Authentically Learning YOU: Sit Where They Sit

In order to be an effective teacher or leader within the workplace, one must understand how they learn new information as well as how they teach that information. Once you understand how you learn / teach you become a more effective leader because you begin to understand how others learn and can alter your teaching style in a way that helps others effectively learn new material. In order to truly make this happen, one must teach from the heart. By this I mean, someone must teach from an authentic standpoint allowing who they truly are to define the way in which they communicate. From my experience within the classroom as well as in the workplace, utilizing immediacy, personal experiences for a basis of class discussion and taking time to understand someone’s perspective allows students / coworkers to feel your desire to genuinely connect with them.

In the book Eight Essential Questions Teachers Ask, author Deanna Dannels answers all the questions that most new teachers ask in regards to teaching in the classroom. However, I found that most topics she covered are also true in the workplace / organizations. Throughout the book, I found five key take -aways I believe go hand in hand with “authentically learning you”.

1  1. “Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.” (p. 113)

    2.“Fear is normal. It is often an uninvited and unwanted guest at a dinner party. But don’t turn it away. Let it in, acknowledge its presence, and then focus on what is important: the meal.” (p. 90)

    3. “Do not simply focus on the power and authority as punitive; rather think of them as opportunities. In physics, in fact, power is defined as the rate at which energy is used, transferred, or transformed. Why not think about your power in the classroom in this way – as something used, transferred, and transformed? If you do this, you are left reconsidering power and its potential to create change, rather than its potential to control change.” (p. 67)

    4. “Relational dynamics of the classroom are extremely important and can have a lasting influence on you and your students… And for some, nothing else will matter.” (p. 139)

       5. "How you speak truth can make a difference in how students are able to hear it. You can speak it in a way that tears a student down, or you can speak it in a way that motivates them to move forward. Keeping them in motion does not necessarily mean keeping them on their current path. In fact, through your feedback, they might change directions, but changing directions is still motion.” (p. 195)

I have heard it said before that in order to really reach people, whether that’s your students or your co-workers or employees, you must “sit where they sit”. We need to understand the perspectives of where others are coming from, genuinely know / love what we teach, and like Dannels says, show them the way.  As leaders, if we can grasp how we naturally teach, what our natural strengths are, we can capitalize on those things in order to leave positive impacts on the people around us.

#authenticallylearningyou

Dannels, Deanna. (2015). 8 Essential questions teachers ask: A guidebook for communicating with students. New York: Oxford University Press.