Now, on to our prompt this week, Beautiful Mistakes. We have been asked to discuss a time when we have made a mistake that turned out well. I will confess, I had a very hard time thinking of one. Not to say I don't make mistakes. Oh my goodness, I make plenty. No, my trouble is finding the silver lining in my mistakes. I have been pondering this prompt for a few days off and on.
While working on The American Council on Education's Effective Teaching Practices Course, I remembered a time from when I was a new professor where I made a huge mistake and both my students and I learned from it.
In fall of 2003, I was teaching a class called Child, Family and Community Relations. It was an evening class in a fully face to face format. Students sat in a semi-circle and we engaged in weekly discussions related to many sensitive topics. I was determined not to have class "rules" since I had seen students feel stifled by too many rules about class conduct. After all, my students were adults! (As a reminder, my background was teaching preschool and elementary school). So, there were no rules or even norms around class discussions. This particular class often touches on family history to make sense of what we are learning about related to children today.
We had one student in class who tended to dominate the discussions. She was older than the rest of the students ( and older than I was at the time) and I was hesitant to stop her. I also did not have the tools that I have today to guide the discussions more proactively. In addition to dominating the discussions, she also always seemed to have a life experience that related to what we were discussing. I should add here that it is most likely that she was making up some of those experiences. They certainly seemed somewhat far fetched. It had gotten to the point where students would roll their eyes when she spoke and their body language was clearly stating that they were tired of her domination of class discussions. I was still too green in my teaching practices to figure out a way to respectfully stop her. I had an appointment to meet with my department chair (who was an excellent instructor whose guidance I valued greatly) to discuss this problem.
Well, before I could get the help I needed, things erupted in class. We were having a discussion and as usual this particular student began to share how she had experienced this same problem in her childhood ( it did not seem very likely that a white middle-aged woman would have experienced whatever it was we were discussing, but again I let her go on with her story). In the middle of her story, a normally respectful, polite, and lovely young lady began yelling at her: " You are just a liar! You make these stories up and I am so sick of hearing you talk! Can't you just shut up and let others' have a chance to talk?"
Well, the entire class froze, myself included. At that moment I realized that I should have fixed this problem much sooner! After a few seconds of panic, I told the class we were taking a ten minute break. I ordered everyone out except the older student who had been yelled at. I approached her and asked if she was okay. She smiled and said, "Of course!" I was a bit taken aback. I reminded her that the other student was out of line and I would talk to her about yelling at others. She smiled again and said it was fine. Baffled by her brushing off of this problem. I stepped outside to look for the younger student who had had the outburst. She was standing outside the door to the class crying. I pulled her aside and asked if she was okay. No, she was not. She actually was horrified that she had yelled at someone old enough to be her mother or grandmother. She was mortified that she had disrupted the class and was thinking she probably should drop and try to take the class in the spring semester. Whoa!
I took a breath and told her that it was my fault for not having confronted what was clearly a problem not just for her, but for many other students as well. I told her that I would fix it. I wasn't sure how, but I would. I asked her if she wanted to remain in class that evening or if she wanted to go home and collect herself. I reassured her that the fault was totally mine and she was not "in trouble". She opted to stay in class that night and to allow me to fix the problem.
When we returned from break, I had students write a reflection about what had happened and what they thought I should do moving forward.I told them not to put their names on the reflection and that they should be totally honest. After turning in the reflection, everyone was free to leave. I told them that by the next week of class, I would have a solution to this problem.
I read through their reflections literally sitting in the parking lot. All but one ( guess who?) basically said that they had been thinking what this student had said and they were glad she had spoken up. A few told me that I needed to get better control of the class. One or two had some good ideas that they had learned in other classes about guidelines around class discussions.
The next day I met with my department chair who reassured me that this was part of the learning process for me. She gave me a few suggestions for how to move forward in a productive way. I planned the next week's class session very carefully.
I opened with an honest self-assessment of how I had failed to set guidelines for the whole class discussions and that had lead to problems. I asked for forgiveness and told them I had a plan to fix it. I implemented discussion guidelines that limited everyone in class to two comments per class discussion. It worked for the remainder of the semester and the students were very forgiving.
I learned that students are incredibly forgiving. I knew that when I worked with small children, they were always willing to forgive me when I made a mistake. I believed it was very important to model the ability to admit when we are wrong so that children will not be afraid to tell us when they have messed up. I had felt that when I was working with adults, they needed to see me in a different light and I needed to be "perfect". I learned that just like my small children, my adult students appreciated me modeling how to humbly acknowledge my mistakes. I also learned that even though my students were "adults" they needed me to provide guidelines and structure around their behavior. All the lessons in classroom management I had learned working with young children, should not be put away, but needed to be used in different ways with my grown up students.
Of course, I also learned that I was still learning and growing as a teacher. My students were just bigger than my little ones had been, but they needed my love and guidance just the same.
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