Author: Phyllis Swartz

The whole time I was growing up, I watched Richard Showalter from afar. In some ways our childhoods followed similar trajectories. We both lived for a time in the mountains, both knew what it was like to live in Mennonite communities and to look back into those communities from the outside. But Richard was always just a little older, a whole lot wiser, and way more adventuresome than I was.

When we were adults, I kept watching as Richard made critical choices to engage. He rose to one challenge after another—teaching and pastoring and living in Kenya and the Middle East. He became the president of a college and of a mission agency. And he wrote books. Richard, I could tell, wasn’t afraid to be different, but he also seemed to know how to avoid hyper-partisanship, to reach across differences for relationship.

Like I had as a kid, I kept right on trying to learn from Richard, a person ahead of me on the path. And so when he agreed to read Yoder School and comment on it, I was delighted.

“Yoder School is an extraordinarily insightful memoir of an inter-culturally-seasoned Anabaptist educator journeying from an Amish Mennonite mountain school in Maryland through urban mazes of Michigan and beyond. Her razor-keen excellence in educational pedagogy, fusing love for students with inspiring them to learn, forms a page-turning narrative.”

—Richard Showalter, Columnist, Mennonite World Review, and Writer, Teacher, Mentor

I get a handful of free books from my publisher, and I’m saving one for Alvina. She was my first teacher, the one who made me want to teach. And as I took class after class on the way to a teaching degree, I measured my other teachers and professors and eventually myself by Alvina. She was my yardstick.

Alvina is now 94 years old. The last time I went back to Grantsville, Maryland, I stopped to see Alvina. She remembered me . . . and my first grade reading score.

“I wrote a book,” I told her.

“Good for you,” she said. “I want to buy one. What’s it about?”

“You,” I said. “It’s about you. And I’ll be bringing you a book.”

Here’s the cover of my upcoming book, Yoder School. The photograph, taken in the school yard, shows one small way teachers at Yoder School took learning beyond the classroom walls. At Yoder School time flowed, and subjects merged into each other.  And I couldn’t quite tell if I was working or playing. But I knew I was learning. In many ways, Yoder School set the foundation for my thirty years of teaching.

Here’s the cover of my upcoming book, Yoder School. The photograph, taken in the school yard, shows one small way teachers at Yoder School took learning beyond the classroom walls. At Yoder School time flowed, and subjects merged into each other.  And I couldn’t quite tell if I was working or playing. But I knew I was learning. In many ways, Yoder School set the foundation for my thirty years of teaching.

 

“Let’s go to print!” I read these words in an email from my editor. And now my book Yoder School is at the press. I’ve never wanted to sky dive or ride roller coasters. But when I read this message, I felt a nervous tremor of thrill run through me—great pleasure mixed with some jots of anxiety. My book is about to go public.

Maybe I like to write because I’m an introvert. I’m no good at a party, never sure I can think of the next right thing to say, always wondering how some people gather others around them so effortlessly. But alone with my laptop, I feel free—exploring ideas and finding patterns that I can set out for others. I like to think that with the words I write I can bring gifts to others in a way I can’t seem to manage in casual conversation.

And I hope my book will be a gift.

“Delighted to be at this juncture, Phyllis,” my editor wrote. And I thought, me too!

Nonverbals are a good deal. Though simple and free, they enliven teaching. Stephen Ceci, professor of psychology at Cornell University, proved this. He taught an identical course—same syllabus, lectures, audiovisual materials, assignments, text, and exams—to two different student groups. But in one class, he added what he called nonverbal expressiveness, a wider range of voice tone and more purposeful gestures.

And students in that class approved. In the end-of-term student evaluations, they rated Ceci’s class with an overall score significantly higher than the typical class (3.92/5 compared to 3.08/5).  In fact, the rating in every category of the student evaluations improved. According the students in the nonverbal expressiveness class, Ceci knew more and was more organized. He was also fairer in grading, and even his textbook was of greater quality. But the biggest difference was in how the students perceived Ceci’s accessibility. The typical class rated him at 2.99. But the students who benefited from nonverbal expressiveness gave him a score of 4.06.

When he gestured, students in Ceci’s experimental class got to see meaning, not just hear it. And, as the tones in Ceci’s voice varied, they felt emotion behind the content. No wonder, these students were drawn further into Ceci’s class than the students in his typical class. With his gestures and voice expressions, he had recruited more parts of their brains into the learning process. He had engaged a powerful synergy of body, mind, and emotion.

Some teachers do all this just being themselves. But others of us need to learn how to show students the passions we hold inside. What gestures are helpful? And how can voice be varied to good effect? Watch for further posts.

I wish I could have watched William Kilpatrick teach. In the early 1900’s he was known as the Million- Dollar Professor—not because he earned a million dollars, but because the coffers of Columbia University grew from tuition for his courses.

Kilpatrick’s math classes at Columbia’s Teachers’ College often swelled to more than 600 students. But when he taught, his students were known to say, they each felt like the only student in the room.

So they kept signing up in droves. Kilpatrick would stand there in front of them with his full mane of white hair, piercing blue eyes, slight build, and oversized personality and draw each of them personally into the world of math.

How did Kilpatrick shrink the room? How, in such a crowd, did he create intimate relationships with students? Here’s how you can teach like Kilpatrick:

• Teach students, not content. You need to know the contexts of your students’ lives, Kilpatrick believed. If you can’t connect your lecture notes to their contexts, students won’t learn. What does your content have to do with their lives? This is the question to ask again and again.
• Get students talking. Why do we pay more attention in a conversation than during a lecture? Because we know it will soon be our turn to talk. Kilpatrick capitalized on this. Students listened to him because at any minute, Kilpatrick would hand the conversation to them. Even in his huge classes, he used small group discussion. He valued their words.
• Keep students busy. Kilpatrick guided his students through projects because he believed that learning is doing. He presented real-life problems for students to solve. Students listened to Kilpatrick because he was always about to call them to action.

Kilpatrick didn’t want to retire when he got caught with Columbia’s mandatory retirement age. After all, he knew he still had what it took to teach a good class. And he was right. His last class in 1937 was full—622 students.

I’m a duck and cover kind of person. I don’t like anything that brings anxiety—arguments or roller coasters or financial risk. And I took this way of thinking into the classroom. In my first years of teaching I ignored, when I could, a rolling eye, a dirty word carved into the desk, an insolent tone, a child whose eyes showed something was wrong, a terse note from a parent, the raised eyebrow of an administrator.

I soon learned, though, that trouble doesn’t go away. Eye rolling, for example, can evolve to swaggering and then to disrespect and defiance. Not following up on the terseness in a note results in a tense parent-teacher conference. And the longer a student’s eyes looked haunted the further behind that student fell in classwork.

So I took tentative steps toward resolving problems earlier. But not with much skill. For one thing, I used too much teacherese—the jargon tossed around for so long by so many teachers that students, especially by the time they get to middle school, take as a kind of background music that they really don’t like. In those first years of teaching, I called parents to make statements, not to ask questions, and I referred students to guidance counselors and principals without talking with them first.

I found it easier to run toward trouble after I developed this set of skills to take with me:

• Come out from behind the desk. The longer I was a teacher, the less I talked like one. I found myself depending more on relationship than on role. I didn’t sit behind my desk at a parent-teacher conferences, and in the classroom I drew up a stool beside a student’s desk to talk about an issue. I tried to send the message to parents and to students that we were two people, sitting with a dilemma, looking for a solution.
• Take good news. Hope helps, I discovered. Hope brings the energy to find a way out of a problem. It helps people reach out to others instead of isolating themselves. It gives the courage to take one small step . . . and then another.

  “Here’s an idea,” I liked to say. Or, “Here’s something good I see.” Or, “What do you       think about this?”

• Seek information. With students, I had only a one-sided look, the view from the classroom. I saw kids in one dimension. But parents had a fuller picture. And so did the students, themselves. The more I talked, I came to see, the less new understanding I gained. Questions brought valuable information to the table.

Procrastinating grows problems. And, although trouble still daunted me, I found running toward it much easier and more pleasant when I used these approaches.

It’s hard to get it right in the tension between support and challenge. Give students too much support, and they fail to learn. Give them too much challenge, and they quit trying. With too little challenge, they’re bored. And with too little support, they’re frustrated. No wonder this is hard.

Learning for most people happens most naturally with high support and high challenge. Like a coach, high-challenge, high-support teachers look for potential and call it out. They push students to aim higher and further, to take risks, to learn from failure, to give effort. But, also like a coach, they provide tools and strategies and emotional support. Because they pour into students, they can ask much of them.

Most of us, though, have trouble staying in the coaching quadrant. Instead, we slip naturally and often into the roles of friend, boss, or bystander. New teachers, I’ve noticed, often come in with a soft start, as a sympathetic friend, and move quickly into a hard year. Or they come in as an authority-conscious boss and create a wall too high for students to climb. And disillusioned teachers stand back from students, churning out the class periods and the terms and the years, adding up the pay checks and counting down toward retirement. Not investing and not urging.

On our good days, we’re coaches. On our bad days, we slip into one of the other quadrants. For me it was usually into the friendship mode. Each time I moved into a new job or a new year, I’d tell myself to hold firm with students, especially at the beginning. But, despite my self-lectures, I often started out too lax, giving students too much leeway and then having to pull back the reins. On days I came to class with a headache or a family worry or a bad night of sleep, I had to make a conscious effort to be a coach, not a friend.

Under stress, you might err as I do toward a too-soft friendship role. Or perhaps you are more of a bystander or a boss. What is your natural drift? Knowing it can benefit you and your students.