Engaging Allows for Understanding

When I taught in Baltimore City Public Schools, most years my average class size was 32 kids. Due to some scheduling fluke in my third or fourth year teaching, I was assigned a group of 21 seniors in a year-long engineering practicum class.

A couple months into the year, one of our vice principals stepped into this class to ask me something. Later that day he called me to his office and asked how I was doing it. He said that I had some of the worst-behaving seniors in that class, yet when he visited, everyone was engaged in the lesson. I told him it’s easy: give any teacher a class of only 21 kids and everyone will be learning.

Since leaving that first school 10 years ago, I’ve taught at two other schools, both private. My largest class size at either was 21 kids, and my average class size has been about 14 kids.

What is it about smaller classes that allows more learning to happen? Any of us could probably answer this question without much thought: fewer kids means fewer distractions, more teacher attention on each kid, less opportunity for “misbehaving”, less classroom management occupying the teacher’s thinking, and so on.

The question that I’m really curious about now, though, is what allows learning to happen in any classroom? What are the conditions in a large or small class that allow students to engage with material in a way that they develop understanding?

Yes, that group of 21 students was engaged because, with fewer students, it’s much easier to engage the individual learner. However, class size alone is insufficient to create the conditions for learning.

The key word above, I think, is engage. Whether the class is large or small, the teacher must engage learners in the classroom.

There was a period in my teaching when I thought that engagement was just a matter of showing cool stuff to students - firing pumpkins across a field, flying down zip lines, spewing elephant toothpaste across a lab bench, or even watching Black Mirror in class. And yes, those things are pretty effective at engaging students for a time.

But engagement is more than engaging a student with the outer world of the material. For students to develop an authentic connection with the course material, which is where understanding gets developed, the student's inner world must be engaged in the classroom too.

In smaller classes, it's easier for a teacher to engage the students' inner world as well as their outer world - 21 students is a whole lot easier to engage than 33 students. However, regardless of class size, it's the engagement of the students' inner and outer worlds that allows for understanding to develop.

Thanks so much for reading ♥️.

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The Capacity to Respond without Constraint

Mr. McGrath, my 12th grade calculus teacher, used to get annoyed when one of us referred to “plugging” a number into an equation. Without fail, every single time, he would say something like, “We plug wires into walls. We substitute numbers into equations.”

I doubt he would know that every single time over the last 15 years that a student said in my class to plug a number into an equation that I would reflexively want to say the same exact thing to them.

Mr. McGrath had high behavioral and intellectual expectations of us. Despite his face turning red and his body tensing up when there was occasional misbehavior in the class, he really enjoyed teaching. He’d tell us dorky jokes. He’d pick on a few of us in endearing ways. He’d give us stories from his own past as a student. He had drawings around his room from a former student, art inspired by Mr. McGrath’s stories of mathematicians and their work.

Whether teachers realize it or not, we are models for our students. In adolescence particularly, and whether consciously or unconsciously, students are absorbing the demeanor, the outlook, the approach, the mentality, the vision, the commitment, and the passion of their teachers in one way or another. Adolescence is the fertile ground of influence and choice that in so many ways impacts who we become.

There’s an immense opportunity to positively impact the lives of our students by modeling the being of adult. We can model it by demonstrating the full capacity of adults to be agents in our own lives. By demonstrating thoughtfulness, creativity, compassion, enjoyment, engagement, and satisfaction. By demonstrating honesty, courage, understanding, and collaboration. By demonstrating ease, love, and passion.

Every teacher wants their students to feel free to explore their own self-expression, their own passions, and their own interests. I suspect that if we all knew it to be possible, we’d also want our students free to develop their own innate capacity to be agents in their lives regardless of their present circumstances, their memories of the past, or their anticipated future.

Free to respond to any experience in life, unconstrained by their own thoughts or the thoughts of others, unconstrained by their own past experiences or the past experiences of others. Free to be responsible.

Responsibility: the capacity to creatively respond without internal constraint.

I love teaching and the experience of working with adolescents, and I thrive on the honest and authentic relationships that can form in the classroom. I’m grateful to Mr. McGrath for modeling for me what it could look like to enjoy teaching and hold students to high standards.

It was in Mr. McGrath’s class that I distinctly remember sitting near the back of the room and saying to myself, “Huh, I kinda want to be a teacher.”

Thanks so much for reading ♥️.

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Unbreakable, Untarnishable, and Whole

I was almost 30 years old when Luke, an old high school friend of mine, reached out and invited me to a men’s group that was starting the next night. For the next 9 years, I participated in this group with anywhere from 7 to 12 members twice monthly. The group itself is still going.

Perhaps the biggest lesson that I learned about myself during those 9 years is that my challenges and problems are shared by almost every other man. Issues of fears, insecurities, anxieties, emotions, self-expression, love, and friendship. Early on in the group, I had a guy call me to the mat for yelling at my kids, and a couple years later I called him to the mat for the same thing. We both became better fathers for it.

The men in the group hold each other to account for being the men we knew each other to really be, and we do it with love, compassion, generosity, and some fear and nervousness too. In that community, we all grew to be more closely the men we truly are. And we did it by speaking to each others’ true nature.

From The Methodist Quarterly Review, 1858:

"It is the sculptor’s power, so often alluded to, of finding the perfect form and features of a goddess, in the shapeless block of marble; and his ability to chip off all extraneous matter, and let the divine excellence stand forth for itself."

A student once shared with me some personal challenges she’s dealing with. Issues of health and well-being, body image, self-deprecating thinking, and sadness. She shared that a number of her friends were in therapy too, dealing with similar struggles. When we talked, she was animated and engaged, and I could only imagine this clear, affable, and beautiful person in front of me struggling as she had been.

By the end of our conversation, we were both present to this strange aspect of our experience: we so easily confuse who we are with who we think we are. It’s so clear to me that the broken, false, wrong person that she sometimes thinks she is is in fact not her at all - it is only her thinking about who she is. And the inadequate, insufficient person that I sometimes think that I am is not who I really am either.

In men’s group, the community called us forth from the morass of our thinking (memories, judgments, fears, and desires), and we stepped into being in the present moment. Full of life and authentic connection to others and ourselves, we can step newly into an experience not constrained by our own thinking.

Like the sculptors in the quote above, the teacher’s power is in listening to the divine inner nature of our students.

Unbreakable, untarnishable, and whole: listening to who our students really are, we “let the divine excellence stand forth for itself,” shining more fully and lifting the obscuring fog of students’ own self-limiting thinking about themselves, each other, and the universe.

Thanks so much for reading ♥️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.