Reflection: Time to Think

Reflection is perhaps the most critical component to the thinking process, stimulating both curiosity and analytical ability.  To reflect is to go beyond the limited rubric of the classroom and arrange new ideas within larger contexts.  It is the ability to ask more questions, to discern what is useful, and apply that information to our growing knowledge of the world.

In education we do not often let our students ask questions.  When a student asks, "How is this useful?" we usually snap off a reply and continue the lesson.  But perhaps we should reply in the spirit of the question.  How is it useful?  Why are we learning this?  We shouldn't just expect students to trust our judgment, we should make them curious about their own education.  Too often we confine students to the material that will appear on the test, encouraging them to memorize and regurgitate rather than compose their own thoughts and reflections on the material.  Perhaps students find it difficult to reflect because we do not allow them to.  We discourage questions by driving the material forward to the exam.  In some cases this seems unavoidable.  The amount of information necessary to get across in mathematics and the sciences makes reflection seem near impossible.  The courses are stream-lined to deliver such information, but they hardly ever allow students to reflect on why the material is important or what they like and dislike about the subject. 

These are important questions in respect of student autonomy.  If we do not allow them to reflect we risk turning out students who simply take part in the world rather than shape it.  We lose curiosity and creativity because they are not stimulated by further reflection.  We see the effects in the classroom where teachers can drive themselves into the ground with the same lessons year after year.  There is no incentive to reflect on or deviate from established formulas that produce good test scores.  Teachers are not given the time or authority to make such reflections or suggestions. 

Reflection is ultimately triggered by curiosity but can be tremendously affected by pressures of time and expectations.  The most effective reflections occur when people are curious about a subject, have time to think about it, and expect to achieve something valuable from it.  In an environment where individual reflection is not encouraged or valued, there is little chance such reflects will be effective or even attempted.  I reflect best when I am allowed to pace without the distractions of homework and people around me.  But that reflection must be sparked by a question that is puzzling or interesting to me.  These questions, however, are hardly ever stimulated by the classroom environment.  The classroom gives me the tools to reflect more effectively, but only time and curiosity will allow me to actually do it.  Can schools give students that time and curiosity?  Are they expected to reflect on academic subjects outside of the classroom?  How much time can we allow them in the school day to think about the questions that are really important to them?

Effective Enthusiasm Is Infectious

This past year I had the misfortune to take the most boring class of my college career.  Duped by the title - 'Dark Age and Medieval Europe' - I thought the class would be fascinating, an archaeological romp through one of my favorite periods of history.  Turns out real archaeology is not like Indiana Jones - at least not at the University of Nottingham.  J.K. Rowling's Professor Binns became an astonishing reality.  Everyone was in a stupor by the end of the lecture because the lecture's enthusiasm was slim to nil.  That course killed archaeology for me.  I lost all interest in the subject and did the minimal to pass my exams. 

This experience has thoroughly convinced me that enthusiasm can make or break a course.  Yet there is an important distinction to make between enthusiasm for the subject and enthusiasm for teaching the subject.  In the first case, the teacher's desire to talk about the material outweighs students' actual comprehension of it.  Teachers of this sort usually ramble on long after students have lost interest, either unaware of or unconcerned with their lack of attention.  Over-enthusiasm can kill a student's budding interest in a subject, just by talking it to death or frustrating it with impulsive and unclear formulations. 

The solution to this I feel lies in the axiom: enthusiasm must be infectious to be effective.  This is a great guideline for determining how to be enthusiastic about teaching.  How do you make enthusiasm infectious?  Involve the students in it.  Make them share your enthusiasm.  My high school choir director used humor to help us enjoy music the same way he did.  He could make us laugh at our mistakes so that we weren't afraid to make them.  I loved singing for him.  And I loved learning how to sing better.  My science teacher was far more reserved but no less effective.  His enthusiasm was tempered by practicality, but the excitement in his eyes never failed to affect us.  Effective teachers don't just show their enthusiasm to students; they share it with them.

Authenticity: Context Strikes Again

Teaching is a performance.  As an actor stands before an audience, a teacher stands before students.  And teachers, like actors, must make each and every performance seem as authentic as the last.  So what makes teachers 'authentic' to students?  Competence and sincerity seem to be the markers of authenticity.  If teachers know little about their subject or how to teach it, they are quite rightly seen as frauds by their students.  But the sincerity of a teacher is subject to each student's perception.  In a small schools, students expect teachers to know their names, yet that would be an impossible standard of authenticity for teachers at larger schools.  Some teachers must take a personal interest in each of their students to be considered authentic, whereas others can get by with simply presenting the material clearly. In either case, standards of authenticity are determined by both communal and individual contexts.  A teacher must navigate these contexts in order to determine what is appropriate for each situation.  If a teacher fails to be 'authentic' in the eyes of a particular student or community, they lose the trust of that student or community.  And learning from that teacher is sapped of all sincerity and value. 

Compassion in the Classroom

I find compassion to be a hard disposition to recollect from my classroom experiences.  Teachers were after all the merciless tyrants who assigned me homework and forced me to exert myself with thinking.  Caught in this perspective, I equate moments of compassion in the classroom to reductions in homework or the excusing of misbehavior.  Yet this could hardly be the limit of it.  Surely there are alternatives instances where a teacher might show compassion for his or her students.  Students of different backgrounds and abilities must elicit empathy from teachers, yet as a student I failed to notice such acts as compassion.  Compassion was merely letting us off the hook, be it for homework or behavior.

What I failed to notice as a student was that compassion was present whenever teachers made an effort to better understand their students.  Compassionate teachers make time for the students who are not on the 'gifted and talented' roster.  Compassion allows teachers to care about their students, to invest more than their time.  It drives a teacher to do everything within his or her power to help students achieve their goals.  A teacher becomes an ally, a guide rather than an authority figure because he or she is sympathetic to the uniqueness of each student.  The teachers I think of as compassionate are those who continue to make themselves available to students, eager to take the time to teach a straggler or catch up with an alumni. 

Can Education Overcome Human Nature?

Most societal problems stem from flaws in a society's value system.  Because a society values A, B is then neglected, leading to structural problem C, ethical problem D, and so on.  By and large, the human race's most destructive societal value is its fierce sense of competition, a value bred into us through years of evolutionary training.  'The most fit survive.'  That is how nature works after all.  How then, is this evolutionary maxim be destructive to our society?  The simple truth is that it pits us against one another in a global society that is increasingly demanding social and economic equality.  Some might call this a paradox of human nature: we demand compassion from one another while competing against each other.  It is impossible to reconcile the two, yet it seems equally impossible to abandon one or the other.  How then do we proceed?  If it were possible to choose between the two, certainly we would choose compassion over competition (unless of course you like driving people into the ground and kicking them in the face), but our society is structured overwhelmingly in favor of competition.  One merely has to look at the way we educate our students to see this.

Simply by awarding individual grades to mark students' progress, we have ensured that they will remain at odds with one another.  Teachers can only give grades if they compare a student to his or her peers, and a student knows this!  Therefore, Mike knows that if Susan doesn't do as well on her exam, he has a better chance of getting a good grade.  It would be disingenuous to deny this.  Any sort of standardized assessment grades on a curve, comparing one student's scores with another student's.  In our current system there is no better way to assess a student's progress, but our emphasis upon grades and test scores continues to compartmentalize students, discouraging collaboration in favor of competition. 

I'm not saying competition is bad; I'm saying that society's excessive value of it is.  Everyday we encourage people to climb the ladders of socio-economic success, but at what cost to our ethical code?  For as one person climbs another is left behind.  Some will say that's just the way the world works... well damn it, I don't know about you, but I'm sick of it!  I want a society where compassion and kindness reigns over everything we do, where curiosity gets the better of fear.  When I go to school, I don't want to be afraid of not getting an A, of not getting a job after I graduate.  I want a reason to learn that doesn't scare me to death!  Is that really too much to ask? 

(Your answer is no.)

Why?  Because we can see hope on the horizon.  As Tony Wagner wrote in his book, businesses and corporations are doing away with their hierarchical structures in favor of more creative team-based leadership approaches.  Employers are looking for employees who can connect and cooperate with other people, not just direct them.  Even if the end goal is to make their businesses more competitive, executives are still encouraging cooperation and creativity, attitudes that will only prove infectious to the larger goals of the company.  The information age is thrusting us into a global society were communication and collaboration will be essential to both economic and cultural success, ensuring a slow but steady restructuring of our value system.  To accommodate this, schools are beginning to employ collaborative approaches to teaching, encouraging kids to learn from one another and work together to achieve common goals.  Students will develop critical thinking skills that will enable them to connect individual details to a larger context.  Overall, these approaches will constitute a greater awareness of communities (schools, corporations, businesses, races, nations, humanity itself) and individuals' roles within them.  Not only this, students will be able to see the extent these communities function within and around each other.  If we continue to emphasis learning in community, one day the students we teach might work together to reduce our energy consumption, fix global warming, prevent genocide, and even eliminate world hunger.  Even if it seems impossible, even if human nature seems to dictate otherwise, it should be our goal as teachers to instill this idealism in every student we teach.  Education should not only prepare kids for the world; it should empower them to shape it.

Respect in Context: How to Approach Respect in the Classroom

'Respect' is one of those tricky ideas to relate.  Often we rush for examples and vague descriptions like 'being open' which sound well enough but do little to define the term.  Yet through all of our foraging for phrases we are able to develop a general sense of what it means to be respectful: treat others as you would want to be treated; value other people's opinions; approach situations with humility.  All of these things we've been taught since preschool dance around an idea that we can't quite pin down.  'Respect' is a term like 'love' or 'kindness' where any attempt at a concrete definition is doomed to fall short of the reality.  Now does that mean we don't try?  Of course not!  But we must understand that any definition of 'respect' will be limited, and that 'respect' can be reinterpreted in any number of ways to make it contextually appropriate. 

That being said, my own attempt at a definition is limited to the way students treat one another: the unequivocal defense of a person's right to be different.  Yet this doesn't quite fit the sort of respect we imagine in the classroom.  It might be a good guideline for students' behavior among their peers, but does it adequately describe the respect between students and teachers?  The trouble with the line 'treat others as you would want to be treated' is that it requires students to actively put themselves in other people's shoes, and how many kids can really imagine what it is like to be a teacher?  So as good as that line is, kids can only apply it to what they know, aka their peer group.  Therefore the classroom must define teacher-student respect and student-student respect in slightly different terms. 

What might more appropriately describe the student to teacher respect as 'what this adult has to say might be worth listening to.'  Whereas the teacher to student respect might be 'these kids are not factory products; their thoughts are worth your time.'  Therefore the keyword to the student-teacher relationship is LISTEN.  A respectful classroom is one where the students listen to the teacher and visa-versa.  If this fails to happen, the classroom devolves into chaos where the students are inattentive and the teacher continually frustrated.  So in order to establish respect in the classroom the teacher has to give the students a convincing reason to listen.  What that reason is ultimately depends upon the classroom environment (context).  In some situations it can be as simple as 'I have a loud, cheery, but authoritative voice.  Listen to me."  Others might be about to put the reason to their students directly.  Others might have to use more subliminal tricks to convince kids to listen.  The point is that there are many paths by which you can establish respect in the classroom, none of them necessarily better than others, and the method employed should ultimately be shaped by context.  Getting kids to listen in big schools will be different from small schools; impoverished schools will be different from rich ones.  As teachers we must understand this and remain flexible in our approaches to respect in the classroom.  As Barry Schwartz once said, "A wise person knows how to improvise."