Core Philosophies
1. Coaching, Preaching and Teaching
When we interact with students, we take on various roles. As you have experienced, we are social worker, disciplinarian, nurse, advocate, mediator, teacher, friend and mentor. We’d like to discuss three ways of being that we find ourselves moving between with regularity. Being conscious of which mode we’re in allows us to be more effective in our role as educator.
Coaching: Leading Someone to Their Discovery
Preaching: Leading Someone to Your Discovery
Teaching: Giving Information
“I changed my perspective because of this class.”
Coaching:
This is the process of asking questions instead of giving answers. It can be challenging for us teacher-types to do this! We are used to teaching (see next section), but there are many times this way of being results in more powerful learning. For example, a student asks, “Why (blank)?” We tend to answer, “Because (blank).” Coaching would respond with, “That’s a great question. What ideas do you have about (blank)?”
Preaching:
What? We don’t preach at school! This may have been your first thought. Let’s define preaching as any time we share our own philosophies, values and ideologies with students with the intention of having them agree with us. Think carefully, and you may begin to see times you have done this. We all have.
There is nothing inherently wrong with preaching, as long as we are aware that we are doing it. It is different than sparking discussion so students can discover their own ideas and values. It may look like this: “If you don’t figure out how to do homework now, you won’t be successful in your job later in life.” “You have to learn how to respect people.” “We all have to do things we don’t want to do now and then.”
We encourage you to preface sharing your own beliefs and values with a statement that lets the students know exactly that: you are sharing what you believe. This gives room for them to think about what you’re saying and potentially disagree with it with permission. Feel the difference in this statement: “In my life experience, I found that the more responsible I became for my schoolwork, the better able I was to accept responsibility at my job. My grades went up, and I got promoted at work to a position with more responsibility.”
Teaching:
Sometimes we need to teach. If we are showing how to solve an equation, we want to teach each step as well as we can. It would be simply annoying to try to use coaching in this situation. “How do you think you might solve this problem?” isn’t an appropriate question when introducing new material for the first time. In fact, it could have the opposite effect and elicit feelings of “I should know this and I don’t. I must be dumb.” Another phrase for this is “ensuring success.” This means that we give all the information possible for students to have the basis for knowledge, a skill or a process that they are expected to master. After teaching, then we can coach, allow room for experimentation, and learning by doing and failing and trying again.
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2. Democratic Process
Students Are People, Too!
Our class did not resemble a traditional classroom. We did not sit in rows. We rarely did worksheets. We gave no exams. We did not lecture and have students take notes.
Our focus was on listening and responding, sharing information and eliciting discussion, facilitating experiential exercises that helped them make discoveries, and challenging their ways of thinking, being and relating.
“At first, I thought this would be boring and a waste, but this was the best class because of the teaching style. You treated us like people, not students to snap on. You actually talked to us like we are people.”
Sharing Power
An important guiding principle for us was Democratic Process, defined as allowing room for students to make choices whenever possible and to have power. This Leadership Diagram helped us articulate our beliefs and values.
For example, we began the semester by assigning seats. Eventually, a student was trusted with the power to place namecards on desks to assign seats. By the end of the semester, we did not assign seats at all. Students chose where they needed to be, and they were able to make choices to sit away from those that were distracting or taking them off task.
Another example is using rubrics for assignments and projects. A rubric gives student the ability to choose their own level of performance if it clearly delineates what is required for each grade or level of mastery. Students were given guidelines on what they needed to produce, but they were free to choose their own way of completing the work and could choose their own focus or topic.
At the end of the semester, we conducted closing interviews as their final exam. They were asked about every facet of the course and knew that their feedback would guide how it would be taught in the future. This curriculum reflects their feedback about what to include, what to drop, how it could be done more effectively, and what was most meaningful.
Throughout the semester, all of these seemingly small decisions added up to feelings of empowerment. Their feedback to us was that they felt we treated them “like real people, not just students to boss around.” Allowing choice and freedom whenever possible creates an atmosphere of trust and respect and allows students to begin to think for themselves in a way they may not be used to doing.
“This class made me feel comfortable and smart.”
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3. Challenge by Choice
This is a principle that allows students to have, quite simply, choice! Whether it’s saying “Pass” in a check-in, or saying, “I’m not comfortable sharing right now,” it is important for students to know that they won’t be pushed beyond their limits. This should be used with a grain of salt, however. When students appeared to use “Pass” as a way to avoid interaction or as a cop-out, we gently encouraged them to take the risk to engage. Use your discernment and relationship with the student to feel your way through this.
Tools to Establish Common Language
We used several tools to help us have common language to express our internal states of mind or feelings:
Risk Zones:
Draw a target with three rings on the board. Label the inner ring “Danger!”, the middle ring “Risk” and the outer ring “Comfort.” Explain that we learn best when we are on the edge of Comfort and Risk (see Learning Edge below). We do not learn well when we are in the Risk zone because we enter “fight or flight” mode. Students are encouraged to talk about the zone they are in. For example, “I want to share something, and it’s the in the Risk zone for me, so I need your support.”
Learning Edges:
This is the place between what you know and what you want to learn, often accompanied by a feeling of discomfort as you push yourself to expand.
Trigger:
This is defined as something that is a sensitive issue, word, feeling or behavior for you. We helped students identify and express their triggers to each other so we could treat each other gently around these things. We could also say, “Hey, that’s a trigger for me” if one arose in the moment.
“This class helped me get better at not being too shy to talk in front of people.”
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