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I joined the faculty of Drew Theological Seminary in the fall of 1999. Before arriving at Drew, I had taught children, youth, and adults in a variety of settings. I had never taught at Drew. I had never served as a tenure-track faculty member. And I had never taught this particular community of students.But, I knew how to teach. I was confident in my skills and abilities. I trusted my preparation, my instincts, and my experience. Yet, I also knew a truth that every teacher eventually learns. Context matters.At that time, the student body at Drew was richly diverse in racial and ethnic identities, national origins, denominational affiliations, theological commitments, vocational aspirations, and ages. Such diversity was not a problem to solve—it was a gift to honor. Still, I knew enough to know that I needed help learning how to teach effectively in this new environment.The help arrived serendipitously. What began as a friendship became a lifesaving and career-shaping practice.During my first semester, I taught Introduction to Educational Ministries, a required course with thirty-two students enrolled. On the first day of class, the beauty and complexity of that learning community sat before me. Their experiences, questions, assumptions, hopes, silences, and histories filled the room. By the end of the session, I felt wrung out.That afternoon I called my friend, Brother Reginald Crenshaw.Reginald was an Episcopal monk serving a parish in Harlem, New York. We met a couple years before at a house party in Harlem and became fast friends. He had spent more than two decades teaching in one form or another. I called simply to chat. Before long, we were talking about the class session, the students, my preparation, and the intricate work of teaching. For nearly two hours, I recounted the day. At the end of the conversation, I thanked Brother Reginald for listening.The next week we did it again.And then again.By the third or fourth week of the semester, our conversations had become a standing appointment. After class, I would offer a verbal verbatim of the session. I talked through what happened, what surprised me, what delighted me, and what troubled me. Reginald asked questions about my pedagogical intentions, practices, assumptions, and missteps. He invited me to think more deeply.What I remember most is what he did not do.He did not evaluate me.He did not negatively criticize me.He did not offer quick fixes or easy answers.He did not position himself as the expert dispensing wisdom from above.Instead, he listened.Reginald listened as I wrestled with the demands of teaching in a new context. He listened as I tried to understand what was happening in the classroom and within myself. He listened as I searched for language, perspective, and courage.Now, twenty-five years later, I understand something I could not fully appreciate then. Reginald's listening was not merely collegial. It was an act of steadfast love.Brother Reginald loved the craft of teaching. He cared deeply about my flourishing. He wanted me to succeed, not because success could be measured, but because teaching matters. Listening to someone think out loud about teaching brought him joy.Many institutions organize classroom observations and peer reviews to assess teaching. Such practices can be useful. But what Reginald offered was something altogether different.He was not gathering evidence.He was not preparing a report.He was not determining whether I measured up.Instead, he created a space where I could work it out and work it through.Week after week, he offered room for recollection, reflection, perspective, lament, celebration, uncertainty, and even joy. I could tell him the truth about my teaching without fear of judgment. I could revisit moments of brilliance and moments of failure. I could hear myself think. I learned to hear my own voice in a new and needed way as I talked about my teaching. Even confident teachers need such spaces.We need sounding boards. We need reflection partners. We need people who can hold our stories long enough for us to discover what we are trying to say. We need to be heard deeply so we know the meaning of our own teaching. Sometimes growth comes not from being instructed but from being heard. The human practice of being heard might be a lifesaving necessity. In those conversations, Reginald helped me make self-corrections. He helped me recognize when a pedagogical pivot was necessary. He helped me imagine practices that better served the diverse students entrusted to my care. Not by telling me what to do, but by listening carefully enough that I could hear myself and trust the pivot I was considering. Teaching can be surprisingly lonely work. Too often, it becomes privatized labor hidden behind classroom doors. Without reflective companions, even experienced teachers can become trapped inside their own assumptions, rehearsing what they already know.To become better teachers, we need patient and knowledgeable colleagues who will accompany us in the difficult and beautiful work of critical and imaginative reflection. We need communities that value inquiry over performance and curiosity over certainty. We need listeners if we are to improve our teaching. Perhaps the deepest wisdom of teaching is not found in mastering a technique or perfecting a syllabus. Perhaps it is found in cultivating relationships where honest reflection can flourish. In such spaces, teaching becomes less about expertise and more about growth, less about control and more about learning alongside others. Teaching becomes buttressed by dignity and respect. The myth that teaching is best done as a solo performance must be dispelled. Teaching is never a solo act. It is, at its heart, a jazz ensemble, a front-porch conversation, a potluck where everybody brings something to the table. The classroom hums with stories, questions, contradictions, and possibility. We teach, we miss the mark, we try again. We laugh at ourselves, revise our plans, and discover that wisdom often arrives disguised as a good question. Along the way, faithful listeners companion us and help us hear the music above the noise. They remind us that teaching is not merely the transfer of knowledge but the cultivation of human flourishing—messy, improvisational, joyful, and alive.Thank you, Brother Reginald!Reflection Questions In what ways might evaluation culture in higher education silence the honest reflection that teachers need for growth?Who listens to you talk about your teaching, and what kinds of truths become possible when you are deeply heard?Who do you accompany? Who do you listen to deeply as they rehearse their teaching? If teaching is a communal practice rather than an individual achievement, what structures of mutual accompaniment could you create with colleagues?What stories, voices, or ways of knowing are regularly absent from your classroom, and what might become possible if those absences were addressed?Imagine a future learning community where curiosity is valued more than certainty and wisdom more than performance. What would teachers, learners, classrooms, and institutions look like in that world?

Teachers are people who plan. We cross classroom thresholds with worn briefcases bulging with written lectures clearly forecasted in thick, detailed, syllabi. Entire curriculums are planned three, four, five years into the future. Course learning outcomes are carefully aligned with degree programs and degree programs are carefully align with budgets – all well in advance of students’ enrollment or matriculation. Planning insures a cast iron tradition. Long-range planning, predicated upon long-ago decisions and forgotten needs, makes institutional change challenging, or even impossible. It is ironic; the very attribute which lends stability is also the albatross around our necks. The need to rethink our reliance upon long-range planning and strict adherence to hollow tradition has been exposed during this moment of pandemics. The year 2020 has been a year when plans have gone awry. In this moment, I have a proposition. While this proposition might feel like reckless abandon for those who depend upon the established traditions, reputable standards, and conventional methods of the used-to-be academy, in this protracted moment of pandemics, I want to suggest that this might be a moment to resist the impulse to plan, reflect and analyze. Consider waiting. Resist the impulse to presume how the end will be. Resist the impulse to attempt to go back to business as usual, business as normal, business that no longer serves the students in our care. If we can move past our panic, we will remember we needed to overhaul our educational system before the pandemics snatched us, halted us. If we dare risk surrendering romanticized views of our educational standards, we may recall that many of our traditions, while noble, were often begun arbitrarily. And, given the slowness of institutional change, consider that adult pedagogies have advanced while so many yet cling to outmoded, outdated, and uninformed pedagogies for adult learners in a digital age. Perhaps in this moment the courageous response is, rather than plan, to wait. Just like it is ill-advised to pause and reflect in the middle of a hurricane or surgery or any life-threatening catastrophe, so it is ill-advised, during the 2020 pandemics, to rush to meaning making and gestures of clarity; to rush to return to how it was; to rush to assuming where we will be and how we will be when the pandemics subside. In this moment, if we were the biblical character Noah, the bird we sent out to search for dry land would return having found no place to land. We are not yet close to shore. The waiting is not meant to be idle. In the waiting, carefully ponder, contemplate, imagine - what of the current change will you keep? A colleague who heads an IT department at a liberal arts college said that by his faculty going to online courses (albeit crisis pedagogy) in spring of 2020, he estimates that this sped up the faculty moving to online teaching by ten years. Ten years was gained for a desired change! Perhaps our moments of quick and dramatic shifts to online teaching showed us that our educational institutions are not as calcified as previously reported. If that is the case, what will it take to lean into the new found limberness? What is at stake if we choose to re-calcify? Like you, I am getting pressure to plan for summer 2021, and all of 2022 & 2023. I simply cannot. I do not have a crystal ball.  And I do not want to pretend that even when the vaccine is distributed (2021?2022?) that we will return to how it used to be. I do not want to squander this moment of waiting with worry, anxiety and stress for a future I cannot predict nor control. I tell people that I am waiting. Once we can return to face-to-face work, I want, then, time to reflect.  Then, I will want time to take stock and study.  Once we are no longer in the midst of multiple waves of quarantines, I will want to assess where we are, and learn the new/needed ways to move forward. I will need time to be creative. The waiting that I need right now is the mustering of courage for new visions.  In my not-idle waiting I am looking to what historians have said comes after a social upheaval. Historians tell us that after this kind of societal phenomena there is typically a renaissance. Oh – I cannot wait! There will be newly designed everything! There will be new architecture, different clothing styles, and new music and poetry. There will be new academic disciplines and reimagined ways to be school, to do school, and to get an education. There will be new painting, new sculptures, and new modes of transportation. If we truly engage in the reflection warranted by the moment of 2020 and 2021 (hopefully not into 2022), then our renaissance will be spectacular with new technology accessible by those who are impoverished, will bring end to global hunger and provide language translation fitted for everyday interactions. The post-pandemics renaissance will be marvelous! I want to participate in the renaissance with my own new thinking, renewed imagination and creativity. I want to reserve my energies to participate in the renaissance and not pour myself into reestablishing what needed to be changed. So, I wait. What would it mean to allow our innovation to be a primary mode of meaning making – rather than our traditions being the only mode of meaning making? What would it mean to shift to reliance upon creativity rather than dependance upon tradition? In what ways can we create real innovation rather than simply settling for imitations of change meant for other people in other times or places? What is the toll to the institution should there be a call to attempt to return to normal? What is the price of going back? What changes will we maintain, expand, and normalize?