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Growing up, my family loved playing games. We played with seriousness and delight.In our basement playroom, there were cards, ping pong, knock hockey, and many other board games. Our yard was regularly used for croquet, horseshoes, badminton, and volleyball. When enough family gathered, there were glorious, unruly games of tag.I assumed every family played games the way we did. Then some of my older cousins came to visit.Somewhere along the way my brother and I had quietly rewritten the rules of Monopoly. Whenever someone paid money to the bank—taxes, fees, penalties—that money was tucked underneath the Free Parking space. Whoever landed there collected the whole pile. Free Parking was transformed from an uneventful square into a moment of possibility, a financial windfall.Our cousins were scandalized."You can't do that.""Those aren't the rules.""Get the instructions."They wanted the official rulebook. They wanted Parker Brothers to settle the argument.My brother and I had no interest in consulting the rulebook."It's our board," we insisted. "Our house. Our rules."What began as a disagreement about Monopoly quickly became a struggle over authority. Voices rose. Feelings swelled. Nobody was changing anybody's mind. Somewhere in the middle of our family constitutional crisis, my mother appeared at the doorway and announced that ice cream and cake were being served in the kitchen. Looking back, I suspect she was rescuing us all.The game ended.The argument did not.Years later I realized that we had not really been arguing about Monopoly.We were arguing about power.Who gets to make the rules?Who decides when rules can bend?Who benefits when they do?Who pays when they don't?Rules are never neutral.Every rule privileges someone. Every rule protects something. Every rule imagines an outcome worth preserving. Rules create order, certainly. They also distribute power.Breaking rules carries consequences. Punishment. Exclusion. Suspicion. Labels. Sometimes criminalization. Sometimes silence.Teachers know this. Every syllabus is a declaration of values. Every classroom policy tells students something about what matters here. Every deadline, attendance policy, grading rubric, participation expectation, and late-work penalty announces not only how learning will happen but also who has the authority to define learning.When do I enforce the rules? When do I quietly overlook them? For whom? What assumptions shape those teaching decisions?Which students receive grace because they remind me of myself? Which students receive rigidity because they challenge my expectations? What conflict am I avoiding when I pretend consistency is the same thing as justice?These are not administrative questions.They are the moral questions of pedagogy. ***Ariel was an M.Div. student.He worked full time as the executive director of a denominational agency while carrying a full graduate course load. He came to class prepared. He asked thoughtful questions. He lingered after class to continue conversations. By mid-semester he had completed two major writing assignments, and both were excellent. Ariel was an exemplary student. After class one afternoon he followed me to my office.I set my briefcase on my desk. Ariel settled onto the couch while I sat across from him. We talked casually about the day's discussion. But something in his posture told me he had come for more than this debriefing conversation.Finally, after taking a long breath, he smiled."I have a proposition."I was curious."Tell me."He began carefully, "I've done well on the first two assignments."I nodded."I'm keeping up with the reading. I'm learning a great deal."Still, I waited.He took an anticipatory breath. So did I."I'd like to skip the last two papers."I felt my eyebrow raise and my lips purse. I folded my arms over my chest. "Skip them?""Yes."There was no arrogance in his voice. No manipulation. No entitlement. Only a tired honesty from someone trying to make impossible responsibilities fit inside twenty-four-hour days and this academic semester."I've demonstrated that I'm doing the work," he continued. "I'd like to keep learning without writing two more essays."I admired his audacity. Most students spend energy negotiating for higher grades. Ariel was negotiating for a different way to demonstrate learning.I uncrossed by arms and leaned forward. "We have a syllabus," I said gingerly. "It's our agreement. How do I assign a final grade if you don't complete the remaining assignments?"Without hesitation he answered, "I'll continue being an A student. You give me an A." I snickered. "So, you've come to negotiate?""If I have to.""I need to think."That answer surprised him.It surprised me too.I wasn't ready to say, yes. But I wasn't ready to say, no. I am the girl who put money on Free Parking.We agreed to have lunch two days later.***By Thursday I had a counterproposal. I laid it before him over sandwiches in the campus café."You may skip the remaining essays." His eyes brightened. "...if..." His smile disappeared. "...you tutor the students who are struggling."Silence, but he did not look away. I continued, "One of the deepest ways to learn is to teach. If you help your classmates wrestle with the ideas in the course, you'll understand them even more deeply."He considered it. He was thinking while listening. Weighing his options."How many students?""Before we count students," I said, "there's one more condition."He grimaced.I chuckled."Just hear me out.""There are three other students earning similarly high grades. If I make this arrangement with you, I must offer the same opportunity to them. All four of you become tutors. If everyone agrees, we have a deal. If even one person declines, everyone writes the remaining papers."His response was immediate."That's not fair."I shrugged my shoulders the way you do when you are done talking. "What if they prefer writing essays?""Then," I replied gently, "you'll have to persuade them."Ariel turned his attention to his turkey sandwich and chips—still thinking.We talked about other things. I enjoyed our conversation. Walking back across campus, he finally spoke."Okay."A pause."If I organize the tutors...the essays disappear?""Yes."Within days Ariel had recruited the other three students.Not one of them wanted to write two additional papers.Together Ariel and I organized tutoring sessions throughout the remainder of the semester. Students who wanted help received it. Conversations multiplied. Learning deepened. The strongest students discovered that explaining difficult ideas required even greater mastery than writing about them.By semester's end, the lowest grade in the course was an A-minus.The syllabus had not collapsed.Learning had expanded.***That semester Ariel taught me something I have carried ever since.Rules matter.Justice matters more.The goal of teaching has never been perfect compliance.The goal is transformation.Sometimes the deepest integrity lies not in protecting every rule exactly as it was written, but in asking whether the rule is still serving the learning it was created to protect.The best teachers are not simply rule keepers.We are stewards of learning.That stewardship requires flexibility, discernment, humility, and imagination. It requires us to know the difference between a rule that safeguards community and a rule that merely preserves our comfort. It asks us to remember that equity is rarely achieved by treating everyone exactly the same. Equity grows when every student has a meaningful opportunity to flourish.Perhaps the real question is not whether students should follow our rules.Perhaps the deeper question is whether our rules are worthy of the students who entrust us with their learning.Thank you, Ariel.  Reflection QuestionsWhich classroom rule do you enforce most consistently and with the expectation of uniformity? What fear, hope, or value lives beneath that rule?Recall a time when you bent a rule for a student. What informed your decision, and would you make the same decision for every student?Imagine your students were invited to rewrite one policy in your syllabus. Which policy would they change first? What might their proposal teach you about your classroom?Where have you mistaken consistency for justice? Where has flexibility created deeper learning than compliance ever could?If your syllabus were read as a theological, ethical, or moral document, what would it reveal about your understanding of authority, grace, accountability, and community?

Neutrality is a lovely fiction.There is no such thing as a teacher who enters a classroom empty of convictions, untouched by history, or free from assumptions about the world. We arrive carrying beliefs—personal beliefs, communal beliefs, inherited beliefs, hard-won beliefs. Some have been examined with honesty and care. Others are so deeply woven into us that we mistake them for common sense.Our beliefs are baked in. Sown in. Poured into us long before we stand at the front of a classroom. They become the hidden rebar beneath our teaching, reinforcing the moral architecture of our decisions, our judgments, our dreams, and our expectations for ourselves and for our students.Teaching is never merely the transfer of information. Teaching is the revelation of a way of seeing the world.Whether we acknowledge them or not, our beliefs shape every decision we make. What do we believe about human beings? Are people fundamentally worthy? Capable of growth? Deserving of grace? What do we believe about failure? About power? About justice? About intelligence? About the purpose of our lives together?These are not abstract philosophical questions reserved for late-night conversations or higher education classrooms. They sit beside us while we write syllabi. They whisper while we grade papers. They accompany every conversation with a struggling student and every faculty meeting.Our beliefs teach long before our lesson plans do.Sometimes the greatest challenge is not that we lack beliefs but that we live contradictions. We profess one set of values while practicing another. We announce that every student can learn, yet quietly decide that some are beyond our reach. We proclaim that mistakes are opportunities for growth while responding to errors with disappointment or dismissal.To be human is to live with inconsistency. None of us embodies our deepest values perfectly. Yet the work of teaching asks us to seek greater integrity—to bring our practices into closer conversation with our convictions. Students notice the distance between what we say and how we live. They also notice when we are striving toward wholeness.Our deepest beliefs rarely begin with us. They are handed to us around family tables, in neighborhoods, in houses of worship, in schools, and in communities that loved us as best they knew how. We inherit ways of understanding the world long before we have language to evaluate them.My father gave me one such inheritance.Dad believed in redemption.Not simply second chances. He believed in second, third, fourth, and fifth chances. He believed that broken things deserved another opportunity to become useful again. He believed in repair. In restoration. In refusing to abandon what others had given up on.My father spent his career as a school psychologist in the Philadelphia public school system. He was also a reading specialist and, on weekends, a piano teacher. Early in his career, colleagues discovered that he possessed an unusual gift: he could recognize when children had been misjudged.Part of a school psychologist's responsibility is to evaluate students and recommend educational placement. Too often, particularly in under-resourced communities, marginalized children were incorrectly labeled and assigned to special education programs. Those labels carried consequences that stretched far beyond the classroom. A mistaken diagnosis could narrow opportunities, diminish expectations, and hasten a child's journey toward exclusion rather than possibility.When families appealed those decisions, my father often conducted the reevaluations. His careful work corrected many mistaken placements. His expertise restored educational opportunities to children who had been underestimated. Long before people regularly spoke about systemic inequities or educational justice, my father quietly practiced both.What I remember most is not his expertise.I never heard him criticize the colleagues whose judgments he corrected. I never heard him delight in proving someone wrong. He simply believed that if a mistake had been made, then his responsibility was to help make it right.That was his way in schools.It was also his way at home.Our family owned a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a large apple, painted in bright reds, greens, and yellows. The jar sits on a shelf in my television room today. The lid had a tiny stem for a handle. For two small children with little hands and developing coordination, that tiny stem was an impossible design. My brother and I dropped that lid over and over again. Sometimes it landed safely. Often it chipped. Occasionally it shattered into several pieces.Over the years, I suspect we dropped that lid twenty times.Every single time, my father gathered the fragments.Every single time, he glued it back together.We were never scolded. Never shamed. Never called careless or clumsy. The broken lid was never treated as evidence that something was wrong with us. It simply became another opportunity to practice restoration.More than sixty years later, that repaired lid still rests on the cookie jar, bearing the visible evidence of its history. Veins of glue run across its surface like the rings of an old tree. Every repair tells a story. Every scar witnesses to someone who believed that brokenness did not have to be the end of the story.That cookie jar reminds me that my father believed repair was the holy work of teaching. He believed that preserving was better than discarding. That correcting was better than condemning. That restoration was more faithful than replacement. He trusted that what appeared broken might still hold beauty, purpose, and possibility. Those beliefs shaped his life. They shape my teaching.Teaching asks for our whole selves. We do not leave our beliefs outside the classroom door. They accompany every lecture, every assignment, every difficult conversation, every act of encouragement, and every moment when we decide whether to see a student through the lens of deficiency or possibility.The invitation is not to become perfectly consistent. The invitation is to become more conscious.When we courageously examine what we believe, we become more capable of teaching with wisdom, compassion, and integrity. Our students deserve more than our expertise. They deserve teachers whose beliefs have been lovingly questioned, thoughtfully refined, and generously lived.Perhaps the deepest work of teaching is not simply asking, "What will I teach today?"Perhaps the deeper question is, "What do my students learn about humanity because they have encountered me?"Reflection QuestionsWhat beliefs about human worth quietly shape the way you prepare for class, respond to students, and evaluate learning?Who first taught you what it means to repair rather than discard? How does that lesson appear—or fail to appear—in your teaching?Think about a student who challenged you. What assumptions about that student were you carrying, and what new possibilities became visible when those assumptions were questioned?Where do your classroom practices faithfully reflect your deepest values? Where is there a gap between what you profess and what you practice?If your students remembered only one thing about the way you saw them, what would you hope it would be? What evidence do you offer them of that hope?Imagine your teaching as an heirloom passed to the next generation. What convictions, habits, and stories would you want future teachers to inherit from you?If your classroom became a place where redemption was practiced as intentionally as knowledge was shared, what would change—for your students, for your colleagues, and for yourself?

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?

I was in elementary school—second or third grade—at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Philadelphia. The school served kindergarten through sixth grade, about five hundred students taught by roughly twenty teachers. Through the eyes of a seven-year-old, it felt bright, safe, and full of possibility. I loved school. I belonged there.From the first day, the teachers lined us up to walk through the school hallways in alphabetical order. Because of that, Angela White and I, Nancy Westfield, often walked side by side. Angela was quiet. She rarely smiled. She kept mostly to herself and took her schoolwork seriously.Her mother, Mrs. White, worked at the school as a non-teaching assistant. She supervised hallways, lunch periods, recess, assemblies—always somewhere nearby, always paying attention. Mrs. White carried herself with a kindness that settled people. Mrs. White greeted students warmly and helped make the school feel like a place where children mattered.Assembly days were a big deal. Once a month, the entire school gathered in the auditorium. Sometimes there were musical performances or class presentations. Sometimes police officers or firefighters visited with lessons about safety. In the spring, awards added extra excitement. Whatever the program, assembly days broke routine and filled the building with anticipation.One Tuesday morning, our teacher announced it was time to go to assembly.We lined up, barely able to contain ourselves, and marched to the auditorium. Every class had assigned seats. The youngest students sat closest to the stage; older students filled the rows behind us.I was sitting on the aisle. Angela sat beside me. The auditorium buzzed with hundreds of conversations. Children laughed, whispered, called out to friends. It was noisy in the way only children can be noisy—joyfully and unapologetically. The auditorium seating was old wooden theater seats. When you stood up, the bottom flipped upward.Angela started shifting in her seat. She placed her hands behind her back and continued squirming. Then it happened.As Angela leaned backward, the seat opened slightly. Her hands slipped into the gap between the seat and the backrest. When she leaned forward again, the seat shut. Both of her hands were trapped and crushed by the scissor action of the wooden seat. Angela cried out. When she tried to stand, the pressure became worse. Her cry grew louder, sharp with pain and panic.I remember searching for our teacher.Instead, I saw Mrs. White.She was across the auditorium.Hundreds of children filled that room. Yet somehow Mrs. White heard one voice.Without hesitation, she ran toward us. In one swift motion she reached across me, lifted Angela free, released her hands as the seat flipped upward, and carried her toward the nurse's office.Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.In a room overflowing with voices, how did Mrs. White hear that one cry? How did she know instantly it was Angela?As educators of adults, we may hesitate to compare teaching with parenting—and we should. Adult learners bring agency, experience, expertise, and self-determination that fundamentally shape the educational relationship. There is something worth noticing in Mrs. White's knowing and response. She recognized Angela's voice because she knew it. And because she was listening for it. That distinction matters.Adult education unfolds in noisy spaces. Sometimes the noise is literal. More often it is the noise of work schedules, caregiving responsibilities, financial pressures, institutional demands, digital distractions, and the thousand daily realities adult learners carry into our classrooms.Adult learners do not always announce their needs directly.A missing assignment may be a sign of exhaustion.Silence may signal uncertainty, exclusion, resistance, or deep reflection.A brief email may contain far more urgency than its few words suggest.Listening for learners requires more than hearing words. It requires listening for meaning, context, history, and possibility.One challenge of teaching adults is that our time together is often brief. A fourteen-week semester can feel like an extended introduction. Just when we begin to understand who our learners are, the course ends. Yet over time, some learners become more audible to us. We begin to recognize their rhythms. We learn their questions, their hesitations, their brilliance, and the ways they enter a conversation. In crowded classrooms and online discussion boards, their voices become recognizable. That kind of attentiveness does not happen by accident. It is a practice.What distinguished Mrs. White was not simply that she heard her daughter. Plenty of people heard Angela’s painful cry. Mrs. White was listening for Angela. There is power in that kind of listening. It refuses distraction. It insists that people matter enough to be noticed.For educators, the question is not whether our learners are speaking. The question is whether we have trained our ears to hear them. Listening for learners may mean creating multiple ways for students to communicate. It may mean paying attention to patterns of participation and absence. It may mean noticing subtle shifts in tone, energy, or engagement. It certainly means cultivating classrooms where learners know their experiences are welcomed and their voices carry weight.Attentive listening is not passive.It is disciplined.It is an act of respect.It is fodder for dignity.Mrs. White's attuned ear was not merely about recognition. It was about readiness. When the moment came, she was prepared to respond. She came running! Adult educators are invited into a similar practice—not as parents, but as attentive companions in learning. We are called to listen deeply, respond humanely, and honor the complex lives our learners bring with them every time they enter our classrooms.Thank you Mrs. White.  Reflection QuestionsWhose voice reaches you most easily in your classroom, and whose voice might be getting lost in the crowd? What assumptions shape your listening?Imagine your course through the eyes of a learner carrying invisible burdens. What signals of struggle, strength, resistance, or resilience might you be overlooking?When have you mistaken silence for disengagement? What other stories might silence be trying to tell?If your learners were describing the culture of your classroom, what would they say about who gets heard, who gets affirmed, and who must work hardest to be noticed?What would it look like to teach this term as someone intentionally "listening for" every learner? What specific practices would need to change for that commitment to become visible?

The practice of writing and publishing can be among the most life-giving dimensions of scholarship, and, at times, among the most difficult. Recently, I have held both joy and fear in the same open hand.My latest book is now available: Thinking Teaching: Stories, Insights, and Strategies to Ignite Reflection, Discussion, and Imagination.Thinking Teaching is a collection of blogs I have written for the Wabash Center over more than twenty years. In many ways, this volume most fully reflects my pedagogical commitments, both in content and in form. The book gathers sixty-six essays shaped by story, memory, wonder, and hard-earned wisdom—offerings intended to help teachers teach with greater imagination, reflection, and care. Each essay concludes with questions designed to spark conversation and communal discernment.Throughout the book, I draw from my experiences in classrooms and on faculties, while also leaning into the teachings and memories of family life. Womanist pedagogical commitments guide the work deeply. I understand education as a practice of emancipation, healing, and human flourishing. My hope is that this book will serve as a companion for individual readers, small groups, and faculty communities seeking richer conversations about teaching and the teaching life.Anyone who has published a book knows that writing and publication rarely unfold in a straight line. Books often arrive through detours, disappointments, revisions, unexpected grace and help from friends and colleagues. This was certainly the journey of this manuscript’s becoming.Around 2014, I began to imagine my Wabash blogs as a collected work. Though I had not written them according to a systematic plan, I sensed that together they traced meaningful terrain for colleagues engaged in conversations about teaching. I prepared a proposal for an anthology of these essays and carried it with me to a conference where scholarly and trade publishers gathered in search of new projects.I shared the proposal with several publishers. Most were not interested. Then, during a conversation with a fifth editor, I began to feel hopeful. We had a lively and engaging exchange about teaching, writing, and audience. As the conversation came to a close, she said gently, “Of course, you will expand each blog into a full chapter—right?”My heart sank.I wanted the brief essay form—those 750 to 900-word reflections—to remain intact. I believed the short form carried its own integrity, accessibility, and power. After thanking her for the conversation, I quietly set the project aside. With disappointment lingering close by, I placed the dream of a book-length collection on the back burner.Then, in 2022 I met Donald Quist. Donald became both editor and thoughtful conversation-partner for my writing life. He helped me trust my voice again—particularly my love for short-form creative nonfiction. What began as a professional collaboration soon grew into a relationship marked by shared imagination, intellectual curiosity, and mutual trust. Donald’s editorial guidance deepened my writing, clarified my sense of purpose, and refined my voice. Through his encouragement, I began once again to believe that these collected essays could make a meaningful contribution to theological education. Without hesitation, Donald urged me to pursue the book anew.With renewed confidence, I returned to the manuscript.I then called Jack Seymour for help. Together, we shaped a table of contents that finally felt coherent and spacious. My earlier attempts had been tangled and overworked. From among hundreds of blogs, Jack helped identify sixty-six essays for inclusion in the volume. I prepared a proposal for Wipf and Stock Publishers, and in the spring of 2026, the book came into the world. Somewhere between 2014 and 2026, this book slowly found its way toward becoming. Some books, this book, require more time to ripen before they are ready to meet the world.One of my deepest joys connected to this book is its cover art. The cover features an original painting, Eden #13, by Najee Dorsey, artist and founder of Black Art in America in Atlanta, Georgia. The artwork is luminous and beautiful. For the past two years, the Wabash Center and Black Art in America have been in creative partnership. Through that collaboration, Najee has generously shared his work and encouraged artists within his gallery community to contribute artwork for scholarly book covers. This partnership has blessed us in ways both marvelous and unforeseen.When I received the email from the publisher announcing that Thinking Teaching had been published, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, joy, and humility. The dread and frustration that accompanied parts of the journey seemed to fall away. In their place was a deep appreciation for the possibility that my work might accompany colleagues, nourish meaningful conversations, and encourage more liberative approaches to teaching and learning.Reflection QuestionsIn the blog, I describe my resistance to expanding the brief essays into long chapters because I trusted the “integrity, accessibility, and power” of short forms. What forms of wisdom or truth might theology and religion teachers overlook because academia privileges length, complexity, or abstraction?Who are your trusted conversation partners who cheer you on, bring needed skills and expertise, and allow you space to shine in your writing and scholarly work? List them. Thank them.The writing of some books “require more time to ripen.” What in your teaching life is still ripening? What unfinished idea, classroom practice, or project might need patience rather than productivity?What are your practices of relief and release when dread seizes you? How can you better handle disappointment and rejection?For the colleagues who you mentor, advise, and support, how will you encourage their persistence, agency, and tenacity for their creative work?When your work brings you satisfaction and joy, how do you celebrate? How do you show appreciation for those who assisted you? 

In the old religious imagination, neighbor was commandment—love thy neighbor as thyself—a moral directive carved in sacred text, often recited more than practiced. But womanist knowing stretches that word beyond obedience into embodiment. Neighbor is not assignment; neighbor is encounter. It is the moment you recognize that your life is braided into another’s survival.To be neighbor is to resist the lie of separation.To be neighbor is to lean into the inextricable connection between us.To be neighbor is to know that heart, guts, breath, and soul are even now relationship—we know this is how the universe holds us, whether we consent or not. To be neighbor is to understand that justice is not abstract. It is as close as the nearest wound you are willing to see and bind up. This is not about convenience. Neighbor is not the one who lives next door. That is geography, proximity without promise. Neighbor is interruption of our indifference. It is the holy disruption of your comfort by someone else’s reality and need. Neighbor is memory: remembering that somebody once stood in the gap for you/us. Neighbor is risk: choosing connection when disconnection would be easier, less costly, less troublesome. Neighbor is sacred because it insists that no one is outside the circle of care.It is when you cannot unknow what you now know, and so you must respond—not out of charity, but out of shared humanity, communal obligation, and love. Neighbor is the woman whose name you do not know, but whose struggle you recognize in your bones. Your marrow knows she is tired in a way that feels familiar. She is carrying more than she should have to carry. And something in you refuses to let her carry it alone—even if all you can offer is witness and empathy.Womanist theology reminds us that survival is communal. Thriving is collective. Therefore, neighbor is not optional. Neighbor is the practice of showing up, especially when systems have decided someone is disposable, expendable, or useful only to the greed of others… and that someone is we, us, mine. And perhaps most truthfully—neighbor is action. It is doing. It is what you do when love refuses to remain a theory, an abstraction, or a fragile, contestable idea.I have vivid childhood memories of the ways the women in our church, including my mother, would band together to care for someone recently out of the hospital. When a person or household was in distress, they mobilized a circle of care.The women organized grocery shopping, meal preparation, house cleaning, laundry, medication schedules, transportation to doctor visits, errands, fellowship visits, overnight stays, pet care, plant care, and prayer. As many aspects of home life as were needed were tended to. Each woman took, or was assigned, a task, with one or two coordinating the efforts of the whole group.Sometimes this neighborliness supported family members who were caregivers. Sometimes, when there was no family—or when family was absent or unreliable—the women became the family.Most often, my mother cooked meals. My father and I delivered them. My mother gave us strict instructions—where to leave the food, what dishes to retrieve, how to be attentive without overstaying.As a child, I felt the weight and wonder of doing something important. I would talk with the person receiving care, even in my shyness. I would remind my father of my mother’s instructions. Together, we noticed what needed tending: the throw rugs that should be removed now that Mrs. Thurgood used a walker; the broken commode upstairs that needed a plumber before her grandson’s next weekend visit.We stayed just long enough—twenty to thirty minutes—present but not exhausting. Back home, we reported everything to my mother, who reported to the coordinating woman. Often, what needed fixing was already in motion before the next visit.We were neighbors, acting as neighbors. We were caring for someone in need, trusting that when our time came, we would not be alone either. No one was left to fend for themselves. Our care was how we moved and had our collective being in the world.The ethic of neighborliness is part of my DNA. And yet, for a long time, I believed I had not been part of a community that lived this way anymore—or so I thought. I thought I was alone. I was wrong. A recent health diagnosis placed me in the ICU for eight days. While I was in the hospital, friends and colleagues—local, regional, and national—banded together for my care. I am not alone.After my hospital discharge, my neighbor, Tom Traughber—a friend to me and to the Wabash Center for more than twenty years—stepped fully into the work of care. For two weeks, Tom stayed with me. He grocery shopped, cooked, did laundry, picked up prescriptions, drove me to follow-up appointments, watered my plants, and asked me every day, “How do you feel?” He watched over me. He took care of me. Tom’s radical, steadfast care returned me to my childhood—to that circle of care where being neighbored was simply a way of life.I am grateful beyond measure to be healing. I am on the mend. And I am humbled to have received the sacred and precious gift of being on the receiving end of neighboring. Time spent convalescing has given me space to remember, reflect, and pray. Before this moment, I would have said I had lost touch with this kind of neighborly faithfulness. But memory corrected me. I remembered faculty who showed up for one another. I remembered celebration—my first book marked with a sheet cake bearing its cover, joy made edible. I remembered the ways colleagues supported me during the ten years I was the sole caregiver for my parents. I remembered the affirmations—grants, tenure, promotion, and then promotion again—not as solitary achievements, but as communal investments.I had not named these moments as neighborliness before.I have made that correction.Neighbor is not lost. It is waiting to be practiced again, deliberately, tenderly, and with courage. In a world that profits from our isolation, to choose neighbor is to resist. It is to remember that we belong to one another, not as sentiment, but as survival. The question is no longer whether neighbor exists. The question is whether we will be neighbor—again, and again, and again—until no one is left outside the circle of our care.Thank you, Tom!  Reflection Questions Where, in my academic life, have I mistaken collegial proximity for genuine neighborliness—and what would it take to move from one to the other? When have I been carried by a “circle of care” in my professional journey, and how do I honor that memory through my own actions now? What risks am I unwilling to take for the sake of connection, and what does that reveal about my commitments to communal thriving? How do institutional norms (competition, productivity, scarcity) shape or limit my capacity to practice neighborliness—and how might I resist them? Who, in my immediate academic community, is carrying more than they should—and what is one concrete act of neighboring I can offer this week?

Our plan was simple and highly anticipated—meet my friend Helen at choir rehearsal, then go for an evening treat of ice cream sundaes. I arrived at the church a little early. Rehearsal was underway. Through the small window in the sanctuary door, I could see the choir gathered in the chancel, each member holding an open black folder with sheet music, and all eyes focused on the director. I eased the heavy wooden door open, careful not to let it groan, walked halfway down the aisle, and slid quietly into a pew.Helen stood on the third step with the altos. Our eyes met. She smiled, a knowing, conspiratorial smile. I smiled back. I was certain we were both already thinking about hot fudge and vanilla beans. Helen had sung in this choir for more than ten years. She loved it. The choir was part of her spiritual rhythm, as familiar as prayer.As I waited, the choir director led them through two pieces: one hymn, one gospel song. The choir was faithful and earnest. Their sound was fine. Solid. Dependable. And… just… okay.Near the end of rehearsal, the director called the organist, Randall, forward. Randall had been hired about nine months earlier, and—somewhat reluctantly—the director allowed him to direct the choir from time to time.Randall stood, slid off the organ bench, and moved quickly to the front. One of the singers took her place at the piano. The choir closed their black binders and focused on the new conductor. Randall said nothing. He simply looked at the choir, lifted his arms and waited, gently. The pause itself felt like an invitation. Then he nodded to the pianist, who began playing in the tempo Randall shaped with his hands and arms.After a few measures, Randall brought the choir in.Their sound stopped me cold. I was stunned. The music was not louder. It was clearer. Fuller. Alive. Holy. As Randall conducted, he confidently called out instructions—round the tone here, lift the final consonant there. Each instruction was met with trust. The choir adjusted, leaned in, sang intensely. They sang a verse. Randall stopped them, offered a few more words, and started again from the top.In less than ten minutes, they had rehearsed the entire piece, solos and all. The choir sounded polished, consistent. I sat bewildered.How could the same group of people sound merely adequate under one director and extraordinary under another?When rehearsal ended, Helen gathered her things and hurried down the aisle. We greeted each other and headed for the ice cream shop. She ordered a banana split; I chose a root beer float. We sat outside on a picnic bench, spoons in hand, evening air wrapped around us, glad we had this moment together.Once we were settled, I told her what I had witnessed. I named the contrast. “When your director leads, the choir sounds just okay. But when Randall leads, you sound incredible!”Helen nodded. “We know,” she said gently. “All of us know.” I asked if the choir was undermining the director. She shook her head. “No. We love him. We do exactly what he asks.” Then she paused, took a breath to let the truth land softly. “Randall is just a better musician. He hears more. He knows more. He’s led more. He brings out what’s already in us.” She took another bite of her ice cream. “Randall doesn’t make us better people,” she said. “He just helps us sing who we already are. That’s why we sound better.”Helen already knew, and I had witnessed, that sometimes the very best leadership is about wisdom, listening, and the quiet ability to call forth the best in others.When we consider the roles and responsibilities of educational leaders and administrators, we recognize that the same is true. My hunch is that the primary job of administrators is to call the best out of teachers and staff people by helping them develop their better selves. The highly complex industry of education would have us believe that an administrator’s job is upholding the bureaucracy. Yet we know that the educational enterprise, at its core, is profoundly a human centered endeavor. Perhaps we have paid too much attention to maintaining the institutional mechanisms of teaching without realizing that leaders of educational communities must model healthy relationships as the most important factor of their responsibility. Presidents and Deans, do not miss opportunities to call forth the best in others. This might be your key responsibility and contribution. Reflect …Where in your leadership are you managing systems and policies efficiently, but missing opportunities to listen deeply enough to call forth the fuller gifts already present in your faculty, staff, and students?Who within your institution is “singing just okay” under your leadership—not because they lack talent or commitment, but because your leadership has not yet created the trust, clarity, or inspiration that invites their best?How often do you seek honest feedback about the impact of your leadership—and are you prepared to hear, without defensiveness, what your community already knows?In what ways are you cultivating your own growth, your listening, your wisdom, your relational capacity—so that your leadership expands what others are capable of becoming?If your primary responsibility is not simply to maintain the institution but to call people into their better selves, what would you need to do differently this semester, this year, or starting tomorrow? Make a list. Make a plan. 

for Rebecca Badertscher What’s your superpower? The question is playful. It invites imagination. It flirts with the extraordinary. It asks us to consider who we might be if we were not so bound by the ordinary limits of time, fear, gravity, or flesh. It is a contemplation of freedom. Common answers come easily. Flight. Speed. Mind reading. Super strength. Time travel. Invincibility. The question suggests that we long for capacities beyond ourselves. It suggests that we are weary of constraint. It suggests, too, that power is something we add on, something we acquire, something that dazzles. We yearn to be more. But some superpowers are not imagined. They are practiced. They are learned early. They are honed in ordinary spaces where fear lives quietly and persistently. Invisibility is one of those kinds of real superpowers. The ability to make oneself invisible is often imagined as magical. A sudden disappearing. A body present then vanished—moved to the unseeable realm. In classrooms, invisibility is neither magical nor sudden. It is deliberate. It is disciplined. It is a survival strategy.I learned invisibility in elementary school. I do not remember a single lesson on how to do it, yet I mastered it quickly. I learned to still my body. I learned to avoid eye contact. I learned to quiet my breath and fold myself into the smallest possible version of who I was. If I did all of this well enough, the teacher’s gaze would pass over me. I would not be called. I would not be exposed. I would not be required to speak. This invisibility protected me. I was shy. I was anxious. Speaking felt risky. Answering incorrectly felt dangerous. I learned that when another student answered a question wrong, the room changed. The air tightened. Time became prickly and slowed. Mistakes lingered longer and thicker than they should have. I learned that invisibility could carry me safely through those moments. I could disappear until the tension passed.This is how classrooms teach. Not only through curriculum and standards and objectives, but through atmosphere. Through tone. Through what happens when someone gets it wrong. Through what happens when fear enters the room and no one names it or ushers it out. We often mislabel invisibility as disengagement. As lack of interest. As laziness. As absence. As passivity or disinterest. But invisibility is effortful. It requires attention, control, and constant monitoring of the environment. It is hard work. Frequently it is exhausting work. For many adult students in our classrooms the practice of invisibility is their work. They sit in seminar rooms, lecture halls, and Zoom squares, perfecting disappearance. They keep cameras off. They speak only when required. They offer safe answers. They avoid drawing attention. Like me, they learned invisibility early, and like me, they learned it because learning spaces did not feel safe. Too often learning spaces were harmful, painful, even violent. A superpower is needed for survival. Educators often misread student silences. Silence is wrongly judged as deficiency. Quiet becomes lack of preparation. Invisibility becomes a problem to be corrected rather than a strategy to be understood. We ask students to participate without asking whether participation feels dangerous or is an invitation into violence. We celebrate visibility without interrogating the conditions that make invisibility necessary. Participation is not politically neutral. Visibility is not innocent. Who can risk being seen, heard, corrected, or misunderstood is shaped by race, gender, class, language, past schooling, and accumulated harm. Some students speak because they trust the room. Others disappear because they do not. Many classrooms are not trustworthy. Invisibility, then, is not a student’s failure. It is intelligence. It is the body remembering what it needed to do to survive learning spaces. When we label it as resistance or apathy, we miss the story it is telling. We miss the work of teaching all the students in the room rather than simply teaching the complying students. Good teaching requires listening for what is not said. It requires noticing who disappears and when. It requires asking not Why won’t they speak? but What makes silence feel safer than voice?If we are serious about education, we must teach against invisibility—not by forcing students into the light, but by changing the conditions of the room. We must slow down. We must treat mistakes gently. We must create multiple ways of being present. We must make fear discussable rather than disciplinary. I suspect it is a superpower of the highest caliber to invite students to reappear. Making learners visible again is worth the effort. Perhaps the better question for the teaching life is not What superpower do you have? but What powers did you develop to survive classrooms? And then, more importantly, What would help you no longer need that ability?Teaching is not about exposing students. It is about making it possible for them to reappear. At their own pace. On their own terms. In rooms where invisibility is no longer necessary.

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?

You know the feeling.You have watched your students survive it. You have survived it yourself, many times. It is that shift from knowing to not knowing; from confidence to uncertainty; from expert to novice.Learning so often begins with a jolt of disorientation. It is uncomfortable. It can be exhausting. Over time, with patience and willingness, that discomfort usually gives way to new learning, relearning, even transformation.If you have ever wondered whether your body is part of the learning process, think back to how your body responds when you face something truly new: the queasiness, the sense of being under attack, the way fear can freeze you in place. For many of us, our bodies announce the loss of old truths long before our minds catch up. Disenfranchisement, feeling misplaced, confusion—these are not just ideas. They live in our muscles and our breathing.The disorientation of learning can be severe.I have come to believe that this disorientation is a signal. It tells us that we are entering a space of possibility, wonder, and generativity. That uneasy feeling is a sign that we are exactly where we are supposed to be. Pay attention to the breakthroughs when they come—because they do come.The most sensitive teachers stay in touch with what it feels like to be a learner.Some students greet new learning—or the loss of old knowing—with resistance, refusal, distrust, anger, or deep skepticism. Sympathetic teachers remember what it is like to move from being a competent, confident adult with swagger to feeling like an uncertain beginner, without the vocabulary to join the conversation. Learning can be emotional and unsettling. It can feel grief-stricken, like a small death of who we thought we were.I hold deep respect for adults who decide to learn new things. Those who dare to pursue degrees, learn new software, or tackle baking bread from scratch are risk-takers. I admire risk-takers, dreamers, disruptors.Stepping into classrooms, reading substantial books, participating in weighty discussions, exploring new worldviews, and encountering unfamiliar cultural knowledges—complete with assignments, deadlines, and grades—places learners in terrain marked by misunderstanding, uncertainty, surrender. These are not small shifts. They are life-altering, identity-reforming changes.Many students begin their studies assuming that coursework will affirm what they already know. Instead, they discover that genuine learning asks us to move from knowing to unknowing to new knowing. Few adults are prepared for this destabilizing journey.Deep study challenges what we assumed was settled and agreed upon. That cognitive dissonance is both disruptive and life-giving. Learning can be powerful.We need teachers who recognize how difficult learning is and who sympathize with their students, even as they gently invite them to lean into the formation of a reordered identity.Think about learning to ride a bicycle or surf a wave or drive a car. Fear was high and ability was low. What helped you push through was knowing that others had learned before you. You wobbled. You fell. You practiced—again and again—just to gain a small measure of proficiency. You strengthened your determination. And when the new skills finally took root, your confidence returned. Your swagger came back.Over the years, I learned to notice when my students’ swagger disappeared and disorientation set in. I watched their breathing in class. By mid-semester, their breath usually slowed; their bodies relaxed. I listened to how they used new vocabulary and interacted with unfamiliar concepts. By mid-semester, many of them were incorporating new words into their conversations—sometimes tentatively, sometimes playfully.I became a cheerleader for their attempts, even the unsuccessful ones. I designed assignments that did not assume students already knew what they had come to my class to learn. I created learning activities that acknowledged struggle and disorientation, then coaxed students toward deeper, richer, more flexible knowing. I learned to honor and even celebrate confusion as part of the process.The best teachers cultivate a desire to learn and build spaces for community. New learning is best done not in isolation but together.Do not be alone when confusion gives way to reorientation. Surround yourself—and your students—with people who will not be embarrassed or shamed, who will not humiliate others for not already knowing. The heart is too tender in the midst of learning to bear ridicule or blame.Classrooms need clear rules of engagement that foster community, make room for mistakes, and celebrate the courage it takes to learn.Making space for students to imagine new ways of living through engagement with new knowledges is both daunting and exhilarating. It is risky work. And it is worth it.Happy New Year!