Teachers don't plant ideas. They plant evidence.
Maybe teaching is about running the right experiment
What can a teacher do?
Maybe not all that much.
But by embracing and understanding the limitations of a teacher’s potential for impact in a student’s life, we can stretch and expand those limitations in a meaningful way.
The fact is that learning is not a transitive verb, like “write” or “send.” I can write and then send an email, and in that sense I have agency over that email’s content and its destination. But I can’t “learn” a student — I can only teach them, and the agency of learning is entirely up to them.
This is something we all — teachers and learners alike — instinctively know and understand. And yet, when we as teachers first come face to face with it in the classroom, it can be deeply unsettling.
All our hope, all our pedagogical study, all our philosophical belief in the importance of the subject matter, comes face-first against that beautiful, terrifying fact of human agency.
People can choose.
A student has to choose to learn, or all of our work and passion amounts to nothing.
I believe, like all committed teachers, that I have the potential to make a positive impact in students’ lives. There are the transmission-centric goals, of course — I need to deliver this information on this subject in relation to this course of study.
But we teach because we believe in the power of education to bring personal and societal good, not just career advancement or the accumulation of knowledge.
But just as we can’t force learning, we can’t force that personal growth.
So where does that leave me, the teacher?
I can create the right environment. All our lives, we’re gathering evidence — evidence that ultimately informs our worldview. When we talk about things like “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets,” we must ask where those mindsets come from. Certainly a complex idea about whether we’re capable of growth or advancement cannot be purely or even predominantly genetic.
If a student has a fixed mindset, it’s because the evidence thus far has led them to the conclusion that their fate is, in fact, fixed. Perhaps they’ve been told this by people they trust, perhaps they’ve had evidence reinforced in their experiences that have shown them that this is the case.
Our job is to balance the scales of evidence, to provide counterpoints. To give them an environment where they can prove to themselves that they can grow, can learn, can progress, can advance.
And so our job is to cultivate an environment — not an artificial, biased environment, but a true scientific environment for experimentation. Because, as teachers, we know the truth — that people are not fixed, that growth is possible in nearly all cases. And so we don’t have to create conditions where only change will happen, we simply have to make true conditions free from the corrupting influences that have diluted our students’ personal “experiments” up to the moment they enter our classrooms.
That’s what psychological safety is really about. It’s not safety from challenging ideas or concepts. It’s safety from the false idea that each student cannot grow into their ultimate potential.
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My wife is a teacher. She's taught in 5 very different countries, with 5 very different expectations as to what a (successful) student looks like.
From South Korea, where there's immense pressure to perform - to Vietnam where the parents have an incredibly frustrating hands-off attitude.
Environment is everything.