Back to school season is officially upon us, and with it comes a blank canvas, a new start. So many possibilities, and so many ways to learn and to teach.

The options appear infinite, and if we take into account the neurodiversity of each individual learner, it would seem quite impossible to be definitive about any one approach.

I think of teaching akin to training to run a race.

There are so many different ways to do it, and no one approach will work for everyone. Great coaches, like great teachers must first take time to observe carefully, before tailoring their approaches to best suit the individual.

So while floundering in the sea of advice about how best to approach this new teaching year, I was left wondering ‘what is important for me as a teacher’?

This brought me back again to a transformative piece that I was introduced to by a great mentor and teacher once upon a time – Parker Palmer’s ‘The Courage to Teach’. In the short video clip, Palmer talks about the ‘who’ of the teacher who teaches. The ‘who’ of the teacher is important because at the end of each day, ‘we teach who we are’.

Palmer believes that we can test this empirically, as he recalls a visit to the college from which he graduated from 40 years ago. On campus were three of the ‘great teachers’ he had when he was 18-22 years of age, and he was invited back to sit alongside them on panel to talk about teaching. An audience member asked him ‘what courses did you have from these professors Parker?’. He smiles and says that he could not remember the titles of any of the courses, let alone the information in those courses.

Palmer goes on to explain how the impact that those three teachers had on his life had nothing to do with course titles or course content, it had everything to do with the selfhood of those three teachers. They were people of great integrity, and he wanted to be like them when he grew up. And while each of us has to find our own sense of self he says, the impact of any teacher is from ‘selfhood’, and not from course content. Palmer clarifies this further, by stating that he does not mean to belittle the course content, and acknowledges that good courses are the ‘vehicles from which some good things can happen’. Without doubt we need knowledge and theory and applications of all of that to the world, he affirms.

‘But teaching is an exchange of deep from oneself to another self’, and if teaching is going to ‘work’, then the ‘who’ teaches turns out to be a critical question.

As we begin this new school year then, maybe we can take a moment to reflect on our ‘who’ as teachers. Who are we? What do we each bring? What is our unique gift?

And importantly, ‘who’ do we want the learners in our care to remember in 40 years’ time?