Who is the Teacher? This is a question that has been answered by the machine that is education in a way that is worrisome and limiting. So limiting that teachers have lost the flexiblity to respond generatively to major challenges to the system (think COVID times). It is not that teachers don’t have the capacity to do so. It’s that the growth they would need to use their personal resources optimally can’t happen because the field’s image of the teacher is so limited. Those of us who study the principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach are guided by the question, “Who is the child?” It is time to ask, “Who is the teacher?” And “Who do we want to be?”
Traditional discourse holds that a good teacher is a cooperative cog in the machine. She is, as E. Said has said, tame (Said, 1993 as quoted in Giamminuti, 2024). She does not upset the apple cart. She does not have an unmutable curiosity or a restless mind. She takes direction from the administration (the boss). She accepts professional development in one-off workshops or seminars and, even if she encounters tempting new ways of thinking, may not dare act on them. She is “professional,” which means she follows the adopted curriculum and the pacing as directed. The teacher who cannot or chooses not to play this part may be reprimanded and sometimes socially outcast or bullied. She is an inappropriate cog in the school machine. Here I speak from experience, as a one-time outsider: what Dorothy Suskind calls a “creative” in her book, Workplace Bullying (2023), an eye-opening read if you find yourself in that position.
Teachers are capable of far more.Though they have intelligence to spare, they are led to believe it has limited usefulness to what they do in the classroom. Their creativity is relegated then to making attractive bulletin board displays or to making incremental adjustments to a curriculum they have inherited, which is attached to unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning. These assumptions are trusted by school administrators and dominate social and political discourse. They are the underpinnings of public certainty about teaching and learning. The trouble is that certainty and groupthink are incompatible with innovation, inquiry, and construction of theory, all of which should be a teacher’s rights to exercise.
Not only is this a waste of the tremendous potential teachers have, but it limits what children learn. Those who are lucky enough to find themselves in situations where their intelligence is honored, where innovation is encouraged, and where they can evolve as teacher-researchers are a relative few in the field. My experience as a consultant in public school kindergartens showed me teachers-in-boxes, individuals with much to offer that they were afraid to show. They were kept over-busy with curriculum requirements and pacing guides, paperwork, meetings in which they received even more directives, so that even if they knew how to bring their whole selves to teaching there would be no time or space to grow. And then there was the culture of compliance, even about what teachers displayed on their classroom walls. The restrictive culture slipped down to the children, who walked down the hallway to special classes or the lunchroom in silent, straight lines and were told that the meeting couldn’t begin until each child was sitting silently criss-cross applesauce on her own assigned circle on the rug. The children’s behavior in and out of the classroom was regulated just as the teachers’ was. It can be hard to find the joy or the growth in that environment (though I have to say that, to their credit, both teachers and children did to a degree though not to their potential).
So how do educators deserve to see themselves and be seen by others? As the resourceful, astute, creative, and imaginative people they are, as perpetual learners themselves, and as theory-makers about children, teaching, and learning. The things we want for children, we should also want for teachers. In Embracing Challenges in Early Childhood Education: Flexible Protocols for the Thinking Teacher, due to be released by Routledge in July 2025, I propose that what we want for children is that they will
- Develop awake minds,
- Pay attention to their own curiosity and have the disposition to follow it
- Develop a disposition toward inquiry
- Experience pleasure in learning
- Feel a desire to communicate and act on that desire
- Reach for relationships and know how to sustain them
- Challenge themselves
- Develop cognitive and emotional flexibility (Oken-Wright 2026)
Shouldn’t we want those same things for teachers? Awake minds to notice what children are trying to show them? “Permission” to follow their curiosity about children, teaching and learning? The disposition toward inquiry, both with and for children? Finding joy in the process of teaching and learning? Following a drive to share their documentation and insights with children, colleagues, families, and the world? Eschewing siloing and acting on a disposition to collaborate with colleagues? Turning their questions into challenges for themselves? Finding the ability to think beyond assumptions and rejecting the “because we’ve always done it this way” rationalization for the status quo? If teachers begin to see themselves as deserving of a culture that will support their intelligence and autonomy, and if school leaders share that image of the teacher and create that culture, teaching can become more than an act of compliance. This has implications for teacher educators, school and district leaders, pedagogical companions, teachers themselves, and politicians (who, in my opinion, should have no say in any of this but think they do).
How can school leaders support teachers’ evolution and growth? They can embrace a robust image of the teacher. Trust in a competent, thinking teacher needs to emerge. Administrators can see themselves as facilitators, out to provide what teachers need to thrive, rather than as managers. To do that, they would need to be open to and educate themselves about the potentiality of teachers. They could start by reading Ann Pelo and Margie Carter’s excellent book, From Teaching to Thinking, A Pedagogy for Reimagining Our Work (2018). Perhaps they find support by consulting with a pedagogist and observing her working with teachers. They could remake their expectations of professional development to be continuous, individual, and encouraging of teachers’ questions and research. They could loosen the lid holding schedules to unvarying rigidity and allow time for children’s research and collaboration among teachers. They could encourage teachers’ efforts not in how well they tow the line, but in how they innovate responsively. They could find and consult with other school leaders who have successfully created a culture of inquiry, collaboration, and collegiality at their schools, where teachers evolve and soar as thinkers.
These are just a few thoughts that come to my mind. We need continuous and widespread dialogue to challenge the current image of the teacher and transform it into something teachers can grow on. It’s time for teachers to reclaim what they know is within, and time to transform and reclaim the image of the teacher.
References:
Giamminuti, S. (2024) “Reciprocal Formazione and Collective Care” in Giamminute, S., Cagliari, P., Guidici, C., & Strozzi, P. The Role of the Pedagogista in Reggio Emilia: Voices and Ideas for a Dialectic Educational Experience. Routledge.
Oken-Wright, P. (In Press) Embracing Challenges in Early Childhood Education: Flexible Protocols for the Thinking Teacher. Routledge.
Pelo, A. & Carter, M. (2018) From Teaching to Thinking: A Pedagogy for Reimagining Our Work. Exchange Press.
Suskind, D. (2023) Workplace Bullying: Finding Your Way to Big-Tent Belonging. Rowman & Littlefield.