Leading with Love

First as a teacher and then as an administrator, I often asked myself, what is keeping my at-risk student from learning? As a young teacher, I often looked at the external factors of family, home life, friends and then to internal factors of language skills, motivation, behavior, and potential processing/learning problems. All of these are factors I had no control over. So, I asked, how do I, as the teacher, help the student? If I had kept my focus on these elements, then I would never be able to help my student learn the skills and knowledge needed to be an educated and productive person.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that I cannot control these external and internal issues affecting the student. All I can do is impact the way I act upon these factors. What behaviors can I do, change, get better at, etc. to counter, improve, stimulate, and/or influence the student’s learning.

It begins with philosophy. I start with the philosophy, the belief that the student can and wants to learn, no matter what he/she says or does internally and/or externally. If I don’t believe the student wants to learn and can learn, then I cannot help the student. But, if I do believe, then I have an opportunity to make learning in any child a reality.

Some students are harder to reach then others; this is just the nature of the game. My level of commitment, of desire to “crack this nut” or solve this learning dilemma, is the extent that I can deal with my internal and external factors to achieve my goal of helping this student learn. Helping the student learn is no longer the student’s problem, with a philosophical belief/mindset, it has now become my opportunity.

Yes, we want the student to take ownership of their own learning and if they don’t, it is hard to motivate the student and help the student learn, it just makes it harder, not impossible if I maintain the belief that the student can and wants to learn.

Where do we start? We start with the leadership of “love.” When we lead with love, then we have the opportunity to reach all students. Love always believes, always trusts, always hopes, keeps no record of wrongs; love always perseveres, and most importantly, love “NEVER FAILS.”

If we love our students, then we will never fail them. We have to keep problem solving, keep pushing ourselves to reach them. In the end, I have never had a student fail to respond to me when I loved them from the heart. I have had students fail to respond to me, when I was angry with them and not loving them. They may not get to where I want them to get, but if I start with love, then I have at least knocked down the barrier that affects the student the most - my belief and my attitude which ultimately affects my actions. So in order to be effective, I need to begin with the attitude of love, this will keep me from being ineffective as an educator.