Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn

You know that age-old expression that goes something like, “I ended up learning more from them than they ever learned from me”?  Whoever said it first really nailed it – especially when it comes to working with Daytime Moon.  On the other hand, it’s not necessarily an outcome one intends or strives for as a teacher…

Let me explain.  I’ve been involved with DMC for two years, and every moment with our students and actors proves that old expression true and true again.  I firmly believe that our actors grow and learn so much in our short time together, but I always feel humbled by all the lessons they end up teaching us!  So as I geared up to start this year’s fall session at Cooke Academy (my first program as head teacher!), I thought to myself, “Well, hmm… I need to do Daytime Moon Creations and these actors proud and instill lots and lots of amazing things unto them” – since I would inevitably learn so much from them, I wanted to make sure to try extra hard!!

And so far, it’s been great: exploring new and old games, meeting new faces and catching up with our alumni, but it was all moving very fast.  As I walked home from our second class, my own nerves and huge desire to be the best teacher I could possibly be threatened to take over my thoughts, and as I started to think about the following week’s lesson plan, I started to get distracted by insecurities and those darn nerves.  So as is my wont to do, I caught up on a little neuroscience research, and made a couple of very important realizations about teaching.  We are intrinsically an exploring species.  And everything we do at Daytime Moon has always supported this: that we need to harness this wandering, this exploration, and create and play and make mistakes and learn from them.   We may sort of believe this to be the truth (that we should learn from our mistakes), but it’s usually easier said than done!  Most of us would rather just get it right the first time!  But we actually get way more out of everything if we do make mistakes – though we are only going to want to keep making mistakes if we are in an environment that makes it totally okay to do so. 

I realized this mistake-making needed to carry over to the teacher’s (my own) mentality as well.  If I was allowed to fail, I could really give it my all.  Though the chance for mistakes might be greater,  I wouldn’t watch myself, I wouldn’t be afraid, and I’d be demonstrating that the class needn’t be afraid either.  That it’s okay!  Teachers, of course, should be as prepared as best as he or she can be.  And I can be completely prepared and get the support I need from Jenna and from my assistant teacher Ella, but that after all the preparedness, I just needed to plunge in!  That it’s okay for me to learn and pick myself up and discover and learn and grow because I am enabling my students to do the same thing.  The way a teacher behaves has more impact on students than how much a teacher knows.  Daytime Moon’s mission seeks to create a joyful environment where we can play, where we can make mistakes – but here I was not affording that to myself!

Truly, the most important thing that we at Daytime Moon strive to keep in our classes is joy.  The brain rewards itself with joy after successes – which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive with “The Destination.”  The process is sometimes more rewarding than the end goal itself!   And though many of us believe this to be true, it’s true neurologically as well.  We turn our energies to the things that are ours, the things we want to create, to learn, to move through the process of, to challenge, to overcome.   My students will begin to create and to write their own play next week.   And I am teaching those students.  We can own our own processes.

Maybe it’s not who learns the most.  Maybe it’s something we all experience together, helping each other in our discoveries.  It’s comforting to know that we are all in this process together, that we can grow together.   The following is something I hope to keep present in every class, but that I now know applies to my own teacher journey as well: “The joy of learning is indispensable in study as breathing is in running.”  How very true.

Michelle