The Classroom as a Mirror: What Students Teach Us About Ourselves

Walter McKenzie
Sep 25
3 min read

Mishkat Al Moumin is the Founder and President of The Communication of Success, transforming the way individuals and organizations succeed by bridging gaps in communication, leadership, and strategy to overcome challenges, embrace opportunities, and create impact and growth. This is a cross-post from LinkedIn on September 21st. Thank you for your continued strong voice, Mishkat, speaking to educators everywhere! You can contact her directly via email.

Transformative learning, as Jack Mezirow described, isn’t just about acquiring new knowledge. It’s about moments when our assumptions are challenged, when discomfort forces us to re-examine what we thought we knew. Those moments happen not only for students - but for teachers, too.

At Baghdad University’s School of Law, I worked with students carrying the weight of oppression, wars, and silence. They entered the lecture hall knowing that one wrong word could have consequences far beyond their grades. Their questions, when asked, were acts of courage. Their silences, when held, were survival. Once, a student whispered to me after class, “We understand more than you think,” and nodded. Finding a space for understanding when nothing around us made sense - when countless lives were being lost to meaningless wars - was, to me, an accomplishment.

So, I harnessed silence to explore hypotheticals drawn from beyond Iraq’s borders - from South Africa under the apartheid regime to the genocide in Rwanda. In a dictatorship where discussion of our own reality was forbidden, these cases offered a safe mirror. Through them, my students and I could ask the hard questions indirectly, testing what justice might look like, what accountability might demand, and what silence might cost.

Years later, teaching at the Defense Language Institute, I encountered another kind of silence. Many of my students were U.S. service members returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. Some carried visible scars, but many carried the invisible ones - trauma from combat, from broken homes, from test anxiety that was really fear of failure layered on top of everything else.

They often bottled it up, thinking silence was strength. But eventually, silence walked with them into my office. My role wasn’t just to correct grammar or vocabulary. It was to listen, to acknowledge the weight they carried, and to point them toward the resources and strategies that could help them heal while they learned.

At George Mason University, the silence was different again. Students came to class asking questions no textbook could answer: How do you draft environmental policies in a post-war setting? How do you balance immediate survival needs with long-term governance? How do we protect the environment after a natural disaster with the same level of destruction as a war zone? In those classrooms, I wasn’t the one holding all the answers. I was learning alongside them, realizing that the classroom could transform me as much as I hoped to transform them.

That’s the lesson the classroom keeps teaching me: silence is never empty. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s the heavy processing of an idea that threatens to upend everything you thought you knew.

And for teachers, silence is a mirror. It reflects back to us the limits of our authority and the possibilities of our humility. Transformation in education doesn’t only belong to students. When we are willing to see, to listen, and to learn, it belongs to us as well.

Take This With You

Education is not one-directional. Transformation flows both ways - student to teacher, teacher to student. If you are an educator, a leader, or a mentor, ask yourself:

When have I mistaken silence for disengagement, when it was really weight?
How often do I let discomfort guide me, instead of rushing past it?
What have my students taught me that I could never have learned from a textbook?

Because in every classroom, the mirror is waiting. And if we dare to look into it, we may discover that our own transformation is the truest lesson of all.

This is a cross-posting of Mishkat's original piece published September 21st here. Reposted with permission. Thank you, Mishkat, for sharing your brilliance!