Every school fails some of its students. Competitive independent schools often fail children with learning differences. Large classrooms often fail quieter students or those with social anxiety. Co-ed classrooms often fail girls with low self-esteem. Single-sex schools often fail nonbinary or trans kids. In an ideal world, every student would have access to the school that best helped them thrive, but we live in a world that is far from ideal.
One of my goals, as an instructional coach, is to support my teachers to reach more of the children in their classrooms. And so, one activity I do with educators is ask them to list the students they work with – perhaps in a single advisory or grade or classroom – and notice the students they remember, and, crucially, the ones they forget.
Everyone has students we forget. They might be the same two students who always sit in the corner outside of our peripheral vision, they might be students we don’t fully understand; students who intimidate us; students who make us feel stuck; or students who have inconsistent attendance. They could be students at the top of the class or swallowed up by the middle or struggling to keep up. But knowing who they are and noticing trends and patterns in our own blindspots, are key steps in making our classrooms inclusive, welcoming, safe,and loving.
Sometimes, our blind spots come from implicit bias – we struggle with a part of a student’s identity, an aspect of a student’s personality that reminds us of someone or something, a choice a student made. The steps forward aren’t fundamentally different than if there were a student hiding behind a column in the classroom. See the problem, understand the problem, fix the relationship with the child. The good news with issues of capital “I” identity is that there are lots and lots of resources to take steps towards understanding the problem.
I read How to Raise a Feminist Son, Why Gender Matters, listened to Richard Reeves’ podcast on the Ezra Klein Show and Nikhil Taneja’s episode on the Seen and the Unseen to work through some of my biases when it came to teenage boys. I used those texts as anchors after particularly difficult conversations – maybe what presented as defiance was a still developing capacity to listen, or maybe a perceived lack of effort actually stemmed from fear of failure. I am not a psychotherapist, and Alex Venet is more articulate than I am about the differences between trauma-specific and trauma-informed care. My job is not to diagnose or pathologize, but it is to recognize and notice if I have a tendency to see a girl’s fear of failure with more clarity and empathy than I see a boy’s. It is my job to learn how a fear of failure might manifest differently as a product of gendered socialization. Learning about boys also, it should be said, makes me a better educator to everyone. It increases my Rolodex of possible behaviors and my mental map of possible explanations, leaving me a bit more expansive in my understanding of all human beings.
Precisely because better-resourced students in a mixed-income classroom are often quicker to ask for help, quicker to attend office hours, and claim more of my time and bandwidth, I have definitely overcorrected and ended up alienating high-income students and fracturing my relationship with them and, as a result, negatively impacting my classroom community. In this case, my strongest resources were my colleagues, so I initiated a series of conversations with different teachers to brainstorm what I can do differently. I wanted to find ways to see and support all children while honoring my commitment to equity. As a result of those conversations, I began trialing changes to my pedagogy. I changed my writing conference approach, shifting from ‘need-based’ conferences to consistent, systematic, round-robin conferences; I started acknowledging and discussing privilege more explicitly with individual students but less explicitly in collective classroom discussions. I became more intentional and selective with the mentor texts and discussions I brought to whole group observations; I facilitated differently. I became much more attentive to and careful about how various comments would be heard by others in the class and learned to jump in more to protect kids or ideas. Again, I experienced my shift in pedagogy to better include one child or identity gradually grow to serve all children.
This is my ninth piece exploring what it means to lead with love. See the other pieces at the links below:
#1: learning love: a beginning
#2: what does it mean to be love?
#3: how do we lead with love through our mistakes?
#4: what is wrong with urgency? What is beautiful about patience?
#7: what makes it challenging to think clearly about urgency and patience?
sruti teaches 