The other day on MiddleWeb, Alayne Armstrong submitted the following posting:
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From an interesting article on Slate's website about an aspect of teaching that isn't often discussed: how well do you "read" your students, and then, how do you act on this:
"We often have the notion in our culture that the Great Teacher is a Great Communicator: the enthralling evangelist, the mesmerizing orator. Of course, being able to communicate powerfully is vital to effective teaching. But it is still secondary. What separates good from great, across professions and domains, is the ability to receive before you transmit."
"The People Whisperers. What a Hollywood acting coach taught me about teaching."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111924/
What do you think?
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First, a little personal background. My father has done extensive work in "Basic Attending Skills" (that's the title of his second book), so I have long been interested in the idea of how best to listen and more generally how best to receive messages of all sorts. Furthermore, since taking two Semiotics courses on a Junior Year Abroad at the Universite de Paris X - Nanterre, I have been fascinated by the idea that when a message exists in some undefinable form in some being's brain, that being may choose various means by which to communicate the idea, following which these attempts at communication are received and interpreted by a second being and translated back into a message which now exists in some undefinable form in a second brain. To my 19-year-old mind, it seemed a miracle that anyone communicated at all under these circumstances. The importance of my Dad's idea of periodically checking one's comprehension now took on added significance.
With these ideas floating around in my brain, and (I confess, it's true) hooked by the title of the article, I went to the website to read it through start to finish. To my surprise, the parts of the article which most intrigued me didn't have to do with communication per se, but more with motivations behind communication. Here is the quote which stuck out in my mind:
"Teachers like Ivana Chubbuck are not just picking up a student's vibes and following them blindly; they have a distinct point of view to impart, a method to pass on and a goal to achieve. They manipulate. And that's not inherently a bad thing. When you think about it, every act of teaching is a kind of manipulation. We hope—we trust —that the manipulation is well-meant, guiding us to discovery and to a clearer sense of our own voice. But ultimately, we can be sure of that only by trying, by entering into the apprenticeship."
This idea of teaching as manipulation has always fascinated me. My school is built on the ideal that girls should be absolutely true to themselves and find/develop their own unique voice, so we tend to attract girls who come from families that value that ideal and/or who value that ideal themselves. Along with that, our school advocates firmly for tolerance and respect - one may believe what one wishes, but one may not act on those beliefs in a way that diminishes the humanity of anybody else. That perspective could be considered well-meant manipulation. (It could also be considered a necessity and a bedrock principle of civilized society.) Even the act of reading through a draft of a student's work and offering suggestions could be seen as well-meant manipulation. Once the suggestions are offered, the student will no longer look at this specific work as she did before, and perhaps will even have permanently changed her views on some aspect of the writing process. Is that bad? Of course not? As teachers, we have to begin by recognizing there's no way around this idea of teaching as manipulation, and always be on our guard that we are acting in our students' best interests.
Not surprisingly, I think my students understand this idea of teaching as manipulation at some intuitive level - two of the kids, during the presidential campaign, were convinced I was voting Republican (I think this is because I kept intervening whenever the six strong-voiced Democrats in the class were starting to overwhelm the two vocal Republicans) and asked me if I would be offended if they went and found some other adult "who agrees with us" to offer suggestions for revision. I asked them to trust me to be fair-minded in my suggestions, and they were willing to take that leap of faith. Hopefully, they felt their trust was well-placed. Certainly they seemed to feel that my suggestions were honestly useful, and confined to logic and organization rather than pure content. They did make the changes, and it did make their point stronger.
I'll be interested to see where this discussion goes on MiddleWeb - if the thread just sort of trails out, or if it sparks a longer, deeper, more philosophical discussion. In the meantime, it has given me the chance to renew my commitment to always act in the knowledge that teaching other people's children is a sacred trust. I never really did get around to writing a "New Year's Resolution" posting. This will serve for the time being!