The Best Teachers Never Stop Learning

In his tremendously helpful book, ​Teaching to Change Lives: Seven Proven Ways to Make Your Teaching Come Alive, the late Howard Hendricks reminds us that the best teachers remain passionately committed to learning themselves. The best teachers always remain students themselves. Listen to how Hendricks puts it (Teaching to change lives, pp. 17-18):

The effective teacher always teaches from the overflow of a full life. 

The Law of the Teacher [i.e., one of Hendricks "seven proven ways to make your teaching come alive], simply stated, is this: If you stop growing today, you stop teaching tomorrow.

Neither personality nor methodology can substitute for this principle. You cannot communicate out of a vacuum. You cannot impart what you don't possess. If you don't know it - truly know it - you can't give it. 

This law embraces a philosophy that I, as a teacher, am primarily a learner, a student among students. I am perpetuating the learning process; I am still en route. And by becoming a student again, I as a teacher will look at the education process through a radically new - and uniquely personal - set of eyes. 

I must keep growing and changing. The Word of God, of course, does not change, but my understanding of it does change because I am a developing individual. This is why Peter could tell us at the end of his second epistle, 'Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.'

Such a philosophy requires a certain attitude - the attitude that you have not yet 'arrived.' A person who applies this principle of teaching is always asking, 'How can I improve?'

Think of it this way: As long as you live, you learn; and as long as you learn, you live.

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I'm confident that Hendricks would agree that "growth" and "improvement" here as a teacher isn't only a cognitive growth. It's not only getting more and more head knowledge of the subject you're teaching - though I'm sure that's included. I think he'd agree that "growth" and "improvement" also include learning what to VALUE and how to VALUE it. It includes growing in PASSION for our subject matter. And it includes the lifelong process of increasingly APPLYING those things we teach.

So teachers: Are you learning?