Parker Palmer
The Courage to Teach
Chapter 1. The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching
Palmer begins the chapter by giving the book's basic premise: "Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher." The implication of this, he says, is that "in every class I teach, my ability to connect with my students, and to connect them with the subject, depends less on the methods I use than on the degree to which I know and trust my selfhood and am willing to make it available and vulnerable in the service of learning."
In the rest of the chapter Palmer explores these basic ideas. At the core of his explanation is that teachers must have a sense of self, which comes from their integrity and identity. The teacher who has that sense of self is a good teacher, one who can "join self and subject and students in the fabric of life. Good teachers are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves."
The ability to weave that world comes from authority, something that is "granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts."
Finding that authority and acting upon it are the subjects of the following chapters.