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by Thomas R. Rosebrough and Ralph G. Leverett
Table of Contents
Democracy requires of its citizens qualities that it cannot provide. Politicians can conjure an exalted vision of a prosperous, healthy, free society, but no government can supply the qualities of honesty, compassion, and personal responsibility that must underlie this vision.
Jürgen Habermas
Students belong at the center of our teaching pedagogy. Placing our subject matter in the center, which so many teachers do, fails those we intend to teach. When teachers aim too low with their expectations or mindlessly capitulate to the prevalent testing ideology, students suffer. Mindlessness is judging education's worth by relying solely upon objective measuring and remeasuring. Teaching to transform requires beginning with the learner and allowing ourselves to know just who it is we are teaching, including personality, ability, experience, culture, and aspirations. The act of teaching centers on a relationship. We must place students at the heart of our teaching.
Nancy, now a high school English teacher, shared a simple truth with us that indicates how teachers who know their students can influence them deeply. As a high school student, Nancy was the school newspaper editor. She spent a lot of time with the newspaper advisor and fellow student writers. They would piece the paper together in an old print shop, using scissors and wax as they attached the type to dummy boards. Losing one piece of paper was unacceptable. Nancy, ever the hyperattentive student editor, spied from the corner of her eye a scrap of paper fluttering to the floor and yelled, "Pick that up!" Her advisor chuckled good-naturedly, "Golly, Nancy, let it hit the ground first." To Nancy, now a teacher, it meant "don't borrow worry—let things happen and then make a plan for dealing with them." Nancy was profoundly influenced by this teacher who knew her and respected her as a learner and as a person. Nancy's teacher had the freedom to assess what matters. Nancy realized that her teacher had helped her learn the value of patience and planning through a prized relationship.
The connection between teachers and students is their relationship. How teachers view the students they teach makes a difference academically, socially, and spiritually. So, how do we perceive our students? Where do we "place" them? The list below offers teaching attitudes often displayed in classrooms:
Teachers may possess a combination of teaching attitudes. Teachers' dispositional orientations toward their students make a difference in the classrooms. They can shape what they teach and how they teach it. A caveat: While whom we teach takes priority in the Transformational Pedagogy Model, learner-centered classrooms must not compromise high expectations tied to what is taught. Placing students in the center of our pedagogy should include a deep commitment to the rigor it takes for them to reach their potential. These teacher views progress from extreme subject orientation to social sensitivity to spiritual understanding. See Figure 4.1 for an illustration of this progression.
Teachers need the spiritual authority that comes from respecting the learner. The teacher-student relationship is much like parenting, in that the relationship between parent and child is built on real love and born out of respect and trust. This mutual esteem ultimately makes the relationship work, whether it is in parenting or teaching.
Abraham Lincoln, 23 years old, was asked why he was running for political office. He said that his peculiar ambition is to win esteem by rendering himself worthy of esteem (Goodwin, 2005). It is indeed an irony of life that our own attitudes, so selfish in tendency, are so instrumental in changing the lives of others. Teachers underestimate how they affect learners. Correspondingly, we often overestimate the importance of own knowledge. Wisdom develops when we realize the full dimensions of our roles in teaching.
Jackson (2009) relates a great story about Cynthia, her teacher-friend: Jesse, a particularly exasperating student, one day refused all persuasions to finish a makeup test. Refused, that is, until Cynthia offered to make him a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. "Wasn't it just a bribe?" she was asked. Her answer: "You are missing the point. It is not the sandwich itself that matters. It's the fact that I make it for them" (p. 49). As a teacher-relater, Cynthia knew what Jesse needed. Her priority was Jesse. She started from where Jesse was because she knew him. She knew that his mother never took time to make her own child a sandwich. Once the student knew the teacher cared, he did the work. Creating relationships in which students believe that they are cared for is the foundation of transformational teaching. The dynamic of the relationship between Cynthia and Jesse is the key to academic, social, and spiritual transformation. The tragic short-sightedness of the Information Age is that the learner-centered classroom is a hoary issue undeserving of contemporary attention.
Teaching has to be more than telling. It was Mark Twain who sagaciously told us, "Teaching is not telling. If it were telling, we'd all be so smart we couldn't stand ourselves" (Wormelli, 2006, p. 3). Teaching is more than sharing the world of facts, more than information giving. To know our subject and to be articulate in communicating it is necessary, but not sufficient. Indeed, we all have experienced some effective teachers with a passion for and knowledge of their subjects who were less than sensitive to holistic needs. Many of us have learned to cope with teacher-scholars who epitomized strong disciplinary knowledge but were absent human attitudinal qualities. Some of us learn despite draconian teaching styles.
On the other side of the issue, a socially sensitive teacher-relater who is not deeply prepared in a discipline cannot be transformational either. No amount of commitment to holistic goals can enable a teacher to overcome weak academic preparation or poor planning. The dualism of either/or continues to reign supreme in teaching: We gravitate toward the notion that we must choose between disciplinary dragons or permissive drones.
Teachers often exhibit the syndrome of either/or thinking. We dig in our heels faster than most, saying we cannot possibly teach this way and that we cannot teach that way either, because (1) we have never done it that way or never experienced it that way; (2) it doesn't make sense to us in the particular teaching style we inhabit; (3) we suspect or distrust the motives or thinking of the person who espouses this new idea; or (4) we hold to a combination of the above rationales. Why do we think like this? Perhaps because we are so passionate about our work or because we are so obstinate about what we think we know. Wise counsel is to avoid the "divisive or" and embrace the "divine and" in human disputes (Trueblood, 1996). We should be thinking student and subject, whole learner and measured performance, scholar and relater, academic and social.
The act of placing the student at the center of pedagogical goals is controversial with many in academe. The dispute often comes from disciplines requiring students to master a hierarchy of factual subject matter, such as mathematics or science. Mastery in learning is a highly worthy goal, but it should not be a stand-alone pursuit.
Traditionalists are suspicious of any scheme that suggests subject matter is not the primary focus of education. Suspicious is the watchword because these same teachers think that a learner-centered classroom leads inevitably to less rigorous attention to the subject. Indeed, sometimes it can, especially when teachers weakly give in to a people-pleasing mentality. But there is no doubt that committed and active scholars often make great teachers; this occurs when their focus is on their learners as well as their academic domain.
Many teachers readily buy into the dualism of either/or in education. One cannot possibly be learner centered and discipline centered at the same time, they contend. Content needs to be covered—in only so much time. Indeed, coverage and time are two of the flashpoints in talking about a more transformative pedagogy. Suffice it to say that the least difficult aspect of teaching is covering content. The holy grail of pedagogy surely involves a passion for the subject and the learner. Consider a teacher who can teach so that meaningful content is remembered and a student's life is transformed. Education is what we remember after we have forgotten everything we have learned.
The triad of scholar/practitioner/relater roles is an achievable goal for teachers. But how many teachers have worked with colleagues or been students of teachers who knew their subject but couldn't teach it? Those who believe that scholarship is sufficient in the classroom also tend to believe that presentation is the same as teaching. In addition, some have the notion that elementary teachers are great practitioners but do not need great scholarship. It is a mistake for teachers to be satisfied with fulfilling only one or two of the three roles. Ultimately, teaching for transformation is the individual responsibility of the teacher.
Consider middle school teachers. Even the most prepared and dedicated teachers of middle grade students can have difficulty occupying the mental and emotional landscape of pre-adolescent students. The teacher-relater role is crucial for middle school students, where socioemotional and academic needs abound, but where empathy often becomes a far-fetched notion for teachers. Knowing who it is we are teaching requires holism of roles as well as goals. Kate told us how excited and proud she was of her middle school learners who one day discussed the literature contrast in the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romance period. Later that day, she discovered her students playing "hangman" on the whiteboard. The epiphany for her was the stark contrast in her students between sophisticated adolescents and joyful, unpretentious children. Such a realization not only underlines the relater role but helps place and re-place students at the heart of our teaching.
Transformational teachers cultivate a curiosity that leads to scholarly work, indeed to lifelong patterns of learning. They also are relentless in finding a variety of ways for their students to learn, not being satisfied until their pedagogy connects with students. As relaters, transformational teachers have a "soft side" that leads to greater vulnerability. Experienced teachers know that soft must also be "tough," as in tough love when needed. Otherwise none of the teacher roles works.
Teaching is a moral, ethical relationship. Believing in learners means treating them as the ends rather than the means. If we are to be a friend to someone, for example, we love them for who they are, not what they should be. We treat a friend not as a means to get something for ourselves, but as an end, an entity deserving individual respect. The goal of people-focused teaching is to teach the student as an end, an individual with profound human dignity. On the other hand, the goal of achievement-oriented teachers who feel pressured by threats to job security is to serve their profession by teaching students to achieve better test scores, perhaps to the detriment of serving the ethical and social needs of students. The moral models represented by teachers are vital to strengthening character as well as a deep understanding of content and its implications in students. The moral development of learners is tied to good decisionmaking skills needed for upholding freedom in the face of unprecedented societal challenges.
How can teachers in the public schools morally deepen their approach toward teaching and place their students in the center of what they are doing? One application of going deeper is a values-clarifying strategy, one that at first seems uncomfortable but is ultimately freeing in purpose: Secondary students can write their own obituary. In thinking about this assignment, learners realize their lives count in a spiritual dimension that transcends the here and now. They can also identify qualities they want to be remembered by. The teacher's role here is that of a relater.
Placing students in the center of the classroom purpose requires that teachers first analyze their attitudes toward teaching, learning, and students. Attitude, or teacher disposition, occupies a part of the broad affective realm apart from teacher knowledge and skills. Contemporary scholars (Thornton, 2006; Tsui, 2009) have identified distinctive qualities of teachers that are critical to the development of teaching expertise, focusing on patterns of thinking and how teachers are disposed to act. Attitude is an academic, social, and spiritual quality that affects how teachers view their students. To assist us in exploring this paradigm, we reach for some classic work from a pioneer in the field of humanistic psychology: Carl Rogers (1969) identified three vital attitudes for effective teaching.
It was Rogers who introduced teachers as facilitators of learning into the educational lexicon. He was seeking a term other than teacher that would match with his concept of a teacher who had no intention of forcing anyone to know anything, a teacher who possessed three qualities vital to great teaching: realness, empathy, and prizing. Realness, or authenticity, characterizes teachers who are the same inside the classroom as they are outside. Teachers who inspire trust are real because their students can sense a purity of intention. Transformational teaching is not a performance but a relationship, and learners know that the teacher they see outside the classroom is the authentic person they see every day inside the classroom.
It is common for a student to spy a teacher in the supermarket or coffee bar and express surprise that the teacher "has a life" outside the classroom. Students often isolate their teachers to the classroom and school in which they serve. The surprise of discovering teachers in the real world—and the number of spies—can be minimized by teachers who make the effort to "get real." Be a real person with real emotions in the classroom; don't play the role of teacher as though it is an actor's part.
Empathy is differentiated from other dispositions through action. Empathic teachers view learners from the inside out. Empathy goes beyond sympathy by incorporating a willingness to walk in the learners' shoes. Empathic educators act in ways that are consistent with knowing students' identities. Empathic educators act in ways consistent with knowing their individual students, identifying and accepting learners' cultures and lives that include stresses of modern life. They support students as students seek to discover and understand their own identities.
Research suggests (DeWar, 2009) that empathy is a complex phenomenon involving a sense of self-awareness, taking another person's viewpoint, and managing your own emotional responses. It is helpful to think of empathy as an ability that can be developed with practice. To help students feel secure in the midst of instability and to recognize that we share a collective human experience are part of being able to empathize.
Delores is a veteran 6th grade science teacher. She has learned from experience and research that security and commonality are vital parts of teaching compassion. Delores developed a strong sense of empathy for her students' emotional security, often exploring negative emotions in a sympathetic, relational way. For example, she often asks her students, "How do you feel when someone was mean or indifferent to you?" Delores teaches empathy by modeling empathy. She looks for everyday opportunities to model empathy by focusing on what she and her students have in common with people who are victimized, whether they are found in literature, on television, or in their own neighborhoods. For example, Delores has discovered that making learners aware of connections to and similarities with the victims of Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti helps motivate action that is rooted in empathy. It helps students react to the emotions of others and behave in kind and helpful ways.
Rogers's third attitudinal quality is distinctive because of its intense focus on individual differences. He chose the word prizing to express how the best teachers can make learners feel that they are unique prizes. Prizing transcends caring or kindness. This disposition in teachers, however, goes beyond teaching to individual differences, beyond differentiation to personalizing education. Prizing students represents the spiritual goal structure of the model where learners are treated as unique individuals, convinced that they are the special focus of their teachers.
Mister Rogers spoke to children like no one else. He knew his audience, and his intent was to communicate, not entertain. And Rogers communicated beautifully. Children ran to the television whenever they heard his quiet tenor voice singing the theme song. What was his secret? How could such an unassuming man, from his cardigan to his sneakers, be so successful with children? His touching and instantly classic interview with Jeff Erlanger, a child in a wheelchair, brought forth the best in Fred Rogers. The unrehearsed segment was a picture of sincerity, love, and honesty, not pity. Rogers prized Jeff when they sang together "It Is You I Like." He showed daily how much he liked children. Perhaps Rogers's greatest contribution was the distinction he made between reality and fantasy. His puppets and props engaged children in a world of fantasy. But Rogers always took the kids on the trolley car back to reality. The show always seemed to end on a note of emphasis of individuality: "There is no one exactly like you, never has been, never will be."
Prizing is the quality that connects. It has such a strong influence that it alone can infuse a sentiment that a certain teacher made a permanent difference in a student's life. Just as teachers' attitudinal qualities make a difference in holistic learning, learners' attitudinal qualities are vital in learning.
Education can benefit from a reconnection to learners and their holistic needs. Ensuring that all students learn connects to a fundamental democratic ethic. Human life is precious and worthy of nurturing. Because of this belief, a nurturing pedagogic dynamic would naturally be the foundation of our educational system as long as we also realize that individualism has its limits.
Sensitive, nurturing teachers affect the performance of their students in ways that transcend the academic. It is vital that teachers know themselves because what they believe makes a difference in student beliefs. Educational psychologists term people's beliefs about what causes success and failure attributions. Attributions include such things as effort, ability, luck, task difficulty, mood, physical appearance, and teachers' or peers' behaviors (Schunk, 2008). Interestingly, learners' perceptions of themselves relate to attributions as strongly as they relate to reality. Perceptions often become students' personal reality. Learners sometimes attribute causes of events to factors within themselves, such as lack of ability or work ethic. Ormrod (2004) and Weiner (2000) term such perception internal locus of control. Factors attributed outside themselves like good luck, an accident, or even other people's frowns are examples of an external locus of control.
A similar psychological term is attributional style (Ormrod, 2004). Learners can assume a mastery orientation, in which they believe they can do it, or they can adopt an attitude known as learned helplessness, believing they cannot do it. Those with mastery orientation as a style do better in the classroom and on the athletic field. Success breeds success, and failure develops a learned helplessness, especially when the perceived cause is outside the individual's locus of control. Teachers can make a difference in their students' attribution styles, in what learners think about themselves, and thus in how well they do in the classroom.
Placing students in the center of our teaching philosophy leads to transformational learning. Transformational learning feels like an epiphany for the learner. To be suddenly transformed by the confidence of knowing, to realize that hard work in reading and studying has been rewarded, to bask in the approval of a trusted teacher, to suddenly desire to know more and seek knowledge individually are all epiphanies of transformational teaching. Great teaching involves an energizing dynamic between teachers and learners.
We use the term teacher-learner dynamic in the profession because of the energizing, synergizing, and changing nature of the relationship between teacher and student. As teachers, we make many decisions while interacting with variables that include the procedural, such as planning and assessment; the theoretical, such as cognitive or behavioral perspectives; and the instructional, which encompasses the learner's needs and motivation. Transformational teaching is dynamic and complex.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001) would remind teachers that doing fulfilling work feels good. He says that with the right environment (clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge level to match skills) "we have a chance to experience work as 'good'—that is, as something that allows the full expression of what is best in us, something we experience as rewarding and enjoyable" (p. 5). He famously termed this concept flow, which he defines as highly enjoyable human moments where we can be lost in seemingly effortless performance. Achieving flow is a worthy goal in teaching and learning, especially as it relates to the dynamic relationship between teacher and student.
Thinking about what matters is valuable, but taking action steps enhances academic, social, and spiritual understanding and self-fulfillment. The strategy that connects learners to meaning and purpose is service learning. Service and learning should be joined in a goal structure in the classroom. Although participating in a school community service program is valuable and indeed beneficial, the benefits of the service rendered can be lost if it is not connected to learning objectives set by the teacher as part of a required curriculum. No greater application exists in a transformational teacher's repertoire. Service learning embodies the synergy among academic, social, and spiritual goals in the Transformational Pedagogy Model. Nothing embodies a student-centered teaching paradigm better.
As teachers, we can affirm this soulful dimension of youth culture. Examples of altruism and activism from popular culture can provide a bridge from alienated adolescents to connect with their own yearning for finding meaning through service for others. Instead of judging and distancing ourselves from popular youth culture, we can support this expression of soul in our students by naming and honoring it whenever we see it. (Kessler, 2000, p. 71)
Service learning allows for diverse expression of sociocultural beliefs. We live in a time where incorporating diverse perspectives in the classroom is vital. Now is the time to reintegrate social and spiritual aspects of education in public school classrooms by encouraging service in classroom goals. Diversity finds its fullest meaning in service to others.
Deborah teaches students from low-income families and has learned that her students often lack confidence to perform in competitive classroom environments. She has discovered that her students thrive in cooperative classroom environments that foster service to others. Deborah's students serve in area food relief ministries where they can connect to lives outside school and bring back to her classroom stories of resilience and accomplishment. Her service learners write about their experiences and share their writing with classmates and with other classes in the school. Building relationships inside and outside the school with the support of an adult anchor like Deborah fosters meaning and engagement in the lives of her at-risk students. Deborah embodies and synergizes the scholar, practitioner, and relater roles in teaching.
Unfortunately, classrooms have become increasingly dogmatized. Rule making and rule following dominate classroom climates, taking the focus off teaching the whole child. Nel Noddings (2005) observes that even when teachers "recognize that students are whole persons, the temptation arises to describe the whole in terms of collective parts and to make sure that every aspect, part, or attribute is somehow 'covered' in the curriculum" (p. 12). Students are more than a sum of parts. Pedagogy should include a synergy of the model's goals, leading to valuing the uniqueness of students as whole learners, individuals who deserve special respect at the center of our teaching efforts.
Why do we teach? The answer of course involves who we teach. We teach for learners, not only to meet their academic needs but to transform their lives. Alexander (2006) comments on the academic reality that some learners begin their journey with limited cognitive and motivational resources, while others are building on rich resources they already possess. To face this reality, teachers should not "unintentionally contribute to the problem by overlooking what students do know or by presenting them with educational tasks that are ill-suited to their abilities or needs" (p. 82). Sensitive teachers who place students in the center of their pedagogy can recognize the difference between a challenge and a frustration for students.
This chapter describes why it is vital to place students at the center of teaching. The relationship between teachers and learners is the dynamic that makes learning happen. Planning and organizing for instruction requires an understanding of students. Pedagogy then becomes less about what the teacher would like to teach today and more about what will cause learning to take place. How we perceive our students is a starting point for transformational teaching. Indeed, our democratic system demands the fundamental ethic of nurturing individual learners. Psychological concepts like dispositions, locus of control, and attribution style are important for teachers to consider because they make a difference in how well students perform in their classrooms. To really change our schools, we have to proceed with deeper convictions about the needs of those we teach. Connecting to the experiences of the learner is the starting point for pedagogy. To teach to transform, we must shed our dualistic tendency of thinking we cannot teach our subject well when we place learners at the heart of our teaching.
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