I am not a teacher, I am a teaching. – Ram Dass
In teaching, it's very important to remember that none of us have answers beyond our own experiences. This needs constant revisiting and reinforcement because the entire construct of teaching relies on topdown directing and guiding. As an authority figure in a teaching environment, you're expected to know things and have answers, and it's an ego trip when somebody comes to you with their real questions about life. It's hard to confront the truth – that we may know absolutely nothing.
As a profession, teaching attracts people who want to help, so nobody in the game is immune to the desire to possess answers. Our real strength as educators though lies in a finer ability to confess that sometimes, we don't know, but we're willing to sit with a young person (or whoever is coming to us) to probe and explore a some question with them.
This is all that really good teaching is – It's stretching open a safe intellectual space and dedicating time to explore possibilities with a person, eventually landing on a way of thinking through things, at least for now. Seen in this way, good teaching happens on a continuum with starts and pauses. There is no mythical end to learning or searching for information or growing.
Good teaching is nothing but good coaching, the transmission of a safe and healthy practice of finding out.
When educators get together and talk about teaching, modeling comes up a lot. This humility of the journey and search is what we should be modeling. By modeling a personal openness with curiosity and patience, we're doing the most important work in society.
We are teaching people that it's ok to not know everything, to learn in public, to take our time, to seek information, and be vulnerable with one another in moments of ambiguity.
That's how we build good citizens who grow to understand each other as human beings engaged in one common endeavor – learning more about life and trying to build a better one.