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July half gone, this is the time of the year that one’s thoughts may first turn toward the fall semester.
Hopefully not too many thoughts. It is only July, after all.
Unfortunately, I think the challenges of the last several years have infused a certain amount of dread into these thoughts, well beyond the usual anxiety (or excitement) of confronting a new year. This is particularly true for the writing teachers that I work with to help them evolve their teaching approaches.
One of the things I’ve heard more than once is a sentiment along the lines of I’m doing everything I can, and it’s not working.
This sentiment echoed in my head when I read a recent piece by Sarah Rose Cavanagh at The Chronicle discussing what she perceives as a backlash against “student-centered teaching.” Cavanagh is the senior associate director for teaching and learning at Simmons University, and she has heard similar sentiments:
“I encounter that sentiment whenever I give talks or run workshops at campus teaching centers. ‘My faculty are saying to me: I’m just done. Done!’ said one such center director recently. ‘And these are my most dedicated, most student-focused teachers!’ I see the same frustration reflected in social-media posts from some of my professor friends. And I read some possible causes in essays about growing student incivility in the classroom, and in scholarly work that calls for us to appreciate how women and faculty of color bear the brunt of such disruptive behavior.
“In fact, I’ve been hearing these rumblings to such a degree—and gathering strength over time—that I’ve begun thinking of it as a growing backlash against student-centered teaching, at least in its most concentrated form.”
As someone tasked with institutional support for helping instructors do their best work, Cavanagh offers a number of recommendations, all of which I strongly endorse. I want to add some additional thoughts from the perspective of someone who—over the course of years—evolved my pedagogical approach to be more student-centered, without ever having heard that term before, and the kind of individual mindset that I think helps when moving through this process.
- Student-centered learning at its best is inherently collaborative.
The biggest shift in my mindset was to embrace that my courses were going to be a “shared inquiry into the subject at hand.” It was my job to set the curriculum and challenges for students to work through, but I had to be open to the journey through those challenges deviating from my expectations. Learning was going to happen, but the exact contours of that learning were not apparent.
To achieve this collaborative spirit, I started engaging in radical transparency, attempting to make all aspects of the course and student attitudes toward it open for discussion.
Out of the gate, I did my best to establish a framework of appreciation at the center of the course in order to invite students into a discussion of the inherent fascinations of writing. At the same time, I was open to whatever negative experiences and feelings they had with our subject.
No student was obligated, by me, to do exactly what I was asking them to do. Students had the opportunity to opt in or not. This is their right. I tried to make opting in as tempting as possible, but I wasn’t going to micromanage the lives and attitudes of college students. If this resulted in a student receiving a grade lower than they wished, that was their responsibility, not mine.
- Student-centered teaching puts more responsibility on students, not less.
One of the mistakes I see highly dedicated faculty making in teaching writing is trying to give students access to more stuff (resources, instructor time) in order to meet every student’s needs. Rather quickly, this sets up a disempowering dynamic for students, where the expectation becomes that the instructor will knock down barriers between the student and success.
I lived this for years.
Now, I instead advocate for thinking about the class context in terms of establishing an appropriate atmosphere for learning. Students need to know what they’re being asked to do and why they’re being asked to do it and then be given sufficient resources and guidance to approach those challenges.
Once that baseline is established, it’s not that no additional help is forthcoming, but in my experience, that help often takes the form of redirecting students toward the resources and opportunities that are already present rather than me having to do additional work.
Student-centered work should absolutely increase student autonomy rather than working the other way around.
- Student-centered does not mean instructors sacrifice their own well-being.
The origin of my own shift had nothing to do with wanting to do better by students and everything to do with the fact that I was courting frustration and burnout in my work. Setting a classroom atmosphere rooted in what Cavanagh calls “intellectual challenge” does not and should not require more work or additional sacrifice from the instructor.
My evolution was explicitly predicated on my need to do less. Over time, I found that I could do less that also meant more by changing the nature of what I was asking students to do (build their writing practices).
- Student-centered learning is not a solution for structural problems around teaching.
The chief reason I evolved my approach was because the high student loads were wearing me down and I could not do what I was doing any longer. My student loads came down somewhat when I switched institutions, but the amount of work required to teach writing courses full-time combined with the very limited salary I received for that work ultimately drove me out of teaching.
I miss teaching all the time and still do it in limited tastes when I get the chance, but I have never regretted leaving an impossible situation behind. Instructors should not feel obligated to sacrifice themselves in the face of structural problems that are out of their power to address.
What this looks like for folks who do not have the option to leave will vary, but one of my consistent refrains with the instructors I work with is “You can only do what you can do.” As Cavanagh notes, it is often the most dedicated teachers who are most susceptible to burnout and sacrifice, so if anyone is feeling obligated to solve the insolvable through their own sacrifice, my advice is don’t try it.
You can only do what you can do.
For me, student-centered teaching was the equivalent of putting on my oxygen mask when the plane depressurizes before helping others. Considering my needs first really did give me the space to reconceive what I was requiring of students. It extended my teaching career for years until that fuel was ultimately exhausted.
It also gave me the additional fuel that has allowed me to stay involved with these issues that mean so much to me without sacrificing my economic and emotional well-being.
Student-centered teaching isn’t a technique or method. It’s a mindset, and I think that mindset should first consider the needs of the instructor, who is, for obvious reasons, a very important ingredient to student success.
