Parker Palmer Quotes

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education, I believe teachers are.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

A good teacher does not get lost in the details, but points to what is essential so that the child or student can find meaning and joy in life.

A good teacher is someone who can help you to get back to a teacher within.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids.

I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

No teacher has ever failed from ignorance. That is empiric professional knowledge. Teachers fail because they cannot 'handle the class.' Real education must ultimately be limited to men how INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

I would say this to my students all the time, it's about 30% you as the teacher and 70% about them. They tend to think that their role is to be the baby bird in a nest and you're going to feed them? They're going to feed themselves, or they're going to starve.

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students' creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Teaching like any truly human activity emerges from one's inwardness.

A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

Those who have a desire to teach while coming to learn should not pose as disciples; they must come as teachers.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.