On helplessness, learned and taught

It is hard for me to write about this, because some of my frustrations are very, very specific, and this could easily become about venting rather than professional reflection. Not that I never vent about these frustrations (believe me, I do), but I prefer to vent a little less publicly.

I cringe (I try to keep it internal) every time I see a teacher model a learning behavior they would never accept from students. Saying, "I don't get technology," or "I can't figure this out, I'm not even going to try" or "Here, you do it, it never works for me." All things I've had teachers say to me in front of students.

It is really hard to keep that cringe internal, because when I hear teachers say these things in front of students it makes me angry. For a faculty that is very aware of the impact of learned helplessness, we don't always spend a lot of time reflecting on who taught that helplessness.

I can be guilty of teaching helplessness to my teachers, and I am working on recognizing and stopping that behavior. When someone asks me a question, I want to answer it; this is an instinct many teachers and librarians share, and I don't think it's always a bad one. But sometimes our drive to provide the answer can get in the way of teaching people how to find the answers themselves.

For example, a teacher recently e-mailed me to ask if a certain book was available via Bookshare. My first instinct was to look it up for her; but, I'd spent a lot of time this summer creating Bookshare logins for all my teachers so they could look up books and download them for students at the point and time of need (part of a larger effort to make assistive tech a little more seamless). It would have been much, much faster for me to just give her the answer. But I didn't. I replied with the URL to the site, reminded her how to login, and pointed her to page on the library website with details for how to download a book. Yes, that took much longer (especially since I looked the book up anyway just to be sure), but I'm hoping for a long-term payoff.

We are piloting a 1:1 iPad program with our freshmen and sophomores this year. Some teachers are struggling with being comfortable with the iPad and learning new apps. I struggled with a lot of it too, at first. But now teachers will seem amazed when I know how to do something, and ask how I learned it. To which I always reply, "I pressed something, and saw what happened. And then I pressed something else. There is no self-destruct app for the iPad." But still every once in a while a teacher will say, "I'll never figure this out." When they do (and as long as there are no students around), I've tried to get better at asking, "Would you allow a student in your class to say that?" It can make the conversation kind of uncomfortable. But that's kind of my goal.

One of the things we as teachers need to model is that it's okay to fail. It's okay to get something wrong. Getting something wrong is often an important part of the process. But that idea makes many teachers nervous.

It can be scary to admit you don't know something. To admit it in front of a room of teenagers who already think they know more than you do can be downright terrifying.

But we have to be willing to model not just that it's okay to not know something, but how to ask for help learning how to do something. To say, "the kids are better with technology, I'll never keep up," and use that as an excuse not to learn? Inexcusable. When you say that in front of a student, what's to prevent them from thinking, "everyone else is better at history/math/reading/writing, I'll never keep up"? Is that the attitude towards learning something new we want to model for our students? I hope not.

We need to model the right attitude towards learning--not, "I don't know how to do this, you do it for me," but, "I don't know how to do this, can you show me how?"

If what we're teaching by our model is helplessness, we can't be surprised when that's what our students have learned.

But if instead we model that it's okay not to know, but not okay to not want to know, we create an environment in which all kinds of learning are possible.

Everyone Makes Mistakes (So Why Can't I?)

First, a trip down memory lane:

I made a terrible, awful, horrible mistake on Friday. I was working with a student, reviewing his paper for citations, and I overheard another student saying something awful. One of those things that takes me to a very angry place very quickly. I responded without thinking and I yelled at him. Loudly. I just. . . snapped. And when the student tried to explain, I was still too upset to let him finish what he was saying.

Thing is, I misheard him. He'd said nothing like what I thought he'd said. I yelled at a student, and made him feel awful, for doing exactly nothing wrong. And the guilt is eating me up.

As soon as I realized what a horrible, terrible mistake I made, I apologized. Profusely. And the student, very graciously, accepted my apology. I don't think any long-term damage was done to our relationship. But still, it's eating me up.

This is not, by any means, the first mistake I've made while teaching. Not the first mistake I've made this year. Probably not even the first mistake I made that day (and it probably also wasn't the last).

I've been thinking a lot this year about resiliency and reflection and how to make students more comfortable with mistakes. I've always believed that learning is a messy process in which failure is inherent; most days I take the Red Queen's approach to impossible things and apply it to mistakes. I try to think of myself as someone who can make a mistake, admit it, fix the problem, and move on. I admit that I've sometimes had difficulty empathizing with students who hit (what seems to me) a small roadblock and completely shut down.

And so, in light of this encounter, I've been thinking about how we think about mistakes--whether a mistake is something you DO, as opposed to a mistake being something you ARE. And whether there are some mistakes that hit a little harder at our core.

As long time readers of this blog (or people who know me personally--hi Mom!) know, I work at a school for students with learning disabilities. Sadly, many of my students come to our school having been badly abused by the educational system; they've been treated as if their difficulty with learning--and the mistakes they make as a result of that--says something about who they are as people. And it's not a nice thing.

I pride myself on my ability to build relationships with students, to talk to them about difficult subjects, to guide them through a subject (whether that's the Battle of Gettysburg or the use of respectful language), and to do some calmly and rationally. Which is, I think, why this mistake is hitting me so hard. It hits much closer to my self-perception than using the wrong keywords for searching.

I know, ultimately, that this mistake is not all that defines me as a teacher, but it's been a good reminder of how debilitating a mistake can seem. It is helping me get a better understanding of how my students feel when they make a mistake while learning. When a mistake seems to be about who you are as a person, it's hard to simply move on. I still don't know how to help students with this process, but I feel better equipped to empathize with them as they move through the process.

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P.S. If you have found your way here from the Salem Library Blog awards, welcome! And thank you! I'm overwhelmed and flattered to even be on such a list.