Teachers and students provided various metaphors to describe teaching. Teaching was described as trying to sculpt play dough into Michelangelo's David, requiring constant work to keep students engaged like dough that needs to be kept warm and pliable. Another metaphor stated teaching is like parenting, requiring enthusiasm, commitment and patience. A final metaphor stated teaching is like crossing borders, with both teachers and students having something to offer and learn from each other.

1. Teachers and teaching student and faculty generated views and metaphors

2. A good teacher always knows during the first lesson where she wants the majority of her students to be during the last lesson. Only geniuses will find their way alone.

3. Orchestra Conductor

4. It's like trying to make a copy of Michelangelo's David out of play dough. You wrangle with it and struggle, but you have to constantly work to keep the dough warm and pliable.

5. Teaching is a tool to empower students and professors as to form and strengthen our consciousness to help break the chains of the oppressed and the marginalized.

6. Teaching is not unlike parenthood: Requires enthusiasm, commitment and an enormous amount of patience.

7. not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire

8. Choreography

9. Teaching a toddler how to ride a bicycle... In the end, teaching is about guiding someone through his/her applied individual learning experience and the time given to the learner to spend on the bike is more important than the time taken by the instructor to show how well the instructor can ride the bike.

10. Teaching is like crossing borders: you should approach it like you have something to learn and something to offer.

11. Teaching is like skipping stones. Students are the stones and the ripples of water created are the infinite effects of teaching, whether you see the final product or not.

12. A flowing river in which we are creating 'reality' together, inter-subjectively in a dynamic interaction of teaching and learning together.

13. Teaching is like painting. Sometimes the subject makes a difference but mostly its the style

14. Designer (of a learning experience)

15. Teachers grow and cultivate the seeds of knowledge they plant within their students.

16. A teacher is like a captain of a ship, sailing on unknown waters with students. being together with them in good and bad times, yet more responsible than them, when things do not turn out well.

17. To be a great teacher is to be a great coach--to provide structure and discipline for learning, to set high standards and define them clearly, to model the intellectual curiosity and openness to new ideas that you expect your students to have, and to help students find their own voices, and unique talents, even though they may differ from your own.