The Skillful Teacher

Maxim 6: Take Your Instincts Seriously
Many of us are socialized into believing that the knowledge and
insights contained within textbooks and teacher training programs
have a greater legitimacy than the knowledge and insights we our-
selves generate in response to the particular crises and dilemmas we
face in our daily practice. Although I don’t want to decry books and
teacher education unnecessarily (after all, I write books on teach-
ing and work in a school of education), it is also true that in a very
real sense teachers are the greatest experts on their own situations.
No one is inside a crisis or problem in exactly the way you are.
Often you may feel instinctively that a particular action is called
for in a particular situation, but you refrain from following this
because it is either omitted from, or actually contradicts, good prac-
tice as documented in a teaching text or a teacher education class.
Certainly, texts can be right when teachers are wrong. They can
sometimes suggest interpretations of a situation, and possibilities for
its resolution, that never would have occurred to you. But you
should not immediately assume this is always the case. If your
instinct screams at you that something is either right or wrong, even
if this goes against the conventional wisdom you have learned, be
open to taking this seriously and possibly acting on it.
This carries the risk, of course, that you’ll find out that your
instincts are completely misjudged and that you have seriously mis-
calculated the consequences of following them. But if this worst-
case scenario does happen, at least you will have learned something
about how to recognize when your instincts are misleading and
when they are well-grounded in reality. So don’t automatically shut
off an instinct the first time it speaks to you in the mistaken belief
that if it doesn’t match the theories espoused in books and profes-
sional programs it must, by definition, be wrong.