The Skillful Teacher

Teacher Versus Student Direction
In Chapter Four I indicated that an important element of credibil-
ity was teachers’ being explicit about the rationale behind their
classroom, curricular, and evaluative decisions. I also argued that
making full disclosure of expectations, agendas, and criteria regard-
ing teaching purposes and the assessment of learning was integral
to authenticity. Giving clear teaching directions speaks to both of
these factors by indicating to learners that the teachers concerned
have a clear idea of what they are trying to accomplish and possess
enough knowledge to make sure any directions given are clearly rel-
evant to learning purposes. However, the giving of directions is not,
in and of itself, always a good thing—it is all in how the directions
are communicated. Directions can be confusing, baldly stated,
issued as diktats, or seem to be arbitrary. The important point is that
the directions provided must be perceived as clear, justified, and
linked to educational purposes deemed important.
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Students perceive teachers who give clear directions in very dif-
ferent ways. Some students see such teachers as authoritarian and
arrogant, as focused only on their own agendas at the expense 
of students’ needs and concerns. These same teachers are seen by
other students as authoritative or clearly organized, as respecting
the fact that students’ time is not an unlimited resource, and as
being concerned to work as productively as possible with them given
the time available. Many Asian students will expect strong teacher
direction and be confused if this is not forthcoming, at least initially.
Field-dependent learners and syllabus-bound learners will also be
drawn to such teachers. Even students who come in with suspicions
of the teacher (perhaps they have been burned in high school or in
other college classrooms by professors who look or sound like you)
may also appreciate initial teacher direction since it gives them a
chance to check out how consistently your words match your actions
(a prime indicator of authenticity). Generally, student socialization
is such that students will expect teachers to be directive, particularly
about how best to secure that always desired A grade.
I grew up (professionally at least) fighting against this idea of
directive teaching. The humanist-progressive paradigm of teaching,
strongly influenced by Carl Rogers ([1961], 1995) and his notions
of nondirective facilitation, was predominant while I was in gradu-
ate school in the 1970s. I felt the task of the teacher was to be a
resource person in the service of student learning. My concern was
to get out of the way of learners, to let their interests and motiva-
tions determine the course of their studies, and to be ready to step
in with suggestions when consulted. Not surprisingly, my doctoral
research was into independent learning conducted by learners out-
side the school system (Brookfield, 1981).
Over the years, however, my position has changed quite dramat-
ically. I now agree with Freire’s (Shor and Freire, 1987) view that
“education always has a directive nature we can’t deny. The teacher
has a plan, a program, a goal for the study. But there is the directive
liberating educator on the one hand, and the directive domesticating
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educator on the other” (p. 172). Myles Horton puts it (characteris-
tically) more colloquially: “There’s no such thing as just being a coor-
dinator or facilitator, as if you don’t know anything. What the hell
are you around for, if you don’t know anything. Just get out of the
way and let somebody have the space that knows something,
believes something” (Horton and Freire, 1990, p. 154). In other
words, if you’re a teacher you should stand for something. You should
be honest about admitting that you have something to teach and
some idea as to how learners can best learn it. The key points are
whether or not your directions are (a) transparent to learners who
can understand what your direction is and why you deem it impor-
tant for their learning, and (b) open to being critiqued and chal-
lenged by learners.
A classroom assessment technique such as the CIQ can be used
to judge how students perceive teachers’ directions. If directions are
seen as confused, arbitrary, pointless, or unfair, then these percep-
tions will pervade students’ anonymous CIQ responses. At that point
the teacher clearly needs to rejustify why the directions are being
given and what they are intended to achieve, as well as trying to
explain them more clearly. If the intent is to encourage students to
take more responsibility for conducting their own learning, then this
should be viewed as an incremental process of initiation—something
that happens over time as students become more tolerant of ambi-
guity and increasingly knowledgeable about the learning options and
resources open to them. True responsibility for learning can only be
exercised when students have a full command of what Peters (1967)
called the grammar of the learning activity; that is, an awareness of
the criteria we use to judge whether something has been learned well
or badly and a grasp of the essential concepts and skills that com-
prise the building blocks of knowledge in the learning area.
Diversity can never be fully addressed to the satisfaction of all
involved. There are just too many variables to be accounted for, too
many choices, too many contradictions. But neither can we just
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throw up our hands in bewilderment and refuse to acknowledge that
we are working in increasingly diverse classrooms. If our purpose is
to help people learn, then we must be open to constantly varying
our activities in response to what we find out about the range of stu-
dents in our classrooms. Of course, variations and experimentations
are always bounded by our personalities, abilities, knowledge, and
experience. We cannot constantly transform ourselves into some-
thing we are not. I cannot become an extraverted, large-gestured
teacher fired by evangelical fervor. If I am working with large 
numbers of students from racial backgrounds other than my own, I
cannot morph into someone of another race, using styles of com-
munication and illustrative examples drawn from a different racial
experience. For example, an African speech pattern such as call and
response drawn from experiences of chain gangs, slave ships,
and Black preaching traditions does not come easily to a White
Anglo-American such as myself. It would be condescending and
dishonest in the extreme for me to try to act like Cornel West or
Jesse Jackson in a misguided attempt to identify with African 
American students. If I tried to play at being something I clearly am
not, then the disjunction students perceived between who I am and
who I am pathetically trying to be would be so glaring as to com-
promise my authenticity beyond repair.
Of all the approaches mentioned in this chapter, I find that team
teaching with colleagues who share different racial backgrounds,
personalities, and learning styles is the most helpful. I also rely on
the CIQ to give me an accurate sense of what I am dealing with and
how students view my efforts to address the range of styles, back-
grounds, and desires in my class. In designing classroom activities
and course assignments, I try to vary things (a rough rule is that
each class I teach should have at least three different learning
modalities evident) so that one learning style is not privileged too
much. I also talk out loud to students the rationale for mixing
modalities the way I do and constantly report back to them the
spread of different responses each of these modalities produces on
the CIQ. Throughout my classes I frequently remind students that
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the activity we’re engaged in at any particular moment will be of
interest only to a portion of the class and that soon we need to vary
things so others feel included. But doing all these things doesn’t
remove my fundamental awareness that addressing diversity will
always be only partially successful. Like democracy, inclusiveness is
an ideal worth pursuing but one that will never be fully realized.
But, like trying to work democratically, the effort to teach for diver-
sity contains its own justification.
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10
E
valuating students’ learning is when the power relationship
inherent in teaching becomes public and undeniable. This is
when the rubber of teacher authority hits the road of the student’s
learning journey. To evaluate is to judge, quite literally to assign
value to something. Such acts of judgment invariably reveal the
power and commitments of the judger. As teachers we may wish to
have collegial relationships with our students and to be as support-
ive as possible of their learning efforts, but in students’ eyes our
power as evaluators of their learning means we can never be quite
the same as them. We always have the power of the grade, of the
evaluative commentary, of the ability to name publicly whether or
not someone is working to the required standard. For teachers fired
by a democratic impulse to deconstruct teacher-student power
imbalances and a desire to view teachers and students as co-learners,
co-creators of knowledge, this is a particularly troubling reality. As
long as we work in hierarchically organized institutions with clear
lines of command flowing from accreditation agencies to senior
administrators, to department heads, to teachers, and then to stu-
dents, the need to pass evaluative judgments that reflect someone’s
idea of what looks like effective learning cannot be avoided. Adopt-
ing a pass/fail grading system only blurs the sharp edges of this con-
tradiction, since the passing or failing grade itself is based on notions
of what constitutes acceptable levels of performance. In the words