A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans (19 page)

Consistency, like patience, is a crucial teacher quality and one that's hard to maintain. Consistency for teachers means things like keeping your behavior and emotional reactions fairly constant so students know what to expect, treating your students with the same level of respect and applying the rules the same way to everyone, and having the same expectations of all students. There will be exceptions to the consistency rule—for example, one student might need to do extra work that others don't need to do because he or she has fewer skills than the others in that area and needs to catch up to the others—but it's important to try to treat everyone similarly and fairly and try to keep your own behavior fairly constant in order to build trust.

Reliability is a kind of consistency. Being a reliable teacher means showing up on time and prepared, making yourself available to students, and generally doing what you say you will do. It's hard to expect them to be reliable if you can't be reliable as well. And you will lose students' trust if you exhibit erratic behavior and frequently go back on your word without a good reason.

There will be times as a teacher when you screw up in the patience, consistency, or reliability categories, or all three. In those cases, the patient, consistent, and reliable thing to do is admit you messed up, apologize if necessary, and show students that you continue to strive to achieve these characteristics.

Be Open and Honest—Maybe Even a Little Vulnerable

While you're projecting respect, you should also try to project open honesty. You don't have to tell everyone in the class your deepest secrets—and, as I already mentioned, you should maintain some professional boundaries—but showing students a little of yourself and making yourself available and receptive to students can really help build trust. Trust is important if you want students to come to you with problems, respect what you have to say, and be receptive to learning in your class. And it's vital if you ever find yourself needing to talk to a student about a problem he or she is having or creating.

Sarah Davies talked to me about learning to open up and:

… admit to your personal feelings—to go really deeply into yourself with someone who you might not know all that well—because it's important for them to understand where you're coming from.

And Sylva Markson talked about being open and giving students the benefit of the doubt initially, even when you know it's possible that you might get burned:

One of the things that my former high priestess would say— and my high priest even more so, I think, that I don't like and I don't really want to believe—is that you can never really know a person until they have nothing more to gain from you.… It's only then, when you see what they do, that you know their true nature. You can't know a person—really know them—until they're at that point.… But I don't want to be that jaded person who comes to the Craft saying I can't really trust anybody until we are completely on equal footing and I have nothing to give them, because until then they're just playing a game with me or they might just be playing a game with me. I don't want to think that about people, and I won't, and the consequence of that is I might get my ass handed to me once in a while, but I'd rather get hurt than be totally jaded about everybody and never give anybody a chance.

Markson also talked about owning your mistakes and being honest with students about them:

You're going to make mistakes … probably some big whoppers. And to be honest with your people and tell them, “Hey, you know what? I'm learning here too,” and be forthright and don't try to pull power plays on them, and don't try to bluff your way through it, but be human. I think that they'll respond well to that. They will be a partner for you instead of peons that are feeding from your hand, which is not how I think it should be.

Again, you don't have to tell students your life story, but it can help build trust if you're honest about problems you are facing that might have an effect on your class. Sarah Davies told me a story about a teacher who wasn't honest with students and how it hurt credibility:

I had a teacher who was obviously exhausted and had not made time in their life for teaching and did not want to admit it, and so told the class, “Oh, well, you know, I just moved a bunch of stuff, and my house is full of boxes, and so we can't meet tonight.” And then someone else who lived quite near them volunteered
their
house, but then the excuse changed. I forget what it changed to—“We can't do that because of some other reason.” It was clear that they were not being open and honest with their students, and I understand the desire to save face and try to have some semblance of authority, but it really ended up making them lack all credibility.

Once you lose credibility, it can be difficult to impossible to regain it. Adult learners approach learning critically, and they're less likely to continue working with a teacher they no longer trust or feel they can rely on.

Don't Be Dogmatic

If there is one thing I have learned in more than twenty years in the Pagan community, it's that there is rarely one right, true, and only answer to
anything
in Paganism. Creating an atmosphere of exploration, not dogma, helps facilitate learning; rigidity shuts it down. Sarah Davies commented on being dogmatic:

I think a lot of our philosophy is
not
to impart our philosophy—to try really hard not to be dogmatic and not to tell them what's right and what's wrong and what they should be doing, but more to help them find themselves and find the path that's functional and fulfilling for them.

Sylva Markson also talked about teaching with flexibility:

The bottom line is someone's spiritual path is
their
spiritual path. It's not mine. And yes, they might very well be walking that path alongside me for a time in their lives, because I'm their teacher and that's the way it's going to be for the time being.… I certainly don't want to force my viewpoints down someone else's throat if it's not a good fit for them, because it's their spirituality, not mine. I go to great pains to underscore the thought that we can have different viewpoints; that we don't have to all agree; that we're all adults—every one of us in the group is an adult—and we all have our own life experiences, we all have our own personalities, and we all have our own thoughts about things.

Nobody likes being told “it's my way or the highway,” and adult learners are particularly turned off by that kind of inflexibility. Brian Rowe talks about putting aside the dogma to make space for exploration:

A lot of my philosophy around learning is creating an environment where individuals can explore, learn, and even fail, and then iteratively try again. The experience, to me, is more important than esoteric, abstract facts, and the more opportunities that are given to try, the more that can be gained or gleaned out of what happens.

As Brian points out, sometimes the experience is more important than the facts. The difference between facts and experience is similar to the difference between believing in something and knowing it. I have often said that one of the great things about being Pagan is that we participate in the world around us—the cycles of the earth, the patterns of nature. We don't have to have faith and belief in the Divine around us because we
know
—we experience it. This doesn't mean facts aren't important; one of the most basic things teachers do is pass along facts. But if we're too rigid and dogmatic, we don't leave space for experimentation and gnosis, two things that are inherent in Paganism.

If that isn't reason enough to chuck the dogma—or at least the dogmatic attitude—here's another: teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and if we as teachers think that we have the world all figured out—that we are “right”—we miss out on the opportunities to learn that teaching and our students present us.

Don't Expect Perfection—Yours or Theirs

If you want to create a positive learning environment, it's important as a teacher to let go of the idea that you have to be—or pretend to be—perfect. It sets you and your students up for disappointment and creates an unnecessary barrier between you and them. If you're going to teach, get realistic about who you are and what you are doing. If your students wanted to learn from saints, they'd go to church. Sylva Markson commented about perfectionism:

Don't expect perfection out of yourself, and don't try to pretend to your students that you're perfect. You're human. You're on a journey as much as they are. If they're going to be in your group, they are partners with you on your journey, and you are a partner with them on theirs. So get off your high horse and just be a human being.

One thing teachers of adult learners—especially teachers who like to be perceived as perfect—need to come to terms with is that their students might very well know more about or be better at something than they are. Melanie Henry commented about this:

You have to be willing to look at what you're not good at and get that there are going to be people who are good at every single thing you're not. Especially if it embarrasses you. You are going to have students good at that, because that's just the way it goes. And you've got to be okay with that.

T. Thorn Coyle's advice for new teachers works well for teachers who want to be perfect: “Listen. Come from your core. Connect. Don't try to teach everything. Try to pass on one thing.” The closer you stay to your core—to your true self, with all its glories and limitations—the more accessible and effective you'll be as a teacher.

[contents]

Chapter 9

Taking It Online

Teaching via the web offers some awesome possibilities for Pagan teachers. It can provide greater flexibility than in-person classes, especially if lessons are not delivered in real time—students can take the classes when their schedules allow. It also allows you a greater reach as a teacher. Not only can you teach more students, you can teach people who are not living in your area or any area in which you are likely to travel. T. Thorn Coyle told me about her experiences using online teaching to reach a wide variety of people:

I love the variety of people that get to interact via online classes. The wealth of experience they bring and the perspectives from living all over the world make the discovery of our commonalities all the more poignant. Plus, it is a great way for people to spend time studying according to their work or family schedules, it being less tied to real-time events, with the exceptions of things like chats or in-person weekends if it is that sort of a class.

As I mentioned in the introduction, there are far more people seeking teaching than there are teachers, so another great benefit of online teaching is that one teacher can reach more people online than he or she could in person. This can be especially good for students who live in an area where there are few or no other Pagans, or for students who can't find the “flavor” of Paganism they want in their local area.

And Thorn mentioned another benefit—networking:

The other helpful aspect to online classes is that we can access a variety of teachers and share ideas readily with people of many traditions. This, of course, can become a distraction from settling into deep work, but it doesn't have to be.

Of course, online teaching has its challenges, too. One big challenge that teachers face online is that online students usually don't get the face to face interaction that they would in an in-person class, which can make communication more difficult. Christopher Penczak commented:

I find that it is harder to evaluate the energy of a situation online. I'm going on people's direct feedback written down, but I don't have a sense of facial expression and energetic expressions. I realize I rely a lot on energy and auras when I teach, so I've had to follow my gut or ask internal questions about homework assignments to give the proper feedback.

Another challenge is that it can be harder to build strong bonds with your students if you never meet them face to face. This is not such a big deal for one-off classes or short series, but it is a bigger issue for people who are trying to establish long-term student-teacher relationships. It's hard to build those bonds over the web.

And Thorn pointed out that some kinds of teachers and learners—especially the more self-sufficient ones—do better with online courses than others do:

Also, if students are really in trouble and don't speak up, it can be hard to offer the best sort of help. My students have learned to be pretty self-sufficient because of things like distance, but also, nurturing is not my nature. It is more my way to offer some techniques, insights, or ideas, and let people explore them on their own. For other teachers or students this would not work at all, and I acknowledge that. Friends of mine only teach one-on-one or in very small groups and find that to be best for them and for their apprentices. That is not my strength, nor did I ever expect that from my teachers. Even though I was sometimes taught one-on-one or in small groups, I was still expected to go off and just do the work myself, with minimal support. That worked for me.

I also asked Holli Emore about the differences between teaching online and in person:

As a teacher myself, both occasionally at Cherry Hill Seminary and in my consulting profession, I would say that it's really not very different. As mentioned before, I'm not going to have the visual cues that one has in a site-based classroom, but then we are not working with undergrads or grade school. Our students bring, in some cases, a whole career's worth of experience with them, and I've seen classes that practically ran themselves, so eager were the students to dive into the material and discuss it with others.

Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, co-founder of the online Grey School of Wizardry, also commented on the differences:

Well, online teaching requires many of the same skills as classroom teaching, but also the ability to express oneself extremely well in writing—and for different ages. Also, online teaching isn't time- and space-bound the way classroom teaching is. Lessons and assignments come in around the clock, from throughout the world, rather than in a fixed time and place. In many ways this is much easier, because teachers can sit at home, don't have to dress up, and can respond to students' questions and grade assignments at their own convenience. Since the teachers aren't seeing the students face to face, there's no question of favoritism based on appearance, race, sex, age, clothes, etc. But by the same token, all the visual cues we so depend on for daily communications and feedback are entirely absent online: facial expressions, body language, etc. So teachers have to be able to deal with that.

Communication issues do arise on the web, but Holli Emore points out that correspondence courses have always had that issue:

Obviously, we have little in the way of visual or audio cues. That said, we are finding that Cherry Hill Seminary is actually out ahead of most universities in the country, who are still very tied to the older distance-education models. Some of us might remember taking home a box of audiocassettes or videotapes and, basically, working through something more like an old correspondence course. I know that I took courses in the 1980s in which I never knew who my instructors were.

Ways to Teach Online

There are many ways to teach online, but most people who are teaching Paganism online seem to follow one of these three models:

• The “If I Post It, They Will Come” approach: Posting videos, podcasts, or complete lessons online but not interacting with students who use them, except maybe by enabling the comments feature and reading the feedback.
  
• The “Kitchen Sink” approach: Teaching using a variety of web technologies (webpages, chat, Skype, video, email, IM, podcasts, blogs, interactive web workspaces, etc.), some interactive and some not, pieced together to make a complete experience.
  
• The “Full Monty” approach: Using an LMS (learning management software) program, frequently also incorporating several of the technologies from the Kitchen Sink approach.
  

The “If I Post It, They Will Come” Approach

Posting material for people to find online is a good way to get started teaching, get feedback before developing it into a full class, or supplement a full online or in-person class. Posting text lessons, videos, or podcasts (podcasts are non-streaming audio or video files on the web) is a great way to reach a lot of students all over the world. You can create a lesson, video, or podcast on a single topic or multiple topics, or spread one topic across several segments.

Podcasts and videos give students a chance to listen to a real person instead of reading a blog or website, and they give you an opportunity to practice modulating your speech for times when you might be in front of live students. Podcasts and videos are usually released serially, and they are sometimes syndicated. You can also work with Pagan bloggers and website owners to syndicate your podcasts or videos and/or get the word out about them. A great example of a podcast series is T. Thorn Coyle's
Elemental Castings
(www.thorncoyle.com). Thorn talked to me about her podcasts:

Elemental Castings
has turned out to be a great way for people to not only access my work, but the work of all of the incredible authors, magic workers, and teachers I have as guests.
People
from all over the world tune in to those podcasts, which feels so gratifying.

Proud Pagan Podcasters is a website dedicated to using podcasts to enrich communication in the Pagan community. If you're interested in learning how to make a podcast, check out their Getting Started with Podcasting page for tips (http://paganpodcasting.org/resources/get-started-with-podcasting).

The “Kitchen Sink” Approach

The majority of online Pagan teachers, at least for now, seem to structure their classes to distribute their lessons via a website as lecture MP3s, videos, or podcasts, and using chat rooms, Skype, and email lists to
interact
with students. Christopher Penczak's web classes follow a similar model:

We don't have a specific time to teach together online in a chat room. I send out a recording of the lecture and additional notes that are not in the [Temple of Witchcraft] books we use as a text, along with a syllabus and assignments. Students email their completed questions and experiences for critical feedback and evaluation each month. We have a Yahoo group for group discussion and sharing, and community support.

By cobbling together several technologies, Pagan teachers can create a rich learning experience online.

The “Full Monty” Approach

Some Pagan teachers (such as T. Thorn Coyle) and Pagan organizations (such as Cherry Hill Seminary) are using the “Kitchen Sink” technologies in conjunction with learning management system (LMS) software. LMS software, such as Moodle, can help you create a fully interactive website that allows you to chat with students in real time, post lectures and assignments, and even give and grade tests. Moodle is open source (meaning the code is free and users can alter it). T. Thorn Coyle uses a variety of technologies together, including Moodle, Google+ hangouts, and Skype's online long-distance service:

I teach stand-alone online courses with homework, discussion groups, and chat rooms. I also use things such as Moodle to supplement in-person training. There is a lot still to learn about using these systems effectively, but even at a basic level, they work pretty well.

Cherry Hill Seminary, which teaches Pagan clergy, also uses Moodle to run its online classes. Holli Emore, executive director of the seminary, explains how this works:

Each student, upon registration, is given login to the Moodle classroom for that course. In that classroom, the instructor will have posted a syllabus, a beginning-of-the-semester greeting and orientation, and lots of other resources. Each instructor approaches the mechanics of the class a little differently, but most will post a written lesson, sometimes an audio file lecture, sometimes a PowerPoint presentation, etc., followed by assignments, discussion questions for the forum, links to other resources, etc. Most classes have required texts and periodicals to read. Some classes “meet” regularly by chat or audio call (we use Skype at this time), though some only communicate through the forums.

Depending on your web experience, Moodle can have a learning curve when you are beginning to use it. However, some of the Moodle users I talked to thought it was a breeze. I asked Thorn if she had help setting up and maintaining Moodle:

I do have help with a lot of the technology I use, partially because my schedule is so packed. I'd rather call upon those who have greater skills instead of learning systems myself. However, Moodle and Skype are really quite simple to learn. Were I more skilled, I could likely do more with Moodle than I do, but it is a very functional system, and Skype is dead easy.

Pete “Pathfinder” Davis commented on the size of the Moodle setup he is using for the Woolston-Steen Seminary and some of the complexities the Aquarian Tabernacle Church dealt with in getting it running:

We had no idea of the complexities of putting together an online teaching program. There's some basic software with the strange name of Moodle, but it requires an enormous amount of server space, and so the seminary programs are spread out over six different servers—six different actual
websites
—but you don't know it when you go to wiccanseminary.edu and it redirects you to the other places, depending on what you want to do. It's spread all over the place because it's enormous. Thank god for geeks, because to me that thing is just a fancy typewriter.

Like Cherry Hill Seminary and Thorn, some Pagan teachers use Skype to enhance their web teaching and give students a chance to interact with each other via group voice chat or video chat. This helps them personalize their teaching and give students a face to put with their teacher's name. You can also use Skype to do one-on-one student mentoring.
Others
use interactive broadcast platforms such as Ustream to show students events or classes happening in the moment.

Beyond the Full Monty

You know that phrase “Time stands still for no one”? Well, technology never stands still either, and most of the time it doesn't even slow down long enough to catch its breath. Although LMS and the other technologies I've discussed will probably be with us for quite a while, educators are beginning to look to cloud computing (usually referred to as “the cloud”) to provide learning experiences online.

The general idea of the cloud is that software applications, servers, content, and databases can be accessed via a web service rather than locally, as is the case for a software program on your hard drive or a server in your office. The owners of the web service provide access to many different people or organizations, so resources are shared. The cloud is often likened to a utility service such as gas or electricity. You pay for the service monthly rather than owning all the software or hardware (you'll still need a computer, of course).

The benefit of the cloud for educators is that their online courses don't have to be contained in an LMS or other software structure, and it might be possible to use the cloud to provide a much more personalized learning experience for each student. LMS technology emerged in the early days of the web, and thus it was born from older ideas about the ways people could and should learn online. But both the web and online learning have evolved since then, and educators are looking to the flexibility of the cloud to help them meet the rapidly changing needs of students and the education market.