One of my colleagues claims that we are all fundamentally lazy and so changing what we do is a difficult task. I counter with my view that we are all fundamentally pulled in many directions in our lives and so our ability to change our activities in any one of these directions is hard. He claims we can’t fight human nature and I claim I don’t believe in “human nature”. At least, I wonder what one means by such a nebulous concept and how one can possibly put things into an intellectual construction that is so fuzzy.
I like operational definitions. That is, I like to have some ways to decide how a concept at least approximates what we see around us. Take “trust”, something I believe is essential to changing the way I do things. People often say “trust me”. I have taken to using the operational definition that trust is the willingness to risk being vulnerable. Somehow I know what that means, or at least I can discuss the behaviours of my students, my colleagues and me using this definition.
Most of us seem drawn to familiarity and comfort. In our teaching, we do what seems least disruptive to our lives and what we perceive makes the students feel the most comfortable. Quite often this means that we work hard to prepare the best lectures we can and then to set assignments and examinations that do not stray too far from the ideas that we have presented in these well-crafted lectures. Effectively, we make an implicit contract with the students that if they just follow the program we have set out for them, they will succeed, that is, they will get a good mark.
To learn deeply, however, means that we must push our comfort zone outward. We must wrestle with unfamiliar ideas and we must be willing to consider arguments that may make us uncomfortable. We must be willing to fail.
It is very uncomfortable to fail. We are taught from a young age to hide our ignorance and to avoid failure. If you doubt this, look at the way in which we select students to enter our universities: we base their entire assessment on their marks. Moreover, with the averages to gain entrance to many of our institutions being nearly 90%, we discourage students from taking any academic risks, like taking difficult courses or tackling some of their weaknesses. This risk-avoidance continues when they come to university and our own adherence to continuing the feedback that punishes any acknowledgement of ignorance means that this is unlikely to change.
We should embrace our ignorance. It is what drives us to ask powerful questions and to seek the answers to them. It is what drives us to cultivate an inquisitive and critical perspective on the world. Our fear of it is the biggest issue that prevents us from changing how we learn and how we teach.
Overcoming our fear of failure in teaching is not easy. It involves first of all a willingness to take that first step, in trying something new in front of those we view as our harshest critics, our students. In fact, we are our own harshest critics. Our students look for us to care about their learning, first and foremost, and while they will tell us when our approaches aren’t working, they are also more forgiving than we imagine.
Alone, each of us may have difficulty changing what we do, but with many pushing in the same direction, we overcome our inertia. So, I work hard to trust. I have learned to trust myself, to trust my students, and to trust my colleagues. And I am no longer surpised at what we accomplish together.
