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2001 Teaching Excellence Symposium Keynote Address James Rhem, Ph.D. I'm always pleased to be invited to address a group of faculty, but I'm always thrown into spasms of earnest contemplation of what it means to get up and address such a group. It's an exciting opportunity, but it's also always daunting. I am always wondering "who are these people?" "What do they want to hear? What do they expect to hear? What kind of bridge can I build between that--which I can only guess at--and what I want to say." You immediately see the analogy here between this situation and meeting a new class for the first time, don't you? There is a gulf to be bridged. The waters are somewhat darkened by the things I don't know about you and that you don't know about me--we aren't friends yet, though we might be--and the waters might be troubled as well if attendance here were required for example. For some, this hour might be analogous to a required course, for others, an elective. Our situation diverges from the analogy of meeting a
class for the first time in that it's very doubtful that
you are anxious about whether I will like or approve of
you. But research shows that's what students are feeling
in that first meeting. We think they are waiting to see
if we know our stuff and are well-organized and fair . .
. and they are, but even more than that they are hoping
they'll have our approval. While you aren't carrying it this morning, that worry is part of our equation. It's just that I'm carrying it on my side of the lectern. I'm hoping you'll like me and approve of what I'm saying. Why all this self-conscious talk about liking and approval? Because when we gather to talk about friendliness, we have to decide right at the start whether we are going to talk about a mask of decorum only or whether we are going to probe deeper and consider the essence it represents. If we think of "friendliness" as a decorum, and a decorum as a kind of mask--a behavior we put on--we have to decide right at the start what kind of mask it will be. Will it be a mask that hides, disguises, obscures--a Halloween mask, a thief's mask--or a mask that projects something that we believe in and want to cause to be or to happen in those we encounter--a mask, a decorum like those we associate with Greek drama or the Noh play tradition of Japan or the Buddhist dance tradition. The projective versus the disguising mask had always been an academic distinction to me until I met the Dali Lama a few years ago and heard him speak a few times in Madison. He's not a great speaker. He has a very very deep voice which is hard to amplify and he speaks in a broken and clipped way that can be difficult to follow. But at one point in his remarks I heard him addressing a question I'd always wondered about and so I listened harder. He was talking about why he smiled. I'd always wondered why he and other Asians I'd known smiled as they did. Was it false? What were they hiding? He said (in essence) "I smile in order to project loving kindness into the world. I smile. You see my smile. You smile. It happens. It is a start." A place to begin, a means of affirming something we value and want to further. We cannot talk meaningfully about "friendliness" without examining the essence from which it derives--"friendship." Having invited someone like me to speak today--a writer, a fellow who works with words, a fellow coming out of the humanities, the editor of national publication on teaching and learning-- you can easily predict my inclination to begin examining various aspects of the etymology and semantics of "friendship," and to explore those by recalling articles I've published in The National Teaching and Learning Forum over the last ten years or so. And, indeed, at the end of that path lies a rich well of wisdom, and I will go to that well shortly. But predictable and comfortable as it might be to walk down that path right now,--I mean it would be the keynote we all expect wouldn't it? low-risk, informative, not too threatening--instead, let me move just for a moment in a more experimental direction. Recalling what I said at the outset (perhaps too dramatically) about the dark and troubled water that might lie between us ("us" being not just you and I, but you and I as provisional symbols of the interface between students and teachers), let me pretend to be a scientist for a moment and cast the net of a hypothesis out into our collective experience and see if what we find draws us closer together. This will involve more risk than my just telling you what I think about the topic or reporting on what's been written in the Forum, but a fundamental point I feel compelled to make about "friendship" is that--if it is authentic-- is not without risk. Words like "friendship" and "friendliness" represent consensus about shared experience, and they begin to lose the power of their meaning when we distance ourselves from a keen awareness of what that experience really is, what it really feels like. So let me ask something of you. With a show of hands, who among you has grieved the loss of a friendship? . . . The loss might be from death, but I am thinking more here of those friendships that have ended for reasons we do not fully understand or understand imperfectly. ? Perhaps the friend moved away literally or simply emotionally and did not keep in touch or perhaps we did not keep in touch, and we aren't sure why, because that friendship was important. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding that was never resolved. Perhaps there were even words. Perhaps we came to a point where it seemed to us (or to them) that the friendship was simply exhausted and that it was time for it to end . . . and yet we grieve its loss. ? ? ? ? If you've felt grief or even simply deep sadness at the loss of a friend, then you know what we are talking about here. We often define things through loss. The shadow points us toward the object. Recognizing the grief we feel in its loss, we begin to understand the value of friendship and by inference, I think, we bring to mind the serious underpinnings of what a topic like "student friendliness" actually means or could mean if we will open ourselves to its depth as well as its surface--if we will, in short, contemplate what animates authentic friendliness. I would not be surprised if you were wondering why on earth I should have asked you to think of a sad thing instead of a happy thing. Why didn't I ask that we consider the best friends we've ever had? Why didn't I ask that we stop for a moment and consider the characteristics of those friendships as forming the very type of friendship for us and, by implication, the pattern of authentic friendliness? I might have done that. It would not have been a bad thing to have done. Let me confess why I didn't. When Vice Chancellor Bell phoned and invited me to speak on "student friendliness," I had what I look on now as a rather shallow reaction. I didn't literally think of a smiley face (the originator or the smiley face died two weeks ago according to the New York Times you may be interested to know), but I thought something along those lines. I thought of a mask of decorum without authentic animation, a "put on", "made up," false cheeriness. None of you may have been so thoughtless when you first heard the phrase, but as it took me a few moments of reflection to get in touch with the serious springs of energy beneath the topic, I wanted to try and assure, right at the start, that we were all focused on where the authentic energy in genuine friendliness comes from so that we could try and understand it and how to invest our teaching with it. As David and I talked, he explained that his understanding of "student friendliness" was related to "student-centered learning," a topic covered often in The National Teaching and Learning Forum. Like "active learning," "problem-based learning," "cooperative learning," "collaborative learning" and a host of others, it's one of the "learnings" we hear a lot about. As he said "student-centered," I paused to reflect on that phrase too. I use it all the time, but, I suddenly wondered if I knew what it really meant. I mean . . . what other kind of learning could there be? When we are learning, we are students. Students are the locus of learning. But we do know what we are talking about of course. These phrases "student friendliness" and "student-centered learning" offer polite means of acknowledging some appropriate criticism of how we have done things in the past while looking for some means of remediation at the same time. The need to extend student-friendliness into the classroom suggests perhaps that our classrooms have not been characterized by friendliness. A call for more "student-centered" learning probably suggests that we may have been too focused on ourselves as the active agents in the classroom whereas we have always known that our role was that of the provocateur who is successful not when he or she is well-organized and covers the material, but when he or she sets up conditions that provoke learning. That's the semantics or dynamics of these phrases as I understand them in current usage. When we look to etymologies, we find that these words--"friend," and "friendship" and "friendliness"--have ancient origins. The earliest occurrences in English appear in Beowulf. And they occur in that estimable poem in noble contexts. So perhaps we can agree that we are not talking about something slight, something touchy-feely, something which is If we think of "friendliness" as a decorum, and a decorum as a kind of mask--a behavior we put on--we have to decide right at the start what kind of mask it will be. merely a matter of tone or style when we are talking about friendliness. We are talking about the sign and manner and hallmarks of friendship, and there have been many through the course of history who have seen friendship as very nearly the highest form of fealty. As Francis Bacon wrote in his essay on "Friendship" in 1612: "Without friendship, society is but meeting." The implication of this symposium--"Extending Student-Friendliness into the Classroom"-- is that without friendship, the same can be said of our classes. From time to time, I've given a big multi-media presentation tracing the portrayal of the archetype of the teacher in the movies from "Goodbye Mr. Chips" to "Mr. Holland's Opus," and there is a scene I show from "Mr. Chips" that speaks directly to this point. Chips starts off trying to find his legs as a teacher. Early on he loses control of a class and the headmaster comes in in the middle of this debacle to restore order. He counsels Chips that perhaps he should think of getting out of teaching, that to be a teacher takes courage, moral courage. It takes Chips most of the movie to fully grasp what that means (it takes most of us a long time to gain wisdom, I think). His first reaction to losing control is to try and clamp down on the boys. He calls for extra classes that keep them in on a Saturday so that they are unable to attend "the big game" in which their school is playing its arch rival. The boys hear the game going on outside and at a crucial moment they can't resist springing to the windows to see the final play. Their school loses because their star player is in this class, and as Chips tries to restore order, one student confronts him, accuses him of not caring that Sedgwick has won, that they've lost the cup--in other words that he does not care about the larger world of their lives, only about his order, his discipline, his subject matter. Robert Donat plays this scene brilliantly. What you see in his response is a teacher learning openly on the spot in front of and indeed from his students. He becomes quiet, says with all earnestness that he was sure that the headmaster regretted as much as he did that order had to be maintained, and then he ends by saying, "If I've lost your friendship, there's little else that I value." What does it matter if students score high on our tests, but go away from us with no feeling for or understanding of why we have dedicated ourselves to lives of disciplined inquiry, why we believe passionately that knowledge is a living, growing thing that continually carries the best of the past as we are continually renewing our understanding of it forward into the present in the firm belief that the process completes an ever widening circle of knowledge that benefits us all? A "friend" as the OED tells us is "one joined to another in mutual benevolence and intimacy." If we do not have their friendship (and they ours) in its most basic sense, something vital is missing from the teaching-learning dynamic. Before I recall for you a few stories I've published in The National Teaching and Learning Forum that I think speak to this "vital something" and suggest how we may foster it in our classes, let me make one more quick distinction to further define friendship and friendliness in this context. Friendliness is not civility. We expect civility in a civilized society (though many feel it is being eroded within higher education and in society at large . . . but that's another topic). For the moment let us assume civility. Friendliness goes a step beyond civility. Friendship bridges differences. It tells the truth. It cares about the other. Cares. It risks vulnerability for the sake of connection in the hope of knowing as we hope somehow we are or will be known. Friendship endures failure and rejection and does not close its heart. And as all this is sounding so biblical I might as well add a friendly teacher is "cunning as a serpent, but guileless as a dove." (Matt. 10:16) Friendliness, as I now understand its implications, may well be essential to leading students into the highest levels of learning. For the very first issue of the Forum, John Stephens Crawford, a professor of art history at the University of Delaware wrote an article describing the different ways of understanding. He discussed William Perry's seminal study of intellectual and ethical development in Harvard undergraduate males and Mary Belenky, et al's work on the intellectual and emotional growth of women students. How many times over the years have faculty written pieces for the Forum describing how becoming acquainted with this research transformed them as teachers. If anyone here has not yet become acquainted with Perry's Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme published in 1970 and Belenky, et al's Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind published in 1986, I commend them to you as things to read over the summer. Most of you are probably familiar with the findings--how students come in looking for right and wrong answers, move to a more relative stance where they value different opinions but run the risk of thinking "it's all relative," i.e. that any answer is as good as any other, and--if they are lucky enough--finally mature into contextual evaluators who make a reasoned commitment to the best evidence, "gain their own voice" as Belenky puts it. These levels are pretty obviously related to the levels of development you are surely familiar with from Benjamin Bloom's research in the 1950s on cognition and his colleague David Krathwohl's work on the affective domain of learning, the "taxonomies" as they are usually called. The aim of most faculty is to move students from a novice level characterized by memorization, the quest for the right and wrong answer to be spit back on the test, toward the level of a more expert practitioner characterized by the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information. And guess what? This kind of connected knowing is certainly assisted by and may well be dependent upon an affective component. Connected knowing implies something like friendship. And the fact of the matter is, as Crawford points out, that at the higher cognitive levels, the faculty and student worlds begin to merge. My contention and most of the evidence I've seen suggests that the set of dispositions we understand as friendship and which we can project through authentic friendliness can profoundly accelerate the movement to these higher levels or at least open the door to them wider and more quickly. It's always dangerous to offer personal experience rather than surveys or other sorts of data as evidence, but I'm going to tell you about at least one such survey in just a moment, so let me pause just for a second to run that risk (yet another risk). I don't seem to be able to resist them. For me this story illustrates what I've just asserted about the power of friendship in the classroom AND is the bellwether experience that completely convinced me there ought to be much much more team teaching than we see now. Indeed, in my view every administrator worth his or her salt ought to be working at least half a Saturday a week figuring out how to get around the load and credit hours obstacles that so often block efforts to create team teaching situations. Some years back, I was a novice teacher teaching a required literature survey to freshmen at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was leading a discussion session on Huckleberry Finn which I'd just lectured on to the whole throng of 350 students a few days earlier. My old college roommate was up visiting, sitting in on the class. (We were both novice teachers then.) The class wasn't going very well. In those days I thought, hey, I was the teacher; I had to be the center of things. So my idea of a discussion went something like this: I'd ask a question, wait until I wanted to scream for an answer. At the point of unbearable, impatient agony (10 or 15 seconds tops) I'd reframe the question probably hinting very broadly at the kind of answer I wanted to hear. After a while some student would take pity on me and give some sort of answer which I would work like the devil to spin some gold out of. Then another student would respond and I would answer. In other words I was the hub of everything. I actually thought this was leading a discussion 30 years ago. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I managed to say something that was interesting to my friend Collins, and he spoke up. I can't remember the points at all now, but what he said was probing, open-ended and intelligent. It made me think and I began to " think out loud" as I answered him. Then he replied and we had a little colloquy going. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something had happened to the class. Students who had been slouching, counting the minutes until they could leave were sitting up straight listening intently to what we were saying. Before long, they began to enter the discussion and the amazing thing was that what they said now was many times more intelligent and engaged than what they were saying before. What had happened? Here's what I think happened, what I know in my heart
happened. They wanted to be part of the party. Collins
and I are very close friends and here we were discussing
this material--which had been required reading to the
students moments before--discussing it with genuine
passion . . like it mattered . . .like we cared about it,
because of course we did. Here were two (more or less) We learn about what we care about. If we engage caring, we invoke intelligence. And if we can somehow model what we're after (not deliver broad condescending hints as I was doing in my inept efforts at discussion leading) they will respond with resources and intelligence they didn't really know they had. I'm passionate about my personal experience, but let me give you a more respectable example. Some of you are probably in mathematics? If so you undoubtedly know the work of Alan Schoenfeld of the University of California at Berkeley on teaching mathematics. His book Mathematical Problem Solving from 1985 is very valuable and he made some important contributions to the Handbook for Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning (ed. D. Grouws) published in 1992. (He's probably done other great things since that I haven't kept up with.) Earlier in a couple of contexts I mentioned the confessional "friendliness" of daring to think out loud in front of a class. That's one of the things Schoenfeld does to great effect. You see he believes that (and I'm quoting) "acquiring the habits and dispositions of interpretation and sense-making"--that is to say, becoming a good thinker--may be as important as acquiring any particular set of skills, strategies or knowledge in doing mathematics. So in his advanced problem solving course, he takes on problems he hasn't worked ahead of time and shares his meta-cognitive processes (i.e. thinks out loud) as he tries to solve them. What he's doing obviously is modeling the fact that the exercise of expert knowledge is a synthesis of heuristic strategies ("tricks of the trade" common useful ways of grappling with a particular kind of situation), control strategies (knowing when to back off and try a different tack, when to trust or at lest try your hunches), and learning strategies (the sum of all of those, that is to say how to learn about learning from the act of learning so that one does it better in the next field or problem or domain). If this example seems too "teacher-centered, " Schoenfeld has a wonderful little strategy for getting himself out of the picture. He introduces a kind of problem to the class and then shows them a videotape of last year's class working on it. Pretty quickly the current students see the blind alleys and pit falls the other students are falling into and they can see the potential for making the same sorts of mistakes resides in them as well. So when they take up a similar problem, they begin at a much higher level. They've done some thinking about thinking. They've been befriended by their peers from the previous year who've allowed themselves to be exposed, to appear in all their vulnerable frailty as learners and the result of this gift to the current students' learning is considerable. Vulnerability offers weakness only to enemies. In friendship it always builds strength. Obviously I like stories. They speak to me. They have evidentiary power and they will speak to the sort of person I would likely make friends with most easily, but a good teacher does not have the luxury of teaching in a narrow way that appeals only to students who are like him or her. To be authentic (to use that important word again) "student friendliness," like its cousin "user friendliness" must be available to the broadest range of those in attendance to what we have to offer. Indeed, let's be honest: in some cases you will be challenged to run the risks of friendliness Vulnerability offers weakness only to enemies. In friendship it always builds strength. with students who are somewhat hostile toward you and your required course. In teaching, our capacity for friendliness, our necessary understanding of the well of friendship that defines it, is probably tested far beyond the limits to which it's tested in ordinary life. So . . . . earlier I promised you a survey for those who are more interested in and persuaded by aggregate data than by anecdote. At the Sixth Annual Lily Conference on Teaching held at Lake Arrowhead in California, Mary Jo Maffei and David Walsh both from the department of management at Miami University in Ohio, presented the results of a survey that sought to give a detailed picture of the behaviors professors engage in (or don't engage in) that affect how well students and faculty get on. That is to say, they took a quantitative look at some qualitative factors which describe the "particular social and interpersonal environments for learning." Others have called this the "classroom climate" or "social environment" or "interpersonal rapport." We might call it the "student-friendliness level." They were not looking at course design per se or how hard the course was or what pedagogical technique the instructor used or even presentational style, clarity or enthusiasm. "We're talking about all the stuff that goes around those things in what students think and feel," they said. They identified four elements in this surrounding material to look at:
These elements of good teaching have been around for a long time in prescriptive statements, but no one had really probed how students feel about them in a systematic way. Now this isn't a huge study. This isn't Pasceralli and Terranzini or Sandy Astin, but it's suggestive. Maffei and Walsh administered their survey to 288 undergraduates evenly divided between males and females at Miami U, and here's what they found. First in general terms they found that student perception of a faculty member's fairness was influenced by whether or not the faculty ember explained grading criteria thoroughly, made consistent grading decisions over time, and treated students equally without regard to race, class or sex. No surprise there. Student assessment of caring or sensitivity was influenced by whether or not the faculty member learned student names quickly, expressed concern for students' problems, and arrived early and stayed after class. In short friendly decorum counted with students. Students assessment of credibility was shaped by whether or not a professor followed through on promises, avoided sweeping generalizations, and limited mistakes. Finally, students' sense of flexibility and open-mindedness depended very much on whether or not a faculty member encouraged student questions and comments, initiated critical examination of their own ideas, and explained the rationale for polices. All this seems pretty common sensical to me. Where it gets a bit more interesting and a bit more revealing of the importance of what we are called "student-friendliness" comes in the break down of items that were most likely to enhance or detract from the student-professor relationship versus those that were not as likely to enhance or detract. In the group that mattered a lot were such items as:
Items that didn't make a big difference included things like:
You begin to see the pattern here. I have drawn on the concept of friendship to inform our understanding of what authentic friendliness might mean, might look like, and it is precisely that which most students are looking for. They don't especially want to go have a beer with you after class or have you give them formal welcomes. They understand that their relationship with you is formalized and transient, but they also know (though how self-consciously I can't say) that the two of you are involved in an intimate relationship that will work best if it is informed by a version of the same love and benevolence that defines your truest and best friendships. Those relationships probably define you at your best and students want your best. They feel they have a right to it. If you are going to enter their minds and attempt to change them, if you are going to challenge their beliefs (which inevitably means monkeying with their emotions) they want to be able to trust you. They can't let you in and run the risk those changes involve if they don't feel genuine friendliness. We become so involved in our subject matter or in our sense of our responsibility as "the teacher" that we sometimes forget what an intimate business it is we are involved in and how many dimensions of being converge in what we do. If you want to get a quick overview of the inter-relatedness of intellectual, social and emotional influences on student learning, there's a nice little ASHE-ERIC volume with that title by Patrick and Anne Love that will point you to the best research on each of these influences. Just as our work is hard, so to even when we succeed the results of it are not unalloyed happiness and joy-filled improvement in our students lives. Earlier I waxed somewhat biblical in talking about friendship. Perhaps you'll indulge me again as I recall a verse from Ecclesiastes (1:18) which you don't find in any college view books that I know of, but which all of us who've studied long know the truth of: "For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." And so I am back at the beginning . . .back to my asking us to consider the grief we carry for friendships lost . . . and back to the article by John Stephens Crawford from the very first issue of the Forum. Summarizing what happens when students reach the highest levels of cognitive development, Crawford recalls that William Perry described it as moving from an old house full of treasured memories to a new house full of new possibilities. Crawford writes: "In the acquisition of the new there is grief for the loss of the old. . . . As a veteran teacher, " he continues, "I have to constantly remind myself that my students are experiencing this grief for the first time." He admits that he has to work hard to befriend them in their learning. He tries to tell them that everyone goes through this process, but at times the students think he is trivializing their difficulties. "Their experience is so immediate, their grief so strong, that they think I do not really care." Learning requires caring. It requires or at least it benefits mightily from the projection of friendship, the authentic, animated, projective mask of it which we call friendliness. So here I've come to a point of conclusion --rhetorically-- in this little journey through some thoughts on investing our classes with friendliness, but given what I've said, perhaps it's not a good way to end. Perhaps it will be more friendly if I leave you with some tools with which to try and accomplish the goals implied throughout what I've been saying. I began with questions; let me end with questions. These come from my friend Stephen Brookfield's excellent book called Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. He calls them a "critical incident questionnaire," but I think by now we can recognize them as acts of friendship that serve the teacher and the student and their relationship with one another. Each week Stephen takes five minutes and asks students to respond anonymously to these five questions:
Are these not befriending questions? Do they not affirm the dignity and importance--even the equality of teacher and student? I think they do, and perhaps they will help. One thing is clear to me: "Extending student-friendliness into the classroom" is an important challenge, even a vital one. Let us answer it together in all the good ways we can think of together . . . today . . and in all the days that follow. -- James Rhem, April 27, 2001 |
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adults exposing
several layers of intimacy and caring--for one another,
for the text, for good thinking and sound
argument--unabashedly right in front of them. We were
(without planning it) modeling the kind of thing we were
there hoping to involve them in and by modeling it, we
did. And let me underscore this point: I do not believe
for a minute that it was the intelligence of our exchange
that engaged them primarily. I believe it was the
passion, the love, the friendship, the respect, we so
clearly had for each other and they way that played
itself out in a discussion of this text that grabbed
them. And it brought out those things in them, things
they'd felt about the text, but did not feel like
rehearsing in an unfriendly, teacher-centered
environment. They didn't want to be show dogs angling for
my "atta boys," but when they saw the real game
of critical inquiry being played, they wanted to be part
of it. And they jumped in. 