On vulnerability and fastening seatbelts
In a defining moment of my career, I made a mistake in my first year of teaching at UBC. This was not a matter of opinion; it was an unequivocal, technical error in the content I was teaching. I still remember the sinking feeling when a student pointed out the problem and everything clicked into place for me: what I taught, what I should have taught, and why it happened that way. Well, what can one do in this situation? I came to class the next morning, explained the mistake and the correct version of events, stated that this should not have happened, and moved on with the class. Although I was able to keep it together during class, I was crushed inside. But then something unexpected happened: I received an outpouring of support on the course message board. One magnanimous student even suggested that my mistake and its correction was a good learning experience for them. I realized it was going to be okay.
Over time I came to understand that acknowledging one’s mistakes is not always the default response in teaching. Teachers, perhaps like most people in positions of power, often prefer to maintain their image of infallibility and avoid jeopardizing the established power dynamic. I’m here to argue that the path of humility and vulnerability is ultimately the better one for student learning, because teacher vulnerability enables student vulnerability, which enables learning.
First off, what does student vulnerability have to do with student learning? To learn is to improve at something, which implies being unskilled, or not yet fully skilled, at the outset. (I do not mean to deride students even one iota by calling them unskilled here; we are all beginners when we start something new.) In the process of learning, students need to show this less-than-perfect part of themselves to their teachers, their peers, and themselves. That is not easy. In an unsafe environment, students may associate productive struggles and failures with a diminished sense of self-worth. We must avoid this! (During my time at UBC, I would sometimes phrase this to students as, “You are not your GPA!”) If students can admit when they are confused, if they can ask questions in class, if they can share ideas that might be half-baked, that is when the best learning happens. By creating an environment of psychological safety, teachers allow students to be vulnerable, which allows them to learn.
What about teachers, why do they need to be vulnerable? When a teacher is vulnerable, students see someone in a position of power also struggling, and this makes it okay to struggle. A teacher’s vulnerability can manifest in a number of ways: by sharing that we, too, struggled when learning this particular topic many years ago; by joining in as a participant in classroom activities (for example, if asking every student to share a poem they wrote, then sharing a poem of one’s own as well); by sharing failures (for example, I have a CV of failures on my website); by publicly reflecting on our own teaching and how it could be improved; by sharing our own fears, as teachers, of not knowing all the answers; or by simply admitting when we made a mistake, as in my own defining moment in my first year teaching at UBC. Everyone has their own way of being authentically vulnerable. But regardless of the details, being vulnerable as a teacher creates a safe environment where students feel that they are safe and they too can be vulnerable.
A possible objection here is that, by focussing so much on psychological safety, we are coddling our students and therefore not building resilience. Here is an excellent response to this objection from my co-founder of VISST, Shaun Olafson: “It's not about creating a padded cell and staying safely inside it, but about protecting ourselves for the journey outside of the safe and known. Helmets, seatbelts, brakes... People often mix up their roles in the world. These things exist so we can go fast. In the same way, we want to equip students to safely accelerate and reach new heights in their thought and learning. True coddling would be our students not trying, not reaching, not challenging themselves.” I couldn’t have said it better. Students will lack resilience if they never try and never fail; on the contrary, we want an environment where they do try and do fail. This is why one of our taglines at VISST is building justified self-confidence. Superficial self-confidence comes from the illusion that everything is easy. Justified self-confidence comes from “going fast” — in a psychologically safe environment that serves as the much-needed seatbelt for high-speed learning and growth. This is progressive thinking in service of rigorous education.
Learning is a vulnerable process. A safe classroom environment allows students to focus on learning without distraction, or worse, thinking less of themselves in the process. As educators, we should not just tell students, but show them, that failure is for everyone. As Parker Palmer put it in his thought-provoking book, The Courage to Teach, “Teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability.” Amen!
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