Teachers Are Also Learners

by Jess Durrett

We live in a culture that expects adults to understand things the first time they are told. The failure to absorb and apply a new idea or feedback is a personal failing rather than a feature of how humans actually learn. This assumption is so embedded in how we design workplaces, training programs, and professional relationships that most of us have never slowed down to really think about it.

This idea misunderstands what learning is. In the same way a curriculum does not teach a child because it was presented, adults require the same considerations of safety, understanding, and trust in order to learn. We accept this in theory for children, yet we seem to believe that at some point these needs disappear. The gap between what we know children need in order to learn and what we provide for the adults who teach them is one of the most consequential blind spots in how schools are run and laws are written.

The first teachers I coached were the student teachers and assistants in my own classroom. I was a cooperating teacher before I had language for what I was doing, which meant I was figuring out in real time how to help another adult understand a child the way I was coming to understand children through my training alongside speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and social workers.

What I discovered was that the most useful thing I could offer was not a technique. It was a question: what is this teacher grappling with, and how can I support in a meaningful way? That question does not assume failure; it assumes investment and a willingness to identify and solve classroom challenges. 

I have coached many teachers since then, and the range of learners is wide. None of these teachers are problems to manage. They are adults who want to do well, and my job as a coach is to figure out what doing well looks like for each of them and what is getting in the way. 

As I navigated what worked and what didn’t, it allowed my work with graduate students to be more deliberate. What they needed was not a list of strategies or tools, even if they asked for it. They needed a framework for thinking about human development and learning that was flexible enough to outlast any particular curriculum, program, or tool. The teachers who internalize that way of thinking are the ones who can adapt when the setting around them changes. Teachers who are given tools or training on a particular program instead are the ones who come back the following year asking what to do next.

At a Chinese immersion school in San Francisco, where I served as the school's first and only learning specialist for a 400-student Mandarin immersion program, a significant part of my work was coaching teachers on how to understand the students they were most confused or concerned about. What they needed from me was reassurance about what they were doing well, empathy for the classroom challenges, and an open, non-evaluative conversation about what to try next.

Giving a teacher a developmental framework for understanding a child changes his relationship to the difficulty almost immediately. When a teacher understands that the child who is disrupting the lesson is not defiant but dysregulated, he stops experiencing that child as a problem to be solved and starts experiencing her as a person to be understood. That shift is not just better for the child. It is a fundamentally different experience for the teacher, and it is one of the things that makes the work sustainable over time.

Every school leader has teachers they struggle to coach. This may include teachers who are not reaching certain students, resistant to feedback, or anxious and hard on themselves when given feedback. Most leaders approach these conversations with a combination of hope and dread because the stakes are high and the standard tools, observation rubrics, competency frameworks, and formal evaluation cycles are not always suited to what is actually happening.

A developmental lens changes these conversations in the same way it changes conversations about children. A teacher who is not reaching her students is not, in most cases, a teacher who does not care. She is a teacher who does not yet have the understanding she needs to respond to what she is seeing. That is a developmental gap, not a character flaw, and it calls for curiosity and partnership.

When I approach a coaching conversation with a teacher the way I approach an observation of a child, starting with what I notice rather than what I judge, asking questions rather than delivering conclusions, trying to understand the teacher's experience of the difficulty before offering a framework for it, something shifts in the room. The defensiveness that makes these conversations so hard tends to dissolve when a teacher feels that she is being understood rather than assessed. And once she feels understood, she becomes curious rather than guarded, which is exactly the state in which learning and change become possible.

I know what it feels like to be the teacher in the room, to have worked twelve hour days and still feel behind, to be observed and not know what the observer will comment, and to care deeply about children you cannot quite reach. Any leader who lets that memory shape how they enter conversations with teachers will be able to connect and coach more meaningfully.

The argument I have been building across this series is really about a single idea: developmental understanding is not a strategy for children; it is a way of seeing people. A parent who comes to a school meeting worried about her child is not so different from a teacher who comes to a coaching conversation worried about how well she teaches. Both are carrying uncertainty about someone or something they care about and will be more able to hear and use what leadership offers if they feel heard in their experience.

The parent education work I did in San Francisco, co-facilitating sessions on neurodiversity and child development with families at a private Italian immersion school over three years, was effective not because of the content we delivered but because of the posture we brought to it. We were experts hosting the evenings who came with a framework and invited families into the conversation. The families who participated brought their own deep knowledge of their children and experiences that we genuinely need in order to do our work well.

When all of these pieces are in place, a school becomes something different from a collection of programs and services. It becomes a community organized around understanding. The child is understood by her teacher, who has a framework for reading her development rather than just her performance. The teacher is understood by her leader, who approaches coaching with curiosity rather than evaluation. The family is understood by the school as a partner whose knowledge of the child is irreplaceable. And the leader is sustained, in part, by a culture that values the same developmental understanding in its adult relationships that it asks of its teachers in the classroom.

None of this is achieved by a single professional development workshop or a new observation protocol. It is built gradually, through consistent modeling of what it looks like to approach a person, child or adult, with genuine curiosity about what they are experiencing and what they need. That modeling starts with leaders asking: what is this human grappling with, and how can I support in a meaningful way? Are there structures I can create that allow for more genuine human connection? 

Those questions, asked with sincerity, are where understanding begins. And understanding, in my experience, is where almost everything else that matters in a school becomes possible.