19 How Do I Inspire?

Cecilia didn’t regard herself as a particularly skilled teacher. Cecilia instead knew that several of her colleagues could coax far greater learning out of their students than Cecilia ever imagined accomplishing herself. Yet Cecilia knew that she had one special teaching gift, which was to inspire students to raise their sights from the dull plains before them to the spectacular mountaintops far beyond. Cecilia didn’t even quite know the source of her rare ability to inspire students. She imagined it had something to do with her escaping her own difficult circumstances, to reach unexpected heights of education and vocation, and gain surprising inner peace and outer stability. But no matter her gift’s source, Cecilia vowed every term to put on full display her ability to inspire students. 

Inspiration

Teaching isn’t entirely about method. Teaching can also be a lot about inspiration. Good teachers instruct. Great teachers inspire. To inspire is to project possibilities that another hasn’t seen or imagined, to see and communicate potential where others see impossibility or don’t see at all. To inspire is to make others try to accomplish what they had previously assumed was beyond their reach or out of bounds. Inspiration gets a student out of bed, on their feet, and striving, not just for the short term and for the practical goal immediately within reach but for the long term and for the greater good and bigger whole. Inspiration moves a student’s vision from what they see within their present reach to who they newly imagine they might someday become. For a student, inspiration turns completing yet another dreary assignment on a dull path toward oblivion into taking yet another small but sure step on an adventure toward a glorious future. Seek not just to teach but to inspire. 

Personality

Some teachers inspire their students through their personality. Personalities can involve projecting certain attributes. One teacher is warm and compassionate, while another teacher is sunshine and light, another weight and gravitas, and another eccentricity and humor. Students can draw heavily from these and other attributes, as teachers project them over a classroom and into students’ souls. Students bring their own experiences, needs, and issues into school and the classroom. The personality of a teacher can provide a counterweight to imbalances the student senses in the student’s own family or life. A teacher willing to share with students an especially sunny disposition, for instance, can brighten a student’s day darkened by the sullenness of the student’s alcoholic parents. You hearten, uplift, and inspire students to hope for more, do better, and be better, when you consistently show the generosity of spirit to share with students the most attractive and uplifting features of your own authentic personality. 

Passion

Other teachers inspire their students through their passion. A teacher may have no particular gift of personality. The teacher may instead be as dry and stiff as stale bread left for days out on the kitchen counter. But if a choir teacher has a passion for opera, a gym teacher a passion for sport, a geography teacher a passion for rivers, a history teacher a passion for Napoleon, or an English teacher a passion for Shakespeare, their students’ worlds can similarly come alive with excitement, interest, and possibility. Inspired teachers seem to take on the qualities of their subjects, both illuminated by their subject and projecting dazzling light upon it. The choir teacher becomes Pavarotti or Callas, the gym teacher Jordan or Favre, and the history teacher a lieutenant in Napoleon’s army. The art teacher seems as if walking daily through the Louvre, and the geography teacher as if daily climbing mountains and fording great rivers, while the science teacher transports students to Mars. Make passion for your subject your teaching gift if you have the stiff and uninspiring personality of a 1950s robot. 

Power

Other teachers inspire their students through their power. Teachers can exhibit power in various ways, some through the authority of their reason and rationality, others through the natural force of their influence, and still others through the breadth and detail of their vast knowledge. Students learn not to argue with the teacher whose mind is like a steel trap for logic, wit, and sarcasm. Students learn not to resist the teacher whose will is like tempered steel or contradict the teacher whose memory is faster than an internet search and more accurate than a British encyclopedia. Teachers can exhibit strength of character, power of expression, and force of spirit. They can show brawn of brain, vigor of constitution, and muscle of memory. Power impresses and inspires students, who often lack much of their own. Students need to see mature individuals exhibit strength, toughness, and resilience, so that they can aspire to do so as well. Whatever is your strength, your special power, exhibit it generously in ways that inspire your students to discover and display their own power. 

Purpose

Other teachers inspire their students through their sense of purpose. When a teacher fully embraces their life calling and learns to openly express that embrace to students, the teacher inspires students to discern and pursue their own purpose. Depending on their age, circumstances, and maturity, students can struggle to discern purpose in their lives, when purpose lends meaning, direction, and motivation, and spurs growth and learning. In a sense, all growth and learning comes from pursuing purpose. Without a sense of purpose, not just within the student’s own yearnings but also as the student perceives the world, a student has no light to serve as a guide. Purpose defines the meaning of things in the world, including the meaning of a student’s life. Teachers may naturally express purpose in their teaching and in the care that they have for students and their growth. Yet teachers can also express purpose in their subject-matter mastery, showing the significance to human flourishing of the subjects they teach. Teachers can also express purpose in their broader lives, to care for their families, the school community, or their city, region, or nation. Teachers can also express purpose in seeking truth, upholding justice, respecting another’s dignity, and glorifying their holy creator. Share your purpose generously, so that you might ignite your students’ desire to discern their own.

Hope

Other teachers have the gift of inspiring hope in their students. Students can come to school weighed down by despair. They may have suffered their own reversals or may carry the weight of their parents’ failures or, worse, their parents’ condemnation. They may have lost a parent or sibling, or been unable to relieve the suffering of a close relative or friend. Students may see no path forward and upward for themselves, and instead see only paths backward and down. They may be simply going through motions at school, biding their time for the disaster that they are sure their lives will become, because of the disasters they have seen the lives of others close to them become out of circumstances just like their own. Teachers can be vital sources of hope for students. If teachers are selling anything when teaching, they are selling the hope that student striving will make for a better life for the student. Teachers can see things for students that students do not see for themselves. Teachers can prophesy over students, predicting and anticipating their success, either in general or in specific paths that they suspect might attract a student. Spread your hope for students liberally over their lives. You never know which students will need and benefit from it most.  

Experience

Other teachers inspire their students by the breadth, depth, or uniqueness of their experience. To some students, some teachers can appear to be like the old man by the sea who has seen the comings and goings of kings and paupers, and the rising and falling of empires. In fact, some teachers have had experiences that students can barely imagine, in other exciting vocations, in adventurous travels, or simply in the happenstances of life. Grand and unforgettable experiences can enthrall and inspire students. Sometimes, all a student needs to inspire learning and growth is to desire to experience an adventure like their teacher has had or, instead, their own experience but with a similarly magical, glorious, surprising, enriching, or satisfying quality. When you teach, share with students some of the best, biggest, most extraordinary, and most unusual experiences you’ve had in your life. And then share with students how your education enabled and contributed to those experiences, and how their education might do likewise or even better for them.

Curiosity

Other teachers inspire their students through their continual sense of mystery, wonder, and curiosity. Curiosity is a great gift to inspire learning. Indeed, learning depends on an interest in discovering and acquiring things unknown. When you exhibit a restless desire to discover things that you have not previously encountered and grasped, you stir a similar desire in students. The teacher who exhibits a total mastery of their subject, without admitting any sense that they have more to learn, indeed that the subject has more to teach them, denies students an important tool for their own learning and growth. Don’t project yourself as a finished product, so stuffed to the gills with knowledge as to consume no more. Instead, project your appetite to learn more about your subject, to listen to your subject’s call, to discover its greater mysteries and wonders. Frequently reveal to students new developments in your field and historical developments that transformed it, just when its practitioners seemed to think that it had nothing more to offer. Share with students things that practitioners in your field are seeking to learn right now, and suggest to students things that practitioners in your field might soon discover. Exhibit your own curiosity, modeling it to students for them to adopt. 

Relevance

Teachers also inspire students when showing students the relevance of their learning. A great challenge of teaching many subjects is connecting a student learning the subject with what students expect to experience and need at a foreseeable juncture in their own lives. If students cannot appreciate why they need to learn a skill or subject, they tend not to strive to the same degree as when they see personal value in the learning. Inspiring teachers find ways to continually demonstrate their subject’s relevance. Simply reciting you’ll need to know this someday generally won’t inspire students in that belief. Rather, your inspiration might better be in showing skilled, admirable, and influential individuals using the knowledge or skill you are teaching students. You may, of course, tell your own stories of the difference that knowing your subject made in your own life. You may also show famous people developing and using the skills you teach. You might also find ways to show students how they can use your subject now, as soon as they learn it. Be creative and persistent in your demonstration of your subject’s relevance. Inspire students with the possibilities that your subject holds for them. 

Perseverance

Teachers also inspire students when teachers demonstrate their own perseverance. Sometimes, students don’t need inspiration so much in the form of a potential vocation, famous character, or practical skill. Students may already know that the knowledge, skills, or ethics you teach are valuable and will make them competent, influential, and powerful. Students may instead need to see that their perseverance is necessary to acquire that knowledge or those ethics and skills. Learning is necessarily a struggle to some degree. The zone of proximal development is naturally physiologically nauseating from its constant unfamiliarity. When you admit your own struggle yet show your perseverance, you inspire students to experience their own struggle not as a failure but as a necessity, indeed as a victory. Some of the best teachers are those who struggled the hardest and overcame the most. Their effectiveness may not be so much in their method as instead in their character. Those teachers have their own witness to show students that perseverance is necessary. Share with students how you struggle and yet persevere, so that they join you in the struggle and also persevere. 

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how inspirational do you feel that you are to students, as their teacher? What is your most inspirational attribute or quality, or from who or what do you draw it? Do you have colleagues whom you regard as more inspirational than you? What attribute or quality do they exhibit that inspires students? Do you have a personality attribute that you could deploy more generously to inspire students? Do you have a special power that you could exhibit to inspire students to discover their own power? Can you exhibit greater hope and possibility for students, to inspire them upward on their journeys? Have you had inspiring life experiences that you can share with students that encourage them to learn, grow, and develop to have their own adventures and experiences? Do you exhibit curiosity over your own subject, in ways that show students that you have more to learn, just as they have more to learn? 

Key Points

• Great teachers inspire students to learn, as much as instruct them.

• Your personality may inspire students to develop their own attributes.

• Your passion for your subject may inspire students in the same.

• Your power of reason, memory, or other force may inspire students.

• Your hope may inspire students to see possibilities for their own life.

• Your adventures and life experience may inspire students to adventure.

• Your curiosity may encourage students to adopt a learning attitude.

• Your demonstration of your subject’s relevance can inspire students.

• Your perseverance can inspire students to likewise persevere.

Read Chapter 20.