Resources

Teaching always begins inside time, never outside of it. Our metric of time is typically semesters. Our own learning as teachers, as well as our students’ learning of the subject matter, unfolds unevenly throughout those semesters. Classrooms reveal what cannot be rushed: trust, the formation of community, courage, compassion. In our impatience, we might try to hurry. We rush our own teaching. We attempt to hasten our students’ learning and they bear the cost of this hurry. Our students deserve teaching shaped by who we are becoming, not just by what we know.Knowledge does not rush toward us; she waits to be welcomed and courted. She is fickle, demanding, and unpredictable. Deep learning—engagement with new knowledge—asks that we sit with confusion, love the question, and linger with one another, sometimes for a long time. That which matters most resists efficiency, cannot be downloaded, and belongs as much to our hearts and imaginations as to our minds. Knowing emerges through struggle, care, and communal accountability. Insights arise from misunderstanding, silence, discomfort, and a willingness to think new thoughts about old things. Insights are sparse. It takes time to learn to teach in ways that allow students to still themselves while their questions mature and their insights settle. Teaching as relational, improvisational, and unfinished is the more difficult pedagogy.Good teaching is not a skill we acquire, but a self we grow into—and that takes time. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.In the early years of teaching, we arrive eager, hopeful, afraid, novices in the enterprise. If we stay attentive, by mid-career we discover that teaching requires missteps, revisions, and reckonings. We learn to reject myths of mastery and instant competence. If we are lucky, the certainty of our early years gives way to humility and compassion. We come to understand that mistakes—even the big ones—are not detours but essential curriculum for improved teaching. If we are brave, and if we stay present to our craft, we allow ourselves to be reshaped, reformed, and profoundly changed, even as we are tasked with shaping others. By late career, we might become decent teachers. Teaching is a long becoming.Deep learning refuses hurry. Here lies the distraction of teaching by semesters: learning never appears on schedule. Transformation often arrives after evaluation periods close, after grades are recorded, after the final exam. Good teaching—slow teaching—requires faith in delayed understanding. We must reckon with the truth that good pedagogy attends to trajectories, not prescribed outcomes.Better teachers know that teaching is an act of collective endurance.In learning to teach slowly, perhaps we must refuse the lie that we are behind or late. The illusion of urgency keeps us absorbed and agitated. Slow is not late. Remember that survival itself is a long lesson. Just as important, refuse despair when progress is not visible. We must cultivate within ourselves a slow hope. Most of all, stay with the work long enough to be changed.ReflectionWhat would it mean to reduce the habits and practices that rush your teaching and your students’ learning? For example, what role does impatience play in your preparation and classroom demeanor?What habits or practices might you need to unlearn—or relearn—to grow your awareness of becoming a teacher over time?How might you take account of and celebrate the growth and maturity you have already accomplished as a teacher?

In my last blog on this site (the first of three parts) I reflected on what difference it could make if theological education institutions focused on formation of students rather than imparting information to them. That blog generated some interesting comments, questions, and feedback, so I thought I might dig a little further here. In my seasoning as a scholar and a teacher it has become clear that my focus is not on the students in my institution per se. It is not even on the material I want them to learn. As a pastoral theologian, I focus on the suffering in the world, and God’s longing for the wholeness and the flourishing of all that can only happen through justice, reconciliation, and the labor of peace. I think about my students concluding their time with us at Brite Divinity School and facing anew the world and all the impediments to the flourishing of God’s world. I want to empower them to see what those impediments are, to name them and call them out. I want them to leave Brite with the capacities to envision new possibilities, excite others about those possibilities, and get others involved. I want them to move forward with the knowledge and the tools to offer healing care, to lament and attend to suffering, both personal and systemic, to create genuine community. I want them to have grown and changed personally and to have become better integrated during their time with us. I want each of our students to have the chance to become more whole themselves as they prepare to contribute to the healing and wholeness of others and of communities, no matter where their lives take them. It became clear to me many years ago that no amount of reading Sigmund Freud (or his daughter Anna), no amount of systems theory, or object relations theory, or even narrative theory could accomplish these goals for them. Saying this does not negate the importance of those theories (and my syllabi continue to show my firm commitment to the idea of reading as fundamental to learning). But it does shift how I understand my work. I now ask myself how any course I teach will help students understand what wholeness can look like, what flourishing might taste like. I hope each course will help them understand better how to affect that, both for themselves and for others. Perry Shaw argues in Transforming Theological Education: A Practical Handbook for Integrative Learning that good teaching invites students into deep learning (Carlisle: Langham, 2014). Deep learning, as Shaw defines it, is the learning that continues to affect people 5, 10, or more years beyond the classroom. Deep learning creates space for students to wrestle with the implications of Freud or Heinz Kohut for the world they are facing themselves and the world others are facing. Deep learning teaches students how to connect ideas with lives, practices with change, and gives direction to hope. Deep learning shapes the way students think, how they feel, act, reflect, and engage, more than it relates to what they know. Deep learning changes the way people live and move in the world. It dares to help people figure out what it means to participate in the life of God in the world, to discern what God-as-life-force is doing already, and to magnify that. This is a shift, Shaw asserts, from education-as-teaching to education-as-learning, -changing, and -growing. This kind of education asks less what we are teaching and more what students are taking with them. It teaches them how to assess what is valuable and what is “fake news” in a world inundated by “information.” It helps them sift through the noise to what is most important and meaningful, especially from a theological perspective. This kind of education-as-formation will still require some foundational knowledge, but less of that and more of the work of applying that knowledge to the challenges people and communities are facing. Formation focused education invites much more wrestling, struggling, and deepening than education-as-teaching might. Education-as-formation helps students understand how content relates to and can perhaps be used to change the worlds that they are in. It is funded by the conviction that the God of Life longs for the flourishing of all that is, and that our calling as theological educators is to figure out how to respond to that longing and to do the hard work of living into flourishing; understanding its impediments in ourselves, in others, and in our world; and developing practices (including teaching practices) that nurture flourishing. Deep learning, then, requires that we educators join students where they are and encourage them forward a step or two and much deeper than learning for information does. It invites us to listen to them and the challenges they and their communities are facing. It requires that we faculty get out of our heads on occasion and into our own hearts and souls. It means that we ourselves must be willing to enter ongoing processes of growth and formation, too, as we seek to live more fully into our own wholeness and lean harder into our own flourishing. Deep learning happens best in the context of institutions that understand their role in teaching the formation of effective community, where staff and faculty model growth and integration, and where students can experience a taste of what each of us ultimately seeks.