Caring for Your Students

What does care in the classroom look like?

Photo by susannrm8

Can we all agree that distance learning during the pandemic was an unmitigated disaster? I will never forget the mother who attended her parent-teacher conference from her Covid bed, gasping for breath and barely able to speak. My co-teacher and I immediately urged her to postpone the meeting for whichever date and time she chose. We would accommodate her—we absolutely would accommodate her! But she insisted that she wanted to continue because she was so concerned about her daughter's reading progress. So we plowed ahead with the conference, and with each strained sentence she uttered, I realized that this parent embodied the dual struggles of our time. We were up against a virulent pandemic and a very real problem that is endemic to education: our inability to address the needs of our below-level students long-before they reach third grade. What’s keeping us from taking care of our kids?

A Care Package for Students

For some context, an example from higher education might help. My older son has just completed his sixth year teaching calculus at UC Davis. The reason I had never pictured him as a teacher was because his favorite fictional characters have all been curmudgeons: Grumpy, Henry Higgins, and Q (as played by Desmond Llewelyn in the early James Bond films). Imagine my surprise, therefore, when in one of his evaluations a student commented that my son was more compassionate and understanding than any other math instructor at the university. I couldn’t help but quip: If that's true, what must that department be like!

When I finally managed to observe one of his classes, I could see understanding and compassion in action as exemplified both by attention to lesson planning detail as well as attention to students—and, moreover, a complete mastery of wait time. Though I didn't understand the math, I did understand how he carefully constructed his lesson, and I also witnessed his courteous attention to all questions and sincere encouragement directed toward the entire class. When one student announced that she would not be taking any more math classes, he paused, folded his hands in front of him, tilted his head slightly, and softly stated with a kind smile: I hope you do.

He really does care about his students—all 550! But maybe not in the conventional sense. One of the best teachers, now retired, at my current school was from Vietnam and brought her personal experiences with strict schooling in her home country into her American classroom. Miraculously, discipline problems from third-grade students suddenly dissipated in her fourth-grade class. There was nothing warm and fuzzy about this sharp-tongued, sharp-edged instructor. But her students learned, and beneath their out-of-earshot groans and grumbles, they appreciated that she cared about them so much that she left no stone unturned in delivering a well-scaffolded lesson. I know because I heard these testimonials from her students who came to me for reading intervention. There was grudging respect for everything she did for them—but respect, nevertheless. And the parents loved her for it. Moral of the story: Care can be bundled and delivered in different ways.

In a recent Research Worth Knowing post, Carl Hendrick shares the following:

Many students fail to improve because they don’t know how to act on feedback, even if they try. Teaching how to respond to feedback may be as important as the feedback itself.

Note how this evaluation from one of my son’s students who had been previously terrified by math classes and clearly just bad at math echoes the importance of helping students process feedback:

I cannot overstate the passion he has for his work, and how much he cares about his students’ learning. I remember he advised the class that messing something up on a midterm wasn't embarrassing, but failing to look over it to discover your mistake and then repeating it again was. That bit of wisdom has stuck with me throughout my classes, and I'm certain that I'm better for it . . . In office hours I never felt judged when asking questions; he prompted us to work through our own questions and though scary at first, it was a beneficial learning opportunity.

There’s caring and then there’s caring. Of course we are greedy and want it all: the cool teacher who cares in the conventional sense and also delivers killer lessons based on a solid understanding of teaching and learning, knowing the underlying research related to best practices and making that research manifest in engaging ways. Of course we do! But if we have to choose for our children the cool teacher or the competent one (both caring in their own ways), which one would we choose?

In a recent Knowledge Matters podcast episode, Dylan Wiliam (Creating the Schools Our Children Need) refers to David Geary’s distinction between biological primary and biological secondary knowledge and skills. Yes, there are those teachers who come wired to connect with their classes because of their innate personalities, and then there are those who gain so much secondary knowledge through training and trial and error that they get their kids to connect with whatever they’re teaching so that the sparks with students are more cerebral than soulful, but they are flying nevertheless.

The Caring Curmudgeon

Naturally, it’s fun to have the fun one, which describes my sixth-grade teacher with his free-flowing banter and his laid-back demeanor, sipping his tea while playing music—not a trace of deliberateness or urgency in anything he did. But as much as we loved him—and we really did—the disappointing truth is that he didn’t teach us nearly as much as my stern fifth-grade teacher did. Though he wore a well-ironed white shirt week in, week out, he wasn’t a stuffed shirt by any means. One day he took the entire length of the board to demonstrate what exactly happens when we divide fractions, and he explained the revolutionary war in a manner that had us enthralled. He meant business and dressed the part—and we willingly bought what he was selling.

Or take my no-nonsense fourth grade teacher, who most certainly broke nearly every educational code in the book when she guided us through a multi-week taxidermy lab to sharpen our science knowledge while permitting us to handle sharp scalpels as we took turns preparing, dissecting, and stuffing a raven—and then writing a class poem about this incredible experience immortalizing our feathered friend. I was only nine and in no position to judge the educational effectiveness of this unit, but the beauty and biology of the bird, the dissection table, the instruments, and the teamwork (think operating room)—these are all indelibly etched in my mind with vivid memories of having had a rich learning experience. This teacher, Mrs. Energizer Bunny, had no soft edges, but her zest for student success in all subjects meant the teaching just kept coming and coming and coming.

Jonathan Rauch’s Atlantic essay “Caring for Your Introvert” is a family favorite because he nails the nuances related to the plight of the introvert in an extrovert-centric world. I especially appreciate when he says:

In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. "People person" is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like "guarded," "loner," "reserved," "taciturn," "self-contained," "private"—narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality.

But you don’t have to be bighearted, vibrant, and warm—a people person—to care for your students. You just need to know your stuff and deliver it day in and day out with a dogged determination to help every student—every single one—master it. Whatever it takes, you turn your attention towards your goal and your students—and just do it. Zach Groshell (Just Tell Them) emphasizes this important point (though perhaps a bit too optimistically):

If you start with the question, what do I need them to know and be able to do, then identify prerequisite skills and background knowledge, then plan a sequence for how to teach it based on cognitive load principles, I imagine your students will enjoy it.

Over the years, my son has had to endure mom jokes that compare what I did with my kindergartners to what he does with his college students. I say things like: How long does it take for 450 students to form a circle on the first day and share their names and favorite food? Or—How exactly do you celebrate the 100th day of school? You know—annoying witticisms like that. At the other extreme, we have deep discussions about what it means to prepare and deliver an effective lesson, which goes to the heart of what we both do, though at opposite ends of the educational spectrum.

A More Perfect Union

In a recent post on X, Dylan Wiliam stated:

We should start by teaching in ways that are effective for all our students, and where some methods are more effective for some than others, I think we should err on the side of teaching what works for those with lower achievement.

Unfortunately, it is those with lower achievement who are too often left behind. My union made the challenges of distance learning even worse for these children by failing to insist on a schedule that included small group time for first grade students. I implored the head of the union (as well as the board members and district administrators) to include this provision in our MOU (memo of understanding), but to no avail. How—I asked—how do we teach children to read if we can't listen to them read to us? How? Did any of these decision-makers even understand what goes into reading acquisition?

Clearly not. And that’s the state of affairs in many of our classrooms nationwide: a lack of understanding about reading acquisition and the implications for instruction based on that knowledge. Through no fault of their own, many teachers are denied access to current research and its application in the classroom because their union cares more about their so-called academic freedom than a child’s right to read. That’s a dereliction of duty by my definition. Carl Hendrick (Defending AERO: Evidence-Informed Teaching Isn’t Oppression, It's Empowering) states:

Teachers consistently emphasised the need for evidence to be translated into clear, practical formats such as videos, lesson templates, and case studies.

However, it wasn’t just during the pandemic that my union failed our students. This neglect is baked into their MO: resist anything that makes training mandatory. Even if we know there are certain materials and methods that should be used during beginning reading instruction, the union won’t require teacher training to learn how and why these methods and materials offer students the most direct path to success.

Let me state the obvious: If we don’t do what is required in first grade, we end up with third graders whose parents are so worried that they attend a parent conference from their sick bed. If we care about our kids, we have to do more than just declare it: We have to show, not tell.

I am very concerned about this stance. As one colleague stated:

The union is caring to a fault: they care so much about teacher autonomy that they’ve turned their back on doing what’s right by students.

Behavior scientist Jennifer Weber states:

Student learning should always take precedence over teacher preference. We have a responsibility to use the most effective, evidence-based methods. I think one constant challenge in education settings, though, is that teachers are often given incomplete training, outdated materials, or inconsistent support.

Caring about students means caring about teachers because the care we’re talking about includes offering teachers support with research-based materials and methods that help reduce their cognitive load in the decision-making process. If caring about teachers just means teacher autonomy based on academic freedom, then we’ve got a problem because the freedom to choose ineffective and inefficient teaching methods makes students prisoners of preference.

This Be the Pushback

I turned to ChatGPT for help writing this poem expressing frustration about the teacher’s union based on the Philip Larkin poem This Be the Verse.

They block it all, the union heads—
From structured plans to phonics skills.
They’d rather guard what someone dreads
Than back a change that climbs the hills.

They moan at every mandate made,
Cry “teacher voice!” and “choice!” and “strain!”
But never mind the price kids paid,
Defeated by a mere word chain.

They swear it's not that they’re against—
Just "forced mandates" they won't condone.
So when the stakes demand a stance,
They hedge, deflect, and guard their own.

Larkin’s poem begins with the infamous lines: They f*** you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do. Harsh as it is, this choice phrase can be applied to any entity that does not prioritize student welfare over teacher autonomy. If the union opposes mandatory training in best practices for reading acquisition, then many teachers simply won’t gain access to this knowledge because the burden shouldn’t be on them to seek it out as many of us have had to do. And although we need to do a better—much better—job choosing the amount and quality of ongoing professional development for teachers, it’s precisely this lack of understanding of and training in reading acquisition that leads to underdeveloped reading skills and a worried parent attending a conference even though she was in no condition to do so.

Many parents instinctively understand what my Covid parent understood: the reality that if a child isn’t reading by third grade, there are very hard times ahead. And it was during distance learning that teachers who struggled to teach behind closed doors suddenly found themselves exposed in front of open cameras that captured the depth and breadth of those struggles: a failure to grasp what is essential to teach reading, an ignorance protected by our union under the mantle of academic freedom.

Needless to say, the teachers who did understand the need to hear students (including below-level third graders) read to them added minutes beyond the MOU to their distance learning day, fulfilling the minimum minutes required for whole-class instruction and adding in time for small groups. How could I have looked that mother in her misty eyes and explained that I wasn’t addressing her daughter’s gaps in a small group because my union said I didn’t have to? Obviously, I couldn’t have, so I, like many colleagues, did what I had to do to take care of my kids.

My district has just undergone a state-mandated instructional review for failing to show progress for its most vulnerable students. One of the eighteen recommendations in this systematic review is to require mandatory professional development related to instruction, far too late for my third grader who is now in middle school, but just in time for this year’s first graders. Better late . . . ?

How do we show that we really care about kids? By delivering informed instruction day in and day out to help all students succeed. “Caring for Your Introvert” begins with:

Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? If so, do you tell this person he is ‘too serious,’ or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren't caring for him properly.

Yes, this introvert might well be your child’s next teacher—but please don’t despair! Care can come from where you least expect it, so just do your best to spot it and support it.

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.