The Skillful Teacher

Surviving the Rhythms of Roadrunning
Time and time again, as students speak about their crashing to the
canyon floor, it becomes clear that the people who pick them up,
dust them off, and set them back on track are their peers. The
importance in college of belonging to an emotionally sustaining
peer learning community cannot be overstated. “Community”
might seem a rather grandiose word to describe the clusters of four
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or five good friends that students say they value so highly. But the
emphasis the members of these groups place on the emotional
warmth and psychological security they provide makes the term
“community” more appropriate than, say, “network.”
The important thing about these small communities is that they
reassure their members that their private anxieties are commonly
experienced. Through talking about their individual experiences of
learning, students come to know that crashing to the canyon floor is
a predictable moment, not an idiosyncratic event. Learners lucky
enough to be members of emotionally sustaining peer learning com-
munities speak of them as “a second family” or “the only people who
really know what I’m going through.” These communities provide
a safe haven, an emotional buttress against the lowest moments in
their autobiographies as learners.
Teachers who know the rhythms of their semester well can also
help, particularly if they can predict when a substantial number of
learners will be crashing to the canyon floor. They can let students
know that this will happen and prepare them for it by giving time
and space in class to describe this process and to assure students that
to feel this way is normal. They can also bring former students into
class for a brief period to say how they felt when they were at this
stage of their learning, and how they survived the crash to the
canyon floor. Teachers can also foster the development of conver-
sations by providing lists of students’ phone numbers, e-mail, and
home addresses to course members.
When I taught on a commuter campus in New York, I would
compile a list of subway routes that students took to get to and from
class. Since many students were concerned about personal safety
when riding the subway, I suggested they form traveling parties based
on shared routes. My intuition was that as they were walking to and
from the subway the topic of conversation that would come easiest
to them would be the one experience they all shared—being stu-
dents in my course. Such conversations would be relatively relaxed
environments in which students could disclose their anxieties about
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the learning involved in the course. In online teaching I also make
sure students have a student-only listserv or chat room to which they
have access so that they can talk about their emotional responses out
of the direct gaze of the teacher.