Professional Learning for Busy Educators

In addition to teaching, educators play a number of vital roles in students’ lives.

They serve as listeners and leaders, counselors and coaches, disciplinarians and disruptors, mediators and motivators, surrogates and soldiers, entertainers and energizers, and advocates and allies. In a typical day of switching among the ever-evolving list of roles, it is typical for educators to experience stress, burnout, guilt, and deviation from their ultimate purpose.

We hope this curation of quotes from the most compelling teachers and educational leaders in the field can serve as a source of inspiration for educators who need an extra boost at the beginning of each day, and a reminder of the reasons why they stepped bravely into the complex, critical role of guiding children from potential to possibility.

Teaching is both an art and science.

Teaching is conceptual and intellectual, abstract and concrete, creative and sequential. It’s about people but framed through ideas. It’s about content, hearts, minds, the past, the future–whatever we can imagine, teaching and learning are both causes and effects.

With that in mind, we’ve collected some of the more famous quotes about teaching, doing our best to include a wide range of perspectives, cultures, nationalities, races, spiritualities–many of the things that make ‘us’ different, we tried to somehow use to curate the quotes. In that way, some will be familiar, some way will be about formal education, some will be sourced from old proverbs, etc.

The premise is simple enough and the format explains itself, so see below for our newest collection of quotes–50 of the best quotes about teaching.

Sometimes, when you need inspiration in your life--whether for love, success, or work--it helps to hear the motivational words that others have shared. So here are 101 of the best positive quotes guaranteed to change your attitude and make you feel happy.

"Would you be mine? Could you be mine? These Fred Rogers quotes will make everyone feel more neighborly."

So then, the quotes. Below we’ve hand-picked 52 of our favorite quotes about learning. (We’ve already got a follow-up article drafted because there are many we like that didn’t make the cut this time.) We tried to choose from a variety of thinkers, from teachers and writers to poets and farmers to philosophers and entrepreneurs to civil rights leaders and, in a few cases, even politicians.

These quotes necessarily reflect a particular view of learning, so in that way this list is editorialized. At TeachThought, we focus on the human/critical thinking/innovation angle, and the quotes we chose mostly reflect that.