The Skillful Teacher

Treating Students As Adults
When we follow the assumption discussed above and start to put our-
selves in students’ heads, several themes emerge. In my own class-
room research over the years, particularly in thousands of responses
to the Critical Incident Questionnaire, it seems that students, what-
ever their age, wish to be treated as adults. They don’t like to be
talked down to or bossed around for no reason. They don’t trust (at
least not initially) teachers who tell them that they (the students)
know as much as the teacher and that everyone is an equal co-
learner and co-teacher. To use Freire’s terms (Horton and Freire,
1990) they want their teachers to be authoritative, not authoritar-
ian. They say they wish to be treated with respect, though what that
looks like varies enormously according to learners’ class, race, and
culture. One of the most important indicators they mention that
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KILLFUL
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EACHER
convinces them they are being treated respectfully is the teacher
attempting to discover, and address seriously, students’ concerns and
difficulties.
They also want to believe that teachers know what they’re doing,
that they have a plan guiding their actions, and that they’re not new
to the classroom. They want to be able to trust teachers to deal with
them honestly, and they hate it when they feel the teacher is keep-
ing an agenda or expectation concealed from them. They like to
know their teachers have lives outside the classroom, but they dis-
like it when teachers step over that line and make inappropriate 
disclosures regarding their personal life. They also want to be sure
that whatever it is they are being asked to know or do is important
and necessary to their personal, intellectual, or occupational devel-
opment. They may not be able to understand fully and completely
why the learning they are pursuing is so crucial, but they need to
pick up from the teacher the sense that this is indeed the case. One
indicator of this that they look for is the teacher’s willingness to
model an initial engagement in the learning activity required. This
is particularly appreciated where the learning involves a degree of
risk and where failure entails (at least in the students’ minds) pub-
lic humiliation and embarrassment.
Finally, it’s clear that students experience a vigorous emotional
life as learners that is often concealed from teachers, and sometimes
from peers. Students frequently feel like impostors, believing they
don’t deserve to be in the role of learner. They worry about com-
mitting cultural suicide as friends and family see them changing
because of college. They often feel in limbo, that they are leaving
old ideas and capacities behind as they learn new knowledge, skills,
and perspectives. Sometimes it feels as if learning is calling on them
to leave their own identities in the past. However, if they can find
others with whom they can share these fears—a supportive peer-
learning community—many of their anxieties apparently become
much less corrosive.
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I began this chapter by emphasizing the contextual, shifting
nature of what we consider good practice. So perhaps it is appro-
priate to end it by acknowledging that, although the situational
nature of teaching cannot be denied, there are some broad insights
we can hold on to. First, there are some definite similarities across
learners of different ages, races, cultures, genders, and personality
types regarding their perceptions of teachers. Credibility, authen-
ticity, modeling, full disclosure, and consistency are some of the
characteristics universally appreciated in teachers. There also seem
to be some distinctive tensions and emotional rhythms experienced
by very different groups of learners. Impostorship, cultural suicide,
lost innocence, incremental fluctuation, and a yearning for com-
munity are all mentioned as being at the heart of the student expe-
rience. These characteristics, tensions, and rhythms have a level of
generality that make them worthy of the attention of teachers across
disciplinary areas, and they will all be explored further in Chapters
Four and Five.
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3
I
n the previous chapter I proposed as a core tenet of skillful teach-
ing that the most important knowledge we need to do good work
as teachers is a consistent awareness of how students are experi-
encing their learning and perceiving our teaching. In the last
twenty years an impressive body of work has emerged that fleshes
out this assumption by providing examples of classroom research
and assessment exercises that teachers can use to gain this aware-
ness. Typical contributions are the work of Anderson (2002),
Angelo (1998), Angelo and Cross (1993), Brookhart (2000), Butler
and McMunn (2006), Cross and Steadman (1996), Hammersley
(1993), and Hopkins (1993). These authors have suggested numer-
ous exercises that yield extremely valuable information concerning
student learning yet are quick and easy to administer. Some of the
best-known ones are the one-minute paper and the muddiest point,
both described in this chapter.
Classroom research (or classroom assessment—the two terms are
often synonymous) describes the regular attempt by teachers to
study their classrooms in order to find out what and how students
are learning. This kind of research serves the twin functions of alert-
ing us to learning and teaching dynamics we might be missing
and of developing students’ own reflective capacities. Regarding the
first of these functions, classroom research provides a series of cross-
sectional snapshots of where students are in their learning and what