Okay not being OK

When I was doing my PhD, question time during research seminars was always a scary proposition. I never knew where the questions were going to come from and it was a competitive arena by design. The back and forth between supervisors and collaborators/frenemies can become spirited very quickly, with students and ECRs caught in the crossfire. This was our version of intellectual fisticuffs and I was trained to treat live debate with caution and suspicion - only enter the metaphorical arena if you were ready to figuratively fight for your scientific bona fides.

It’s no big surprise then that the Socratic method was not my first choice of pedagogy as a new teacher. Why would I deliberately open myself up to questioning if I didn’t have to? For students to openly interrogate the gaps of my knowledge? No thank you. I wanted to present a list of carefully curated concepts (all of which I have read about exhaustively) and leave the room before anyone realised how “little” I actually knew.

In the last series of posts I have been trying to consider what advice would be most valuable to new teachers who are being thrust into an education sector filled with uncertainty. We’ve discussed the (limited) value of being an “entertaining teacher”, and how our past experiences shape our value as teachers in different contexts. Today I want to talk about the fact that teachers don’t need to know all the answers - that it’s okay to be not OK with every question students might ask you.

LMGTFY

Exactly how much should teachers know before stepping foot into a classroom? No-one can debate the importance of preparation and lesson planing, but let’s take this to the logical extreme - can teachers actually know everything there is to know about a topic? Is this the ultimate aim of our professional development, to know all there is to know about everything we teach? While this is a common end-game in research (“read every paper available in the literature until you’re ready to write your own”), this approach has diminishing returns in the teaching domain.

Here’s my (mildly spicy) hot take on the matter: knowledge is always changing, and online search engines are omni-present across all our devices. If every one of your exam questions can be answered in a couple of sentences after spending 2 seconds with Dr Google, what’s the point of coming to class?

I’m of the opinion that our job as teachers is to help students make sense of what appears to be disparate pieces of unrelated information, and create a conceptual framework that demonstrates the interconnectedness of each fact. If your students are active participants in the co-construction of this framework, this makes it all the easier to pull it apart at the seams to further highlight the limits of our current understanding.

The Thin Line

Looking back on the past 10 years of teaching, the best learning experiences I’ve been involved with are those where I’ve not had to say too much. A thin line separates a didactic teacher who’s doing all the talking from an inquiry-based facilitator posing open-ended questions for students to answer.

It took years to re-program my wiring and embrace dialogue with students in the classroom, and I wish I had done it sooner. If nothing else, for very selfish reasons - I never know exactly how a class is going to go, as every student brings a different perspective to the discussion. It’s exciting to bounce off students’ ideas, to shape and direct the discussion towards more meaningful outcomes. Sure beats listening to myself talk about the same topic in the same way semester after semester.

The Balance

Accredited curriculum requirements necessitate a balanced approach to it all. Odds are you won’t be able to spend all of the available class time lost in the weeds of intellectual debate, as disciplinary jargon and frames of reference take time to establish.

But it’s very rewarding to learn to let go of the wheel once in a while. To provide explicit opportunities for students to ask questions that nobody knows the answers to. Reflect on the query, and deflect the question back to the rest of the class, and use it to formulate your learning objectives for next time.

Lead by example and show your students how knowledge can only be created through discussion, experimentation, with a little bit of fear sprinkled in. It’s okay not being OK.

Jack.