The enneagram personality typing system evolved as a tool for nurturing compassion and building community. In these days of initiative after initiative, many teachers are exhausted with all the ideas about learning styles, feedback, assessment, etc that they must constantly juggle. All are part of our growing awareness as a global community of the uniqueness of the individuals in our care.
COMPASSION kəmˈpaʃ(ə)nsympathy, fellow feeling, empathy, understanding, care, concern, solicitude, sensitivity, warm-heartedness, warmth, love, tenderness, gentleness, mercifulness, tolerance, consideration, kindness, humanity, humaneness, kind-heartedness, charity, benevolence
The insights of the enneagram can be enormously powerful. They are also in many ways intuitively obvious. However, this comes with a danger of people ‘pigeon-holing’ one another – and that is the opposite of compassion. In order to best implement Compassionate Learning, teachers should go through the process themselves. My experience of leading and attending workshops for almost 20 years indicates that this is almost invariably a joyful process!
We were all children once. Although we are now older, we are in many ways the same person we have always been. Experiencing the process of discerning our own enneagram types and then comparing and contrasting them with others can open up new insights about how others think and respond to the world around them. Becoming aware of how we each have ‘buttons’ that can be pressed, and how we can at times unintentionally press others’ ‘buttons’ can lead to insights about classroom dynamics.
To learn more about the different personalities follow these links
> ‘Head Types’ – Observer, Questioner, Adventurer
> ‘Heart’ types – Helper, Achiever, Individualist
> ‘Gut’ Types – Asserter, Mediator, Perfectionist
Or this link for more background to the background of the enneagram personality typology
Or you may wish to cast your mind back to when you were a student yourself and see if you recognise any of the personality types whose links are listed at the end of this page Enneagram Personalities of Students