Episode 12: Bridget & Fiona

A Teacher Support Group turns terrible feelings into superb instruction.

Transcript

A while back I had a super-interesting Teacher Support Group meeting. It was the first meeting of a group of professors at a liberal arts college. This right here is interesting because, in case you don’t know, very few college professors are taught how to teach. They just figure it out as they go. And, as you’ll see, they get pretty darned creative!!

So creative, in fact, that I’m going to depart from my normal podcast episode format. I’m not going to tell just one story in this episode. I’m going to tell two stories. And tie them together. In a neat little bow. Awesome.

Here we go:

One of the teachers in this TSG, Bridget, worried that her office hours were being overrun by students who needed help reviewing basic math skills. “I can’t devote 20 hours a week to meet with students!” she told us. “I’m not even really teaching math! I’m teaching statistics!”

Another teacher, Fiona, was trying to figure out the types of students the college attracted. She wondered how to pace her assignments. How much was too much? How could she push her students without overwhelming them?

As we talked in the Support Group about what issue we’d start with, one of the teachers cracked the conversation open a teeny bit. About Bridget’s office hours problem, this one teacher said, “It’s kind of about the students’ imagination about what they can and cannot do.”

Are you kidding me? I loved this. “The students’ imagination about what they can and cannot do.” In other words, the limitations and expansiveness of students’ self-images and beliefs about themselves – their abilities, their rights, their self-sufficiency, their chances for success – might well determine how they make use of their teachers. And their readings.

How often do teachers at any level think about that? This is what I’m talkin’ about, people.

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I rolled all this into a question about data. Cuz I love data. Not numbers. (Hell, I am no statistician!) But observations. Of behaviors. Of emotions. Of assumptions. Data that can help us make amazingly accurate guesses about black box questions like the one about student imagination.

So I asked the teachers: “Where’s the data?”

We tackled Bridget’s problem first – the problem of being swarmed in office hours by students who didn’t know math. The group wondered what the data – the swarming, the lack of math skills – meant to Bridget.

Easy. Turns out. Bridget said, “Well, it’s pretty clear that a lot of my students need to brush up on their math skills. They all know the math – they learned it in middle school! But not everyone remembers it.” Oh. So. The problem quickly down-graded from “the students don’t know math and need me to teach it to them” to “the students need to brush up on math concepts they’ve already learned but have forgotten.” A very different problem, right?

So what could Bridget do about this problem? Hint: Meeting with students for 20 hours a week was not the answer.

The group came up with several suggestions:

·      One: Gather more data. Rather than use office hours to deliver remedial math instruction, Bridget could meet with her students for just 10 minutes each to hear their needs and refer them appropriately.

NOTE: Gathering fresh data about each student from each student would allow Bridget to both suspend her assumptions – that is, to stop thinking she knew what her students needed – and instead hear what they knew or didn’t know and parcel out customized recommendations. It would also help Bridget forge individual relationships with her students, which has no downside.

·      Two: Distribute responsibility. Given the data and Bridget’s interpretation of it – namely, that a number of students couldn’t remember the math they had learned several years ago – she could invite someone from the campus tutoring program to address her class and describe all the resources available to students who needed to brush up on their math skills. I call this distributing the responsibility because Bridget wasn’t the only person on campus who could help her students with their math. She could delegate that responsibility. Instant relief.

·      Three: Get the students involved. The teachers in our TSG suggested a number of other ways to distribute the responsibility for knowing and learning, including pairing up the good math students in the class with the students who were less confident in their math skills and having them work a problem together right then and there. Or assigning study groups so students would be forced to work together and learn from each other every week. Or enlisting the aid of Teaching Assistants if Bridget had them.

The prospect of using students as resources for other students caused some concern. What if, one teacher worried, the “good” math students led the “bad” math students astray? What if the answers they came up with were wrong?

Good question. One that, by the way, rests on the assumption that being wrong is disastrous. The group questioned that assumption. One of the teachers told a quick story about a math class she had observed in which the math teacher had distributed responsibility in precisely this way – that is, by pairing students up in class to work on a problem together. One of the pairs did indeed report an incorrect answer. What did the teacher do? She said, “Interesting! How did you get there?” 

Lovely. Just to repeat the obvious: This teacher could not have asked this question – and, by our teacher’s report, gotten super useful answers out of the students – and not just from the pair who had gotten the problem wrong, but from the rest of the class as well – this teacher could not have asked “How did you get there?” if she had held the assumption that wrong answers were bad. If she had said, instead, “Ummm, close! Anybody else?” Or if she had clamped down on her anxiety about wrong answers by making her students watch her do the problem right, as if her knowing would somehow translate into their knowing.

You may have picked up on a theme here. Which is – well, what do you think it is? I’ll give you a moment to think. [pause] OK, ready? The theme is drum roll assumptions. The conclusions we jump to about what’s going on around us, what’s going on inside other people, what they mean, what they can do, who they are, how they see us. The conclusions that are so automatic that they lie buried in our subconscious most of the time. And are incredibly influential.

It’s important to dig them up. To dig up our assumptions. And look at them critically. Because they can really block us from seeing what’s out there. The raw data. What someone else is teaching us about themselves. It’s like our assumptions organize the data before we even get to it and our focus then becomes the assumptions rather than the basic information. The assumptions being one or more levels up from the bedrock level of basic information. And the bedrock level is more often than not where it’s at.

Organizational schemes are good, don’t get me wrong. But not if they obscure the basic data. Better if the organizational schemes emerge from the basic data. Basic is usually better. Assumptions are quite often wrong.

And that’s because our assumptions are frameworks that we have constructed based on past experiences that might not have any bearing on our present experience. They’re a version of our psychic structures. Another way of putting this is that we seek what we look for and find what we seek. None of which necessarily has anything to do with what is actually in front of us. So. Beware of assumptions.

And by the way: It’s really good to have students dig up their assumptions, too. Assumptions block students’ learning just as they block teachers’  learning. Questioning assumptions might even be a crucial means and end of education. If you think about it.

So. Back to Bridget. Keeping this theme of assumptions in mind.

I am a big fan of explicitness. In general, I suggested that Bridget lay out the issue for her class by saying something like “We have roughly two groups here. One group that hasn’t done math in a long time. Another group that does math in their sleep.” And then “How do you suggest we manage that?” which could yield some very helpful data-based ideas. Right? Or “Here’s how I’d like to manage that” – and Bridget could roll out her own plan.

One of the teachers in our group liked this idea, but for a slightly different reason. She liked the idea because explicitness about the instructional problem addressed the underlying emotional problem: the problem of students’ anxiety. Their apparent need for reassurance. Being explicit about those students’ instructional needs in front of the entire class, thereby normalizing their needs, could assuage their anxiety. This wouldn’t just be a nice thing to do. It could make those students actually more prone to use resources other than Bridget because their shame and anxiety would have been reduced.

Beautiful. Solve the problem by noting the emotional need (reassurance) and the instructional need (math review) and addressing each effectively. In one fell swoop.

Returning to assumptions for a moment: How did they work in Bridget’s case? Bridget’s initial assumption seems to have been that it was her responsibility to fill the gaps in her students’ math knowledge. Result? Overwhelmedness and rising panic at the thought of spending 20 hours a week teaching math. For those of you who follow my blog, this is an example of filling the void. That is, sensing a need and throwing yourself at it without regard for yourself or for the possibly negative, enabling consequences. Enabling consequences: meaning that, by filling the void yourself, you encourage, yae enable, incompetence, passivity, in others.

With a tiny nudge from the group, however, that assumption shifted to “It’s the students’ responsibility to remember what they have learned.” The good news for Bridget, which her peers pointed out in many different ways, was that the resources to help students do this were plentiful.

This group had thought about Bridget’s issue so efficiently – did this bring me joy? Yes it did – that we had time to take on Fiona’s issue. Which, you undoubtedly recall, had to do with how much work to assign students, how hard to push them. Turns out that, as with Bridget’s problem, assumptions played a big role in Fiona’s problem as well.

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Fiona reported that she had assigned 120 pages of reading to her mostly 1st and 2nd year students the week before. She had given them a worksheet with four or five questions on it that were meant to guide the students through the text. And she had told them explicitly – a good move – that she did not expect them to read every word of the texts but to skim, to get the gist. But it became clear in this week’s class that only a few students had done it. What were her students capable of? Should Fiona cut back? What should she do differently?

Before I continue with Fiona’s story, a public service announcement: Teachers, when you assign reading, do what Fiona did: Give your students a purpose for reading. That is, help students wade through the flood of words you’ve assigned by focusing their attention on only a few of those words. How do you focus their attention? By giving them questions to answer. Or other hints about what to look for in the texts. This not only helps your students extract useful information but gives them common ground for discussion later.

But how do you survive the offense of narrowing their view? When the readings you’ve assigned are so rich and wonderful? You realize that, if students try to remember everything, they’re more likely to remember nothing. And that, if you give them an organizing scheme, one that forces them to focus on certain aspects of the text, they’ll remember what you ask them to remember and possibly more, precisely because your purpose for reading has provided them with an organizing scheme. You also realize that, if a reading is really that rich and wonderful, you can have the students read it again later with a different purpose.

You get it. If you want students to learn from their reading, tell them how. Explicitly. (I mean it: I really do love explicitness.)

This has been a public service announcement. We now return to our regular scheduled programming. 

So Fiona did the right thing by giving her students a list of questions that gave them purposes for reading. And by being explicit about her expectations – that students would get through a whopping 120 pages in one week not by reading each word but by skimming and trying to catch the gist.

Assuming they knew how to – or maybe more accurately, would allow themselves to – skim. Another important assumption. Everyone in the group agreed that most of the students they encountered at this college were not used to skimming or reading for the gist; they were accustomed to getting the “right answer.” Ah! This was valuable data! Was the students’ general failure to accomplish the assignment that Fiona had so painstakingly set up for them teaching Fiona that they did not know how to read the way she wanted them to? Or that they needed permission and practice to pull it off? Either way, Fiona now had a hypothesis about what her students might need. She could go to her next class with a plan for how to gauge students’ skimming abilities – to gather more data about their skills and willingness to use them – and, if necessary, with a plan for how to permit and promote those abilities.

This group, being the group it was, had some suggestions for how to teach skimming.

·      One teacher said, “Tell the students to turn the title and sub-headings of an article or book chapter into questions and then read to answer the questions.” 

·      A related suggestion: Have students make predictions based on titles and sub-headings and then read to confirm or correct their predictions. 

·      Another teacher told about an experience she had had as a student that was really helpful. Her teacher had given the students (including her) four articles. The first one they had 15 minutes to read. The second one they had 10 minutes. The third one 5 minutes, and the fourth 2. Each time they needed to say or write down in one sentence what the article was about. Ooooh! Fun!!

·      Another teacher told us about a game she sometimes has her students play that she calls “Speed Dating.” Here’s how it works: Students pair up. Each student has read one of two articles. Not the same article. One of two different articles. They sit across from each other, as if they were participating in a speed dating event, and tell each other about their article. They get 5 minutes or so to make this introduction and field questions from their date. To be fair, the Speed Dating activity does not teach students how to skim. But it does give students a concrete way of thinking about consolidating the gist of a reading, and it gives them fun practice at sharing that gist. Would I be going too far to suggest that the outcome of the Speed Dating game could be to vote on the best article, the most appealing intellectual partner? Or even the worst article, the one everyone would least like to date? Swipe right? Swipe left? Of course, the students would have to give their reasons. And the articles’ feelings would not be hurt.

So. We dug up Fiona’s assumptions about her students and helped her come up with an experiment that tested a feasible hypothesis about her students’ relationship with skimming. Which she tried. Did it work? Yes it did.

I didn’t say this to the group but I thought about it afterwards: What we were talking about with Fiona’s issue was allowing students to forge relationships with content. (Think Speed Dating.) Talking about teaching students how to make sense of their readings was, basically, focusing on the means by which such a relationship could develop. In other words, how do you “make friends” with an article or subject matter? When you meet someone (or an article or book or subject matter) for the first time, what information sticks with you? Why? How do you know what information is important? How do you organize it so you can remember it? 

What do all these questions have to do with school assignments? I don’t rightly know.

But I suspect a whole lot.

I had another thought after this wonderful wunder-TSG. These two teachers, Bridget and Fiona, knew exactly what their students were telling them. Bridget knew that some of her students simply needed to brush up on their middle school math skills. Fiona knew her students didn’t complete their assignment because they were terrible at skimming. Bridget and Fiona knew these things, but sub-consciously. That is, their knowledge was submerged under their assumptions and, frankly, under their emotions. What they both did at first was gather the data – “Students are swarming me!” “Students aren’t doing my assignments!” – and worry about it rather than work with it.

What else they did was to note their worry and bring it to their Teacher Support Group. Where the worry turned into camaraderie and digging up assumptions and good guesses and creative thinking and informed plans of action and, of course, emotional and practical relief.

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So to review: There’s something about collecting data – students’ swarming us at office hours, students’ failure to accomplish an assignment – that is transformative. First, crucially: Turning overwhelming or confusing experience into data reduces anxiety. What have you observed? What might these observations, these data, mean? Whether the data is emotional or behavioral – that is, relational – this step asks teachers to use their guts and their heads and, importantly, to detach. Get curious. Trust. Calming down and detaching is just as useful for teachers as it is for students.

The second thing collecting data does is invite us to question our assumptions. This breaks us out of sometimes wrong-headed, entrenched thinking and therefore acting. Which can open us up to creative thinking and creativeacting that allow us to address students’ actual problems. Which gets the learning we’re after to happen.

Some fundamental work we as teachers can do, then, is to question our assumptions about wrong answers and students’ resistance to assignments and rework them into, I don’t know, the assumption that process – how you got there – is just as important as – or maybe even more important than – product – whether or not you got to the right place. Or we can rework our assumptions into the different assumption that wrong answers are good and deserve huge welcoming hugs! Or into the assumption that students have good reasons for not doing assignments and that we’d best figure out what those reasons are so we can adjust effectively.

Because our disappointing or overwhelming or confusing experiences with students can reveal the truth about them and deliver unto us on a silver platter beautiful data that can activate our imaginations about how we can address that truth and turn students’ blameless not-knowing into knowing. How we can get a glimpse into the black box of their imaginations about themselves – what they think they can and cannot do, who they think they can and cannot be – and expand the boundaries of those imaginations.

But collecting data can be so hard to do on your own!! When we’re in the thick of teaching, it can be impossible to see beyond our assumptions, our fears and anxieties; it can be impossible to see behind our students’ blank faces, their black boxes.

Which leads to today’s axiom: Nope. It’s not collect emotional and relational data. Though it could be. It’s not dig up your assumptions. Though it could be. It’s GET THEE INTO A TSG!!

Why? Because, if you’re a teacher who loves your students, loves your subject matter, loves introducing one – your students – to the other – your subject matter – that is, loves teaching – then there is no better place to be than in a TSG. (Sounds like a jingle, doesn’t it?) You bring your blind spots into the group and, with care and compassion and brilliance, you and your comrades shine light into the darkness. Making you a more effective teacher. And making you feel better.

And here’s the thing: While Teacher Support Groups are all about collecting emotional and relational data, they’re ultimately about teaching and learning. With Bridget, we started with her feeling of overwhelmedness and ended with ways she could arrange for her students to brush up on their math skills. With Fiona we started with her uncertainty and self-doubt and ended up with ways she could teach her students the valuable skill of skimming. We start with the feelings you have anyway, feelings that can really screw up your day, and turn them into instructional plans of action that work – and might even be fun! I mean. TSGs rock.

If you want to try one for yourself – and you CAN; it’s POSSIBLE – then go to my website at teachingthroughemotions.com and click on The Manual. That’s where you can purchase – for a pittance – a DIY TSG Manual. That’s a Do-It-Yourself Teacher Support Group Manual. You can teach yourself how to organize and run a TSG. It’s as simple as that.