If you have read much of my stuff, you may have seen that I am a PK. Yes, I am a pastor’s kid, with all of the baggage, dysfunction, and connotations you likely imagine.
Don’t get me wrong, my dad (the pastor) is a great human being. I love him dearly and consider him a true friend. So this post does not have much to do with the father-son relationship, but rather with the knowledge that I was raised in and around highly religious people, pretty much all the time.
But as a person who did not follow in my father’s footsteps (like many of my uncles and cousins), I believe that I have some unique perspectives on faith and religion not afforded to people on either end of the continuum. For people of significant faith (such as ministers) it might prove difficult to look at your own context and not feel defensive of things ‘the collective’ might do with regularity. The other side of the spectrum of course, are non-believers who cannot fathom some behaviors and actions by people of faith, likely because they don’t get the why behind the what.
Stick with me for another minute or two. I promise this impacts education…
It seems to me that one of the fundamental problems people of faith face is the struggle between mercy and law – grace and judgment. But it makes complete sense to someone who can view the dichotomy of works vs love from the outside.
Church services are filled with admonitions of how utterly detestable human beings are. From the songs (“…to save a wretch like me”) to collective reading of Biblical passages (“No one is righteous—not even one. No one is truly wise; no one is seeking God. All have turned away; all have become useless. No one does good, not a single one.” Rom 3:9-12) to the sermons themselves, we see the constant preaching of man’s depravity from the words of evangelicals to fundamentalists. You will hear similar messages whether attending a service lead by pastor Rick Warren or the Pope. Heck, churched children are taught from the earliest age that they are not worthy, they are sinners, and they are born into evil as vessels of the same.
Yet, contrast that with the message of Jesus. Here comes this guy who says to throw out all thinking about how bad you (and more importantly) other people are. Instead, the message is to love people (the greatest commandment), forgiving them and never judging anyone other than yourself. In other words, focus on the good and not the bad.
Easy, right?
But therein lies the hardest part of living a Judeo-Christian life, from my perspective. When humans are myopically focused on one goal which juxtaposes so abrasively against another goal, things get…messy.
Think about your friend who is on a diet and has lost a few pounds. They suddenly tell everyone how to eat or exercise or be healthy, etc. This is sometimes done in a judgmental way. “Oh, you still eat that way? I have taken a more enlightened approach to food…”
Think about anyone you know who homeschools. Homeschoolers judge the heck out of people who send their kids to public school, suggesting the lack of intentional parenting as unloving. Meanwhile, public school people judge homeschoolers as people who are out of touch, stupid, or lazy.
Have you ever had a friend hook up with Amway or another pyramid system of selling? Watch out, because those blinders can ruin relationships.
The concept is pretty straight forward. When we focus on something (almost anything), to the point that we act on it; spending the one, universal currency we all share (time) and likely also effort, money, or more, it becomes incredibly hard to see the world without that thing as our lens. People in the military struggle with civilian lifestyles and thinking. People who sell for a living struggle with operational employees who do not treat every opportunity as a selling one. And on and on…
So, as I have watched people of faith from both inside and outside, understanding the drivers and the message while also understanding the goals, it is not surprising to me that so many lean toward judgment over love, “righteous anger” over mercy, and bad things people do rather than how Christ loves all people. When a person focuses on how bad they themselves are all the time, while also attempting to “work” on the sin itself through meditation, accountability, prayer, etc., it becomes extremely difficult not to look out at a world full of people who are not doing the same thing without judging them. Why? Because that is what our brains are (literally) setup to do.
So how does this apply to education?
For several years I seemed to end up performing the closing keynote at conferences that Dr. Mark Milliron opened. The once Chancellor of Western Governor’s University (Texas) and current Chief Learning Officer at Civitas Learning leverages a lot of data and research in his talks. One of my favorite quotes I heard him say often was that, “Of the top five factors that influence the student experience, the instructor is not only number one, but it outweighs the four that follow even when added together.” He typically followed that statement with this: “The lasting impact of a single teacher in a single class can be seen for up to six semesters.”
What a powerful statement.
And in the moment, I suspect most instructors in the audience contextualized that statement in the same way: through a lens of positivism. A great instructor can help a student succeed for up to six semesters after that instructor’s class!
You probably already see where I’m going.
What about a not-so-great instructor? What about a bad teacher? What about someone who does not exhibit care for the students, who does not understand the brain science of pedagogy / andragogy, or who still teaches using archaic, hyper-controlling methodologies in the classroom? What does that do to students in the current term as well as in future terms?
Well, in order to most effectively answer that question, we need to dovetail all of this with something else our brains are really good at doing, which is focusing on the bad. As I was listening to an interview with Dr. Craig Knippenberg, author of, “Wired and Connected: Brain-Based Solutions To Ensure Your Child’s Social and Emotional Success” I heard him describe the teenage brain as one that struggles to get dopamine to the right places, in the best quantities. Dopamine is that neurotransmitter that suggests a person can accomplish something, yet with so little produced in a teen’s neocortex, which is the part of the brain involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language, it becomes easier to understand why teens always seem bored and struggle with concepts like time or grit. (It also explains why a dopamine hit which finally surges in the pleasure center of the brain feels so unusually good to the normally bored kid, they want to keep doing whatever caused that rush. Like video games, social networking likes, etc.)
So, as I looked for ancillary research from Dr. Knippenberg, I stumbled upon a paper in the Review of General Psychology titled, “Bad is Stronger than Good.“ The abstract goes like this:
The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.
In other words, just as the brain of religious people focus far more readily on “sin” than on “grace”, the brains of students will focus far more readily on a negative experience with a teacher than a positive one. Can a great professor impact a student for several terms to come? Absolutely. But is it more likely that a great instructor’s impact will be diminished by a poor instructor’s impact? Unfortunately that is also absolutely more likely.
Which brings us to the “so what” of this blog.
What happens when a professor, who spends most of their working time gathering subject matter information, honing their expertise, and generating ideas for their community of peers, butts up against students who do not spend much of their time on that subject matter and, in fact may not even care to understand it better? Judgment, frustration, and a general distaste for those students is our human brain’s natural tendency. Which of course leads to assumptions about “bad” students vs “good” students, leading to a focus on the bad students in ways that probably perpetuate behaviors called out as “bad.”
And while all of that is going on, those “bad” students may be receiving a potentially “bad” experience (from a perceived “bad” instructor), which sticks with those student for semesters, potentially also believing themselves to be “bad” in the process.
Of course the defense for this is mindfulness. As those old GI Joe cartoons used to tell us in their PSA’s, “Knowing is half the battle.” (Go Joe) And now you know.
The best educators fight the urge to write off students as “bad” while they also do everything in their power to hone their craft of teaching. The best educators try to be that professor that has a positive and lasting impact on a student. So….
Are you a “good” teacher? Are you a “great” professor?
I hearken back to a conversation I had with an old friend recently. He’s working on a project to create really interactive content for science professors. But he told me a story of being admonished strongly on one of his first discovery calls with a group of SME’s. Those science professors were adamant that they be referred to as scientists and not educators. The tenured, university professors saw affiliation with being a “teacher” as an insult.
I wonder how pervasive that kind of thinking is for all of higher ed? Regardless, anyone who is more focused on their subject matter than in teaching their subject matter likely cannot answer my “good teacher” question above in the affirmative. So let us change that. Universities, stop hiring experts who can’t or don’t want to teach. Graduate students, wrap your head around research positions vs teaching positions and focus your attention on the craft of whichever matters to you, but likely not both. Study the science as well as the art of instruction. Learn about learning.
Let’s make “bad” experiences few and far between.
Good luck and good learning.
