Intentions and Experience

3.07.11 By Rachel Singh

I believe that if I am to be a person with integrity, my actions must reflect my beliefs.  So if I believe that every child in my classroom matters and that it is my responsibility to help each of them succeed, then I need to make sure I am calling on all my students equally, not just the students who I know will have the correct answer.  There is some rather alarming research that suggests that teachers’ beliefs about which of their students are smarter tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies; teachers give more attention and support to the students they think are smarter and have higher expectations for, and, not surprisingly, those students are more successful. First grade teachers have an enormous privilege: we get to work with students before they have learned to internalize their teachers’ expectations for them.  All of my students are eager to be “top scholars,” as we call them.  But that means we have a huge responsibility not to be one of the factors that makes students feel stupid and powerless in school.  I am very conscious that when I call on specific students, I am choosing to include and empower them.  It is important to me to try to call on as many different students as possible, so it never occurred to me that if I am the arbiter of who gets to speak in my classroom, then by not calling on a student, I am silencing and disempowering them.

A few months ago, I was in a training of about twenty people, and our instructor posed a question. I have that unfortunate personality type that feels like I must to answer every question, so I had already spoken a few times in the session.  Again, I raised my hand. My instructor looked at me, then looked around the room.  She continued to wait.  No one else put their hand up.  I began to feel humiliated, so I put my hand down.  The awkwardness was tangible.  Everyone knew I had an answer, and that the teacher was deliberately not calling on me, but no one else seemed to want to answer.  I put my hand back up, insisting that I be recognized and after a few more seconds, she called on me.

When I reflected on the incident, I realized that my instructor probably did not mean to silence or humiliate me; she was probably just practicing wait time and trying to encourage other students to speak.  I do exactly the same thing in my classroom.  What I never realized, however, was how embarrassing it is to sit with your hand obviously raised, having something to share and being deliberately not called on, especially when there are no other hands up.  I felt personally ignored and slighted, as if my contribution was not wanted or valued.  I put my hand down, because I felt that I just been publicly rejected.  But then I put it back up, because I realized I had something valuable to say and I should try to say it. 

It is amazing to me how much power teachers have.  I feel it most poignantly when, for my coursework, I am the student, under the power of a teacher whom I consider unjust.  I think every teacher should be a student in a formal setting, so they are constantly reminded of how truly awful teachers can be, and make an especial effort not to be tyrants in their own classrooms.  But even further, this incident showed me that my intentions as a teacher can be experienced very differently by my students.  Ironically, my instructor was practicing a tool that I consider foundational to my philosophy as a teacher (wait time to include as many voices as possible), but as a student, I not only didn’t recognize her intention, I felt personally silenced and hurt. 

Six year olds have a very distinctive look on their faces when they have something they want to share: their eyes widen, their hands shoot up, their arms are stretched as high as possible (as if I couldnt’ see them without their hands waving and reaching to the sky), and their faces are just so eager.  Some of my students even gasp as they put their hands up and appear to be holding their breath until I call on someone.  Now I must consider what they are thinking when I respond to their excitement with my customary, “I am looking for hands that I haven’t seen yet.”  It’s like deflating balloons.  Although I am trying to teach them that every voice in our community matters, and our discussion are strengthened by more voices, that may not be how they experience my actions.  They may feel just as silenced as I did.  They may interpret my actions as saying that their ideas don’t matter to me, even if I had called on them once or twice before in a lesson.  And the point is not for me to feel paralyzed and to stop pursuing the goal of having everyone participate; I guess I just need to be more careful and recognize that there can be a very wide gap between the intentions of teachers and the experiences of students and that I’ll need to find a way of closing that gap.