How teachers use power in the classroom can have an enormous impact on the community they create and how much their students learn. Every classroom gives teachers a great deal of structural power. Teachers plan the lesson, ask the questions, evaluate students’ work, and assign grades. Teachers pass or fail students and often have the power to remove children from their classroom. Teachers are older, more educated, and more skilled in the ways of human interaction than their students.
Teachers can use their inherent power to leave their mark on the lives of their students. The mark can be profoundly positive or it can wound students for life.
When a teacher uses power for good, wonderful learning can happen.
Unfortunately, power is not always used for good. Just like every other human being on the planet, teachers can be tempted to exert power in ways that are destructive. When teachers use power to dominate, often simply because the feeling of domination is intoxicating, that exertion of power over students can be detrimental to everyone in the classroom, including the teacher. I refer to this as ‘power over’.
Power Over
Power over shows up in psychological bullying, asserting that there is only one truth (the teacher’s), and the constant reminder to students that they have inferior status. In the worst-case scenarios, students feel impotent when confronted by a dominating teacher. Feeling powerless or hopeless, everybody loses the desire to learn.
Power over students, however, is not always as obvious as psychological bullying. It can surface when teachers subtly ridicule a student in front of her peers, when they lecture students to show who is boss, when they glare at a student who is out of line, and when they use their much greater knowledge and experience to show up a student in an in-class debate.
Whenever my need for control runs up against someone else’s need for autonomy, problems arise. “Each of us,” negotiation experts Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro (2005) have written, “wants an appropriate degree of autonomy” (p. 73). When we use power over to control students, our coercive attempts may actually make things worse, more out of control.
Power over can increase misbehavior. When a teacher tries to force students to act a certain way, that force limits students’ autonomy. Often power over pushes students to act more autonomously. When this occurs, teachers may try more coercive methods of control, which in turn produces more resistance, more conflict, ending in a vicious cycle, and, of course, less learning for all.
Few people have more direct power over others than teachers. Like a boss with plenty of reports, teachers observe, direct, evaluate, reward, and punish students. And like good bosses, teachers must be vigilant that they don’t let power poison their perceptions and end up creating the control-autonomy vicious cycle.
Power With
“Power with” is an alternative to power over; it involves authentic power we develop with students, as opposed to power over, which is coercive power we hold over students to keep them in place. Teachers taking the power with approach practice empathizing with, connecting with, and respecting students.
Empathizing with Students
Power with our students begins with the simple desire to empathize with them, to deeply understand how they are experiencing our class and school, and how they think and feel about what is important in their lives. If we empathize with students, we are more likely to connect with them and less likely to need or want to resort to power over. There is much we can do to understand our students better. Empathy begins with a simple commitment to understand our students, the desire to truly see the world through their eyes. I know that this sounds frightfully close to a vacuous platitude, but the simple desire to see our students as real people with real thoughts and feelings is the starting point for empathy.
When we commit to understand our students, we ask more questions of them and of ourselves. When we ask our students questions, we ask anything that might help us better understand them without any expectation of an answer. But the simplest technique might be to ask ourselves questions, taking a moment each day to focus on one student in every class and ask, “What is this student experiencing right now?”
In essence, empathy is about being intentional about understanding.
Teachers can implement several different strategies to be intentional.
- Look at photos of students as they plan their content
- Do a mental roll call by imagining their classroom and thinking about the students and where they sit in class, pausing to consider each student
- Give students a short survey about their interests
- Use writing prompts and ask students to write on such topics as a person they respect, a challenge they have overcome, something that makes them feel proud, etc
- Ask students for anonymous feedback
Connecting through One-to-One Conversations
When we see others as objects, we can do terrible things to them simply because we don’t recognize that they are real. Of course, we know that they are just as human as we are, but we don’t see them having the same feelings as we do. However, when we see people as real, as subjects rather than objects, we see them as fellow human beings. Seeing through empathetic eyes rather than cold dehumanizing eyes transforms our relationships with others.
One of the simplest ways to move from being an object to a subject is to have one-to-one conversations with our students. We can make one-to-one conversations a ritual of our classrooms. They can be scheduled throughout the school year. They might take place informally outside of class, or formally in class while all other students are engaged in an activity that doesn’t require teacher direction. One-to-one conversations could focus on student progress, but they can also focus on our own progress. We can ask children for feedback on what is and isn’t working for their learning. What matters in these simple exchanges is that we try to connect with our students and reveal ourselves as real.
Organizational theorist Peter Senge is credited with a statement that I love:
The way forward is about becoming more human, not just more clever.
Of course, one-to-one conversations won’t be effective if we fail to connect with students when we talk with them. For that reason, one of the most important skills any teacher needs to master is effective listening.
Listening
If we really want to hear what another person has to say and allow him or her to speak, and we process what is being said, I believe the rest of the listening strategies will take care of themselves. When we reduce listening to its essence, it primarily means just to stop talking and focus on the speaker. If we really want to hear what the other person wants to say, he or she will know. It’s as simple as that.
Listening is important for leaders, for all of us in any relationship, and I believe it is especially important in the classroom. When we listen to students, we show respect for them, and we reduce behavior problems by encouraging a positive and respectful classroom culture. Listening communicates our belief that students have something worthwhile to say and that they are smart, valuable people. Listening also models respectful behaviors that all people would be wise to demonstrate. Truly listening is a humble act. If we listen to our students, we communicate that everyone in the classroom has something worthwhile to say. We also get the opportunity to learn more by really hearing what our children are saying. And when we really listen to our students, they often reward us with real insights.
Communicating Respect
Respecting students, seeing them, communicating that they are “somebody” begins with a deep desire to acknowledge that we see our students as valuable, as people, no matter how old or young, with important ideas and feelings to share. IF teachers carefully listen to students, acknowledge their ideas, validate what they say, and stop actions that communicate a lack of respect, we can have a profound impact on students.
