We often think of instructors as the ultimate authority in the classroom, and they are, but I don’t think we spend enough time focusing on the fact that they are humans too. We think of them in terms of developing curricula, conducting research, or advising students. But the reality is, instructors are just as human as the rest of us. They have families, soccer matches, ballet recitals, and trips to the vet just like the rest of us. I don’t think we often realize how much faculty have on their ‘plates’ on a daily basis, especially when it comes to struggles in the classroom.
Not long ago, I was asked to serve as a coach for a boot camp our institution holds to help faculty who are struggling in the classroom. I was assigned an individual whom was supposedly one of the more challenging situations. So much so, they actually assigned two of us to try and help this individual.
As we began our coaching session, my colleague, began the discussion. Trusting his knowledge and experience, I followed his lead. He began asking questions about the assignment strategy, followed by making recommendations for new approaches to the assignments. At the surface level, everything seemed to be going along quite well, but there was a burning question I felt I had to ask the instructor. “Why do you get up every morning and come into work to teach your students?” I knew immediately I had struck a cord.
The instructor began describing how he felt his students viewed him, there were more emotions behind his words than I can describe. Anger, fear, self-doubt, sadness, the list could go on. He spoke authoritatively, but his eyes couldn’t hide the tears that were quietly welling up. He spoke of how disrespected he felt by his students, how he assumed they labeled him because of his dialect. He spoke about how he had been told by his supervisor that he needed to participate in this program because he was struggling to connect with his students and the sense of worthless and failure he experienced as a result.
Our consultation continued with a great deal of resistance to much of what I was suggesting, which I later realized had nothing to do with me, but rather with the sense of vulnerability he felt at releasing those insights into his world. By the end of the session and more importantly of his own choosing, he decided to try some new strategies. I left the session hoping that he would be able to turn his situation around, but also with a real sense of concern for him.
Those concerns were laid to rest when several weeks later I received a Thank you note from the program. In the note they indicated, he was an individual who entered the program with a great deal of resistance, but after our coaching session, he turned things around. He became one of the star pupils of the cohort. I was told that in his final presentation, he described the process of teaching as its own journey. One in which he felt as though he was standing at the base of a steep mountain looking toward the top. He was ready for the challenge and for him, there was no turning back.