The Skillful Teacher

Maxim 11: Don’t Evaluate Yourself Only by Students’
Satisfaction
Although I have consistently argued for the importance of situat-
ing teaching in an awareness of how students are experiencing
learning, I believe it is a mistake to measure yourself by how much
students like you. Many of us would be the first to acknowledge that
we go into teaching inspired by an admirable desire to help others.
What we would probably be much less ready to acknowledge, how-
ever, would be that we expect to be liked, even loved, by our 
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students for this altruism. We might not always admit this to our-
selves, but for many of us it constitutes a powerful underpinning of
our practice. One consequence of this expectation is that when it
is not met—when students greet our efforts with anger, resentment,
or indifference—we immediately conclude that we have failed. It
is as if we assume that being a successful teacher requires that our
students love us and find our efforts to be deeply transformative in
the manner portrayed in popular films about teaching such as Mr.
Holland’s Opus or Dead Poets Society.
We need to remember (as pointed out in Maxim 9) that when
we are doing our job properly some hostile student evaluations of
our teaching are to be expected. Of course, if we only receive uni-
versally hostile evaluations, this may indicate a real problem in our
teaching. It is hard to imagine much learning happening if every-
one involved is consistently full of anger and resentment. But as one
predictable element in students’ reactions, hostility should not come
as a surprise. After all, students themselves report that significant
learning episodes in their lives frequently involve pain, anxiety, and
challenge. While these episodes are being experienced, they may
inspire resentment against the apparent cause of these emotions,
that is, against you, the teacher. Knowing that hostility can be read
as a sign of your pedagogic competence as much as a sign of inade-
quacy is an important defense against the demoralizing depression
that tends to accompany the receipt of poor evaluations.
Additionally, you need to remember that the relevance and util-
ity of an act of learning is often not appreciated until long after it
has happened and you are no longer on the scene. This is particu-
larly true in professional and clinical education where there is a gap
between the initial learning and the student finding herself in a
work context where the content or skills of the learning clearly
apply. The fact that in the immediate aftermath of a learning
episode students view their participation as a waste of time does not
mean that this is the case. Seeds planted sometimes flower long after
the gardener has departed the scene.
Surviving Emotionally
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