on the following link for information on purchasing Robert’s two teacher books directly from the publisher at a 40% discount through 9/30/16:
https://rewardingeducation.wordpress.com/2016/07/02/two-powerful-books-for-
