"Students benefit most from teachers who are professionally competent, but more importantly who simply pay attention, try to improve students' work, and take the time to talk with them—in a word, teachers who care about the subject and the students" (Chambliss & Takacs, 2014, p. 131).
Without question, students should be the primary beneficiary of education. As a college freshman seminar teacher, however, I've often wondered whether students care about the subject and the teacher. If education becomes transactional—about getting grades, graduating, and setting yourself up for a well-paying job—how does this affect students' perception of teachers? Baurelein writes that, under these conditions, teachers cannot be "a fearsome mind or a moral light, a role model or inspiration" (2015, para 17). Instead, "[teachers] become accreditors" (Bauerlien, 2015, para 17) whose only authority, relevance, and importance to students come in the form of issuing grades.
Rehumanizing Education
After reading Baurelein's article, I decided to run a covert experiment in the remaining classes I had that week. I wanted to figure out one simple question: do students care about what I think? The student activity was to read an article about boredom and pseudo-boredom. In groups of three or four, students had to share a reaction to the article, paragraph by paragraph, and record a log of each individual's response. The goal: to experience active reading and dialogue rather than experience the potential boredom explained in the article itself. At the onset of the activity, I also told students I had done the same thing. I typed up my active reading log for the article and made a handful of copies so students could read my thoughts if they were interested. In my remaining classes that week, 28 groups developed. Of those 28 groups, 5 were interested in what I was thinking (and that is a loose interpretation of the word "interested." One student handed it back to me 30 seconds later after barely turning the page). My impression after this brief, informal experiment was that many of my students may not care what I think, and I suspect other teachers have similar concerns.
If students benefit most from teachers who care about the subject and their students (Chambliss & Takacs, 2015), why not also consider the benefits of engagement and motivation to do their best work when students care about the subject and their teacher? I believe this is one of the most underdocumented outcomes of the assessment era. The focus on test scores, grades, and grade point averages seduces students to consciously or subconsciously trivialize the subject and, worse, devalue the teacher. Education needs to be rehumanized from all angles, with mutual care for students, teachers, and content.
Supporting Reflective Classroom Partners
One of my goals for first-year college students is to expand their perception of the education experience beyond what is easily measured, to make connections within the classroom, and to see the potential for enrichment when they choose to care about their peers, the content of the course, and the teacher. I start this work by introducing students to the concept of reflexivity. Professor Ann L. Cunliffe has a series of scholarly articles that discuss reflexivity in depth, but the basic definition is the conscious, intentional, and deliberate practice of self-awareness. We discuss how we all see the world filtered through the reflexive screens of our identity, context, and experience. Then, I ask students to examine who they are by reflecting on ten (there are more) screens that shape their experience: culture, age, gender, class, social status, education, family, political praxis, language, and values. Using these screens as focal points, we dig into the ontological question: Really we dig at answering an ontological question: what is your reality? Students' answers become basis for our self-awareness work.
As student self-discovery emerges in this structured context, my next step is to help students bring their self-awareness into our discussions as a class community. Some our tools for pivoting from the self to the community include the Johari window, a technique that graphically helps people better understand their relationship with themselves and others, and Brene Brown's TED Talks on vulnerability and shame. Once a week, I also ask students to spend ten minutes writing in response to a prompt that is structured to create opportunities for students to connect across boundaries of beliefs, experiences, and other reflexive screens. Example prompts include:
- "We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are." —Anais Nin
- "The true voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." —Marcel Proust
- And less abstract prompts such as, "Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it."
After writing for ten minutes, students are invited to share out, on a volunteer basis, creating opportunities for self-awareness, disclosure, and connection among the students and myself. We use increasingly complex protocols for strategic listening during these share-outs. For example, students practice paraphrasing and summarizing what speakers say. A key point here is for students to understand listening takes effort and what is often "heard" is not necessarily what the speaker intended to say. So we go through a process of "truth gathering" or creating a shared reality of what was said, what was understood, what needed to be clarified, what was confusing, and where misinterpretations crept in. Students begin to understand how important listening to each other is, how challenging it can be, and how easily miscommunication happens if all community members are not present and engaged.
Real One-to-One Learning
Finally, one of my most powerful connections with students comes at the end of each quarter, when I meet with each student, one-on-one, for about ten minutes. The basic outline of these talks is for students to describe their reality based on their personal perspective, as a member of the class, as a first year college student, and how their worldview may be becoming increasingly complex as they see the world through "new eyes" as a college student. The one-on-one basis gives me greater insight into my students as individuals, as well as gives a chance for them to get to know me more personally. Frequently, this is when students are most vulnerable, and quite often, emotional. I tell students I take their trust in me as a compliment and an honor. Putting relationships at the forefront of the work we do as educators communicates to your students that we are more than just conduits for assignments and grades. The classroom should be about community, not compliance. Student or teacher, we are all people, with a past, present, and hopefully, an optimistic future.