#9 was the first in a second unit within my learning love series. The original formulation called this second act, “centring the margins,” inspired by a concept from bell hooks. In this unit, I invite you to slow down enough to see every single student and teacher we work with clearly.
Seeing every person, child or adult, as a full human being every day and in every moment is both impossible and necessary. We have to extend grace to ourselves and to each other because we will forget a child or at the very least distribute uneven attention across the classroom AND inclusive and loving classrooms ask us to see and attend to those gaps.
In comes a “both/and” mindset. I wrote about a both/and approach to our work in an earlier post and mentioned that other writers are worth reading to explore more. In this post, I share three specific examples of what a both/and approach could look like in practice. Applying a both/and lens to our work can help us:
- Take ourselves less seriously.
- Remember that it probably isn’t about us.
- See data more clearly.
taking ourselves less seriously.
We have to see ourselves with a both/and approach so that our work with young people doesn’t turn into a battle to prove something to ourselves or to the world. This, in a way, is my way of saying that we need to take ourselves less seriously – we at least need to acknowledge and accept our paradoxes. I can care about equity and making the world a better place AND want nothing more than Love Island and a slice of carrot cake first thing in the morning before I begin my work day. Both/and helps me laugh at myself, acknowledge that I, like all of us, am eccentric, and helps me stay grounded. Not being able to see ourselves in a both/and way can fuel our saviour complexes and it can lead to our using young people as proof points for our own self-narratives.
In short, we are complicated and silly and have to let go of some of our stress and overwhelm so that we don’t hold on too tightly to our students as a proof point of anything.
remembering that it probably isn’t about us.
So. We have to see ourselves as both/and so that we can see all our kids as, well, kids. Right now, I spend a big portion of my time working with teachers. And I can feel in my body less patience with adults than what I reserve for kids. I am more likely to get frustrated, more likely to get defensive, more likely to relitigate arguments in my head after class or after an email. Like with our kids, teachers need to be seen differently – we need to be able to see them and each other as whole human beings. Sometimes, in moments of frustration, I have found myself taking inordinate credit OR blame for teacher choices and reactions. When teachers come in on time to a workshop, I am quicker to think to myself “oh, my last workshop must have gone really well” or when they are late, I am quicker to think “oh no maybe my last session wasn’t relevant enough – maybe this is feedback!”
I might have done this with kids too in the beginning of my career. I honestly don’t remember. What I do know is that now, when kids are early or on time or late, I am as likely to attribute it to caprice or luck or randomness as I am to take it as a personally relevant piece of data or feedback. And, I know too that I had to do some amount of internal work to enable my seeing kids that way. Of course, sometimes coming in early and staying late IS evidence that I have really sparked something in someone, but that is only if it is also accompanied by a lot of other indicators. Perhaps they ask a lot of questions or try things out for themselves or read ahead or find connections to the content we’re learning in the ‘real’ world.
This holds even more true for teachers. With the mountain of structural forces impacting teacher wellbeing and togetherness in schools, it is highly unlikely that a single behavior is an indicator of my competence as an instructional coach. To put it simply, anything a learner does is most likely not about me. But overwhelm, being insecure, still learning the art of coaching and teaching, we are more likely to see behaviors in an ego-centric way.
Sometimes, a behavior is about us – when a child follows instructions incorrectly or an exit slip shows a misconception or a teacher misapplies feedback we’ve given them, it’s likely an indicator that I lacked clarity in my communication.
But honestly, the number of times I have interpreted a behavior as about me when it would have been far more productive to see it another way far outweighs the number of times something should have been interpreted as feedback but I brushed it off.
seeing data more clearly.
It’s so tempting to focus on our all-stars – the fastest growing or the already-excelling learners in our space. We all do it. On the flipside, we can also overfocus, in our moments of punitive perfectionism, on one wrong answer or one unkind moment as evidence of our failures. Needless to say, neither of these are particularly helpful as a way of being. Applying both/and to looking at our data means that we move away from both “our successes mean we’re awesome” and “our failures mean we’re awesome” toward a more nuanced portrait of our practice.
Researchers institute randomized controlled trials and other very quantitative measures to explore and measure impact because this allows them and educators to focus on the ‘typical’ or the ‘average’ kid. I don’t think averages are that illustrative when we are doing the difficult work of educating all kids, but I do think the RCT folks are responding to a justified skepticism and wariness around our tendency to focus on the outliers on either end of the spectrum. We too, as educators – all of whom I believe are researchers of our own classrooms – need to be able to see what is typical versus atypical in our classrooms. One of my favorite ideas around qualitative research is that, to paraphrase Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, quantitative researchers try to isolate outliers as a distraction from the central story whereas qualitative researchers see outliers as crucial to the story. A qualitative researcher searches for the stories with those outside the norm and asks those voices for their story, knowing that we are “learning important lessons by looking outside the trend,” (p. 192, The Art and Science of Portraiture).
Those of you who are teachers might quite reasonably find this quantitative/qualitative dichotomy confusing. Of course we must adopt both lenses: is there an intervention or an evidence-based practice that can reliably and quantitatively improve mastery in my classroom? Can I improve the average score in my cohort? And, what story lies behind this one number? Why might this student be struggling today or in my subject or on Mondays? Using our mastery data as another way to systematically look at learning and learners in our classroom can be wonderfully illustrative, if we step away and step deeply into it, so that we can see the typical and the story outside the trend.
Teachers using data to inform instruction, in my opinion, can be the best possible researchers, empowered by the humanity of our students and the urgency of achieving tangible learning within the constraints of an academic year, to move past either/or towards a both/and lens with data.
What does both/and look like for your personal practice? Can you think of other ways that moving beyond a binary either/or approach serves you or your students? Share in the comments – I would love to hear more!
sruti teaches 