Risk in the Classroom

I wrote this at the end of last semester and forgot to put it up, but I found so much of this still applies (minus the grading, I’m very behind now!). So here it is.

It’s the end of another semester, and another academic year. It’s hard to believe that it’s already the third year that I’ve been at Notre Dame! It feels like not so long ago that I sat down here and wrote about how exhausted I was about the end of my first year. And while I can happily say that I’m actually ahead of the curve this year when it came to grading, the semester wasn’t without its hiccups and the moments that really made me question my work.

If I had to encapsulate my description of this academic year, it would be ‘taking risks’. Developing two new courses from scratch, courses where I wasn’t immediately full of ideas on what exactly to talk about every day, was a serious challenge for me. In contrast to when I have prepped materials and feel confident about the flow of the course, I often found myself having to surrender my desire to have everything run like clockwork or to have the ideas work out exactly as planned. Even with some of my more ‘well-oiled’ classes, I introduced a couple of changes to the way that we did evaluations, or the way that we held discussions in class.

And so, I decided to just adopt a posture of vulnerability and tell my students straight up: I’m really not that much of an expert, and that there are aspects of each classroom that are like experiments for me.

I worried about it quite a lot over the course of the semester, because as much as I try not to think too much about whether or not my students like me, I’m kind of a people-pleaser at heart. So I would often worry about perceptions about my competence, and how the likeability piece interacts with how this gets expressed in course evaluations (because I still get probably way too fixated on them). But as I either agonized over how well or poorly a course was going, I found myself being reminded of the idea of risk as a necessary element of education.

In The Risk of Education, Luigi Giussani invokes the idea that to let a student grow into an independent being, the teacher’s own intelligence and egotism are put at risk (and oh, how much my ego was tried!). Because the student has to be the one to have the educational experience, the teacher has to also have a love for that student’s capacity to reach that experience freely, and to be open to however that ends up coming about. Although it’s a message that resonates a lot with me when it comes to my personal experience with life (whether that’s my love of neuroscience or my commitment to the Catholic tradition), it is one I struggle with professionally.

But I found that in the experience of making changes and tweaks, and seeing what did or didn’t land, I was invited into relationship with students in a new way. I was challenged to think about what students needed - not in appeasing them or making it easy, but in how to let them build on learning experiences freely. And yes, each of those changes was a risk unto itself, but the exercise of making new classes and trying new assignments revealed something new to me each time that I would not have had if I didn’t take the risk. To wit:

• Project-based work needs more collective responsibility in group work distribution, so that we build the skill of attribution of effort and cooperation.
• Formative feedback is (almost) useless if there is no incentive to go back and look at it, including if there is no direct follow-up on the feedback itself.
• Model the behaviour that you want to see, but don’t assume that people will be willing to take it up.

Not every innovation this semester was a success - I might even say many of them were failures. But I’m really grateful to have risked it in the classroom to have tried.