The Skillful Teacher

Forming a Supportive Network
The importance of college teachers having a group of peers to
whom they can turn for support and nourishment has been stressed
at various points earlier in this book. In the preceding chapter I out-
lined the importance for political survival of building alliances, and
I mentioned in passing the emotional sustenance these provided.
In Chapter Five I mentioned the role that membership in a peer
learning community played in helping teachers (as well as students)
survive the risks of impostorship, cultural suicide, lost innocence,
and roadrunning. Additionally, my discussions of the benefits of
team teaching throughout this book have referred to the way that
Surviving Emotionally
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EACHER
team members can encourage each other and keep each other on
an emotionally even keel. So in this final chapter I will only briefly
reprise this theme.
College teachers spend so much time teaching solo behind the
closed doors of their classrooms that this isolation can induce in
them a distorted perception of their own failings. When teachers
talk together in staff meetings, their conversations usually concern
administrative necessities and procedures. Rarely do they talk about
the rhythms and dilemmas of their day-to-day teaching practices.
Yet, private and informal talks with your peers about situations that
confound you usually reveal that these situations are equally con-
founding to others! Realizing that other colleagues regard them-
selves as inept and inadequate—the same way you regard
yourself—is enormously reassuring.
Let me emphasize this point regarding the benefits of teachers
belonging to a peer learning community. Such a community may
not suggest new resolutions to long-standing problems. You may
outline whatever problems keep bedeviling your practice (such as
a dominant student who shuts everyone else down in class, students
who show up late and leave early, discussions that fall flat because
no one has done the prereading, learners who hand in substandard
work but expect an A, students who go behind your back to com-
plain about the apparently unpatriotic views you express) and find
that everyone else has these same problems and wanted to talk to
you because they were hoping you would have the answer! It is the
fact of knowing that you’re not alone in your struggles that is the
point. When you talk about dilemmas and frustrations that you
thought were unique to you and caused by your own particular
shortcomings, and then you find that your peers share these exact
same difficulties, you often feel a rush of relief as a weight is lifted
off your shoulders. You realize you are not uniquely ill suited to
teaching but that you’re experiencing feelings and emotions that
are almost banal in their normality.
This feeling of being part of a shared experience, of suffering
the same pangs and anxieties your peers admit to, is enormously
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reassuring. You lose the sense that the whole world is set against
you. You stop thinking that you’re stuck in a race to become pro-
fessionally competent in which everyone else is forging ahead suc-
cessfully while you seem glued to the experiential starting blocks.
Team teaching will usually cure you of such feelings, which is one
reason why I am such an advocate of this practice. It helps you rec-
ognize that you are participating in a common reality when you felt
you were the only one suffering. Stumbling across this realization
of commonly shared reactions and experiences is such a pleasure
to see emerge in a teacher reflection group. As soon as one person
admits to feeling like an impostor, discusses how they obsess over
the minority of poor evaluations they receive, talks about feeling
powerless in the face of student apathy or contempt, or describes a
problem they assumed occurred only in their classroom, the others
in the group chime in with their own experiences of these same
feelings. In an experiential domino effect, people realize that, far
from being alone, they are going through emotional rhythms and
experiencing anxieties or problems that are commonly shared,
completely normal, and utterly predictable. This realization can
make the difference between staying in the classroom and quitting
out of a sense of personal failure.