Every Class Is (At Least) a Three-Way Conversation

 A couple of years ago, I read something that changed forever how I saw the classroom, how I saw students, how I saw myself as a teacher. And that was Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If you ever think you might want to teach anything, whether it's as a college professor or a Sunday school teacher or doing training at your company one day, I highly recommend it. 

He says a lot in that little book, but four things stood out to me. 

1. Students are teachers. Teachers are students. If they aren't, I'm not teaching and you're not learning. There are 60 people in this class: If your voices are silenced, we're missing 60 opportunities for new information, lived experiences, varying points of view. And if I'm not learning from you, then I can't be responsive to the class. You might as well not have a human teacher. You could stand in some kind of pod like Michael Burnham and get yelled at by a voice synthesizer. 
2. We aren't supposed to pour facts into your brains. In Freire's model, teachers literally embed in a community months before the class begins to learn what students' needs are. They interview students in depth. They come up with a plan (like a syllabus except not) which the students then approve before the class begins. 
3. An education is utterly useless if it doesn't teach you to change things. So that plan involves teaching students how to learn to do stuff. Things they want and need to learn how to do to improve their lives and the life of their families and communities. To liberate themselves--from ignorance, if nothing else. 
4. Following on #1 and #2, we have to trust our students. If we don't, if we keep trying to take the reins of control in the classroom, we will lose you and all of the benefits of your active, confident, enthusiastic participation in the process. 

Alas, American universities don't allow professors the opportunity to spend all summer seeing how their students live and asking them what they need and want. And you don't approve the syllabus, my coordinator does. Weeks before you even get to see it, it's set in concrete. 

So what I do is, I ask for a Research Question from you. (I also watch your introductory videos carefully and read every goal on every schedule. Sometimes I even take notes!) I want to know what you want to know, then I will help you learn as much about it this semester as you can, mainly via the Final Project series of assignments. And in case you aren't shooting for that A, I will still be packing in as much content as I can that relates to your questions and teaching you skills that will help you find your answers on your own. The "Psychology in the News" discussion assignment is the first step in that process. 

To sum, you aren't empty-headed blank slates. I am not necessarily always the expert. I am certainly not the expert on you. You are! And if we can build a learning community based on mutual trust, learning becomes not only enjoyable but useful. Instead of you listening to me day after day, taking notes, memorizing facts, spitting them back up on an exam, and then promptly forgetting it all, we have a three-way conversation that will stick with us all forever. I talk to you, you talk to me, you talk to each other. 

If you've had other teachers who thought this way, how did you experience that? If you teach (and you probably are, at least informally, teaching someone something on the daily), or ever think you might one day, how do you think of your yoga students or the sports team you coach, your soldiers or whoever? How do you see yourself? What does your process look like?