When Teaching Gets in the Way of Teaching

Bird Droppings November 9, 2026

When Teaching Gets in the Way of Teaching

I have been thinking a great deal lately about teaching, learning, and the strange things we sometimes do in the name of education. After more than fifty years of wandering in and out of classrooms, I am still learning what it means to be a teacher. Perhaps that is the most important lesson of all. A teacher friend recently shared a thought about not having enough time to really teach because of all the curriculum she was required to cover. I suspect many teachers understand exactly what she meant.

Somewhere along the way, we began confusing covering material with teaching children. We began measuring how much information was presented rather than how much understanding was developed. We started watching clocks, pacing guides, and test scores, sometimes forgetting to watch the children sitting in front of us. I have often wondered how many children we leave behind in our efforts to leave no child behind.

Over the past several days, I have reflected on practical principles that have guided my teaching. They did not come from a textbook or a professional development seminar. They came from children, from mistakes, from conversations, and occasionally from those wonderful moments when something happened in a classroom that I never could have planned.

One of the first things I learned was that trust must come before performance. A child who doesn’t trust the adult standing in front of them is unlikely to risk making a mistake, asking a question, or admitting they don’t understand. I remember students who arrived in my classroom carrying years of failure, frustration, and labels. Some had become remarkably good at avoiding anything that might expose another weakness. Their behavior was often described as defiance, disruption, or noncompliance. I began wondering what happened before the behavior.

In behavior analysis, we often speak of antecedents, behaviors, and consequences. For years, schools have devoted tremendous energy to consequences: detentions, suspensions, lost privileges, and various reward and punishment systems. But what happens when we change the antecedent? What happens when a child walks into a room where they feel safe? Where someone knows their name, listens to their story, and offers a place to sit without immediately demanding something?

My classroom gradually became something of a living room. There were sofas, tables, animals, aquariums, and occasionally the sounds of a flute or water moving through a small fountain. Some colleagues thought it was cluttered. Perhaps it was. But the children found places to work, talk, think, and sometimes be. I called it a sanctuary.

It was never about the furniture. It was about the relationships and the atmosphere we created together. The classroom changed as the students changed, and I changed along with them. That brings me to another lesson. We need to teach the child standing in front of us, not some imaginary average child described in a curriculum guide.

I once worked with a student who was selectively mute. Traditional reading assessments required spoken responses, which created an obstacle before we even began measuring what the child knew. By allowing pointing rather than speaking, we discovered abilities that had been hidden by the assessment itself. The doorway was there all along. We had to recognize it.

I have also come to believe that we spend far too much time asking children for answers and not nearly enough time asking how they arrived at those answers. In mathematics especially, the thinking is often more valuable than the answer. A wrong answer may reveal an extraordinary thought process. A correct answer may reveal little more than a memorized procedure. When we ask a child to explain their thinking, we are inviting them into the learning process rather than simply judging the result.

Sometimes the hardest thing for a teacher is to remain quiet long enough for a child to think.

Learning should also be something children experience. I have always appreciated the Foxfire approach because it recognizes that learning is not simply transferring information from one person to another. We construct it through experience, reflection, conversation, and participation. An aquarium can become a biology lesson. A garden can become mathematics. A walk through the woods can become literature, science, history, and perhaps even philosophy. And sometimes a child teaches us something we never knew we needed to learn.

Years ago, I began thinking about three kinds of teachers: parasitic, symbiotic, and osmotic. The osmotic teacher, as I envision that person, doesn’t merely deliver information. The teacher is participating in an ongoing exchange of ideas, learning alongside students, watching, listening, and adjusting. Teaching becomes less about controlling every moment and more about creating the conditions for discovery.

That does not mean abandoning instruction or expectations. I have long believed in a simple process I learned through experience: tell, show, test, and check. Explain something, demonstrate it, invite the learner to try, and then check for understanding. If it does not work, find another way.

My late Aunt Margaret participated in an adult literacy program years ago that used the expression, “Each one teach one.” I have always liked that thought. It recognizes that teaching and learning are human exchanges, not simply institutional procedures.

We also need to respect the many different ways children think. Some need to see something. Others need to touch it, hear it, discuss it, or move through it. Some need more time. Others need a different question.

A teacher’s responsibility is not to make every child learn in precisely the same way. It is to keep looking for the doorway through which that child can enter. Perhaps principals have an especially important role in all of this. A principal can create the conditions in which teachers feel trusted enough to take risks, adapt instruction, and know their students. Or a principal can create an atmosphere in which everyone is so concerned about compliance that little room remains for curiosity. Teachers need sanctuaries, too.

Recently, I have been thinking about artificial intelligence and the way conversations develop. What we say, what came before, and the context surrounding an exchange can change what happens next. It has reminded me again how important antecedents are in human learning. We cannot always control what a child brings into our classroom. But we can influence what happens after they arrive.

I wonder sometimes whether the greatest obstacle to learning is not a lack of information but our failure to notice what is happening around us. We move so quickly to the next standard, the next assessment, the next lesson, that we overlook the child still trying to make sense of the last one.

Perhaps we need to slow down.

Perhaps we need to listen before we explain.

Perhaps we need to remember that education is not simply preparation for life. It is life happening in front of us.

After all these years, I still believe the most important quality a teacher can possess is a willingness to remain a learner. The moment I believe I have nothing left to learn from a child is probably the moment I should stop teaching. And perhaps that is the heart of those ten practical principles I have been thinking about. Build trust. Understand behavior. Create sanctuary. Value thinking. Know the child. Make learning experiential. Listen. Adapt. Respect differences. And never stop learning. They are not ten separate rules so much as ten ways of looking at the same human experience.

I keep coming back to one question. How many children do we fail to see because we are moving too fast? Perhaps the answer is not another program, another test, or another curriculum. Perhaps it begins with simply seeing the child. Please keep all in harm’s way on your mind and in your heart. Namaste.

My friends, I do not say this lightly,
Mitakuye Oyasin
(We are all related)
bird