The Skillful Teacher

particularly if that learning has been forced on me by changed
external circumstances—is rarely something I embrace or seek.
When I review my own experiences as a learner, it is helpful for me
to recall what it was that was helpful to my efforts to overcome my
own resistance. For example, a learning task of my forties—learn-
ing to drive—was resisted by me for years. I only embraced this task
when its necessity became abundantly clear. When I moved from
New York to Minnesota, the abysmal lack of public transport meant
that not driving was not an option. Cars have always seemed to me
like sophisticated instruments of death as much as transportation
devices, so for many years I avoided learning to drive them through
a combination of sneakiness (pretending I’d lost my temporary per-
mit) and luck (living mostly in cities).
The fact that everyone I knew seemed to be able to drive effort-
lessly did not, as one might imagine, ease my anxiety; rather, it
increased it, since I was convinced that if I tried to learn I would be
revealed in all my shame, ineptitude, and embarrassment as the one
person in the world who showed a total inability to acquire this
skill. Eventually, my wife agreed to use part of a sabbatical to teach
me and, as I learned under her direction, I was alerted to some of
the reasons for my own resistance. For example, because this was a
sabbatical we were far away from friends and family. This was a boon
to me because it allowed me the privacy to make mistakes without
these being noticed by people whose approval I wanted. I had never
thought of the ways my insistence on group work might strengthen
or even inculcate students’ resistance to learning until I was given
Responding to Resistance
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HE
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KILLFUL
T
EACHER
this welcome opportunity of conducting a major learning effort 
in relative solitude. I realized that my freedom to make mistakes in
private meant I would be willing to take more risks, and endure
more shame, than if my learning had been situated wholly in groups.
My own welcoming of the chance to make errors in private alerted
me to the need to pay more attention in my own teaching to cre-
ate private opportunities for learning (and the mistakes that this
would inevitably entail) along with my usual classroom discussion
and group project activities.
Two other things were helpful. First, my wife set realistic limits
regarding learning rather than creating high expectations. This ran
counter to what I had believed about learning. My assumption had
always been that learners would rise to the highest challenge I set
them. Now I started to doubt this insight. Because I had been told
that my three-month project was to learn the essentials of driv-
ing on quiet country roads and then to be able to drive the car 
into a local town and back again, I had no fears of being expected
to engage in freeway driving or undertake overly complicated
maneuvers. As it happened, I achieved this three-month goal in
more like three weeks, a fact that increased my confidence consid-
erably since I assumed I was galloping ahead of schedule. Had I
been told at the outset that this was the three-week goal, I would
have felt intimidated and fearful. As a result of this experience, I
now realize that my setting high expectations can sometimes
inhibit and demoralize as well as inspire. The other important fea-
ture in this learning effort was my wife’s clear, calm, and support-
ive style of teaching. She didn’t push me too fast, she broke a
complex skill set down into a series of small, incremental chunks,
she gave clear instructions, she praised frequently those things that
were done well, and readily admitted that when she was learning
to drive she had all the fears and anxieties I was experiencing.
That alerted me to the importance of teacher disclosure and to
the need to provide sufficient scaffolding for learners early on in
a learning effort.
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