INDEX OF QUOTES
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Each time you give a grade to a student, grade your own perception of that student. The following questions might be useful:
You may discover that your answers to these questions are deeply disturbing. For example, you may find that you give the lowest grades mostly to those students you least understand, in which case, the problem is yours — isn’t it? — not theirs. What we are driving at is this: too many teachers seem to believe that the evaluations they make of their students reflect only the "characteristics," "ability," and "behavior" of the students. The teacher merely records the grade that the student "deserves." This is complete nonsense, of course. A grade is as much a product of the teacher’s characteristics, ability, and behavior as of the student’s. Any procedure you can imagine that would increase your awareness of the role you play in "making" the student what you think he is will helpful, even something like the following: Keep track of the judgments you make about students. Every time you say words such as right, wrong, good, correct, incorrect, smart, stupid, nice, annoying, polite; impertinent, neat, sloppy, etc., keep a record. Do it yourself or have a student do it. You can simply make a check on a sheet of paper that has been divided in two, with one column marked "+" and the other marked "–". Beyond the verbal judgments, you might keep track of the judgments you make that are made visible nonverbally, through facial expression, gesture, or general demeanor. Negative judgments are, not surprisingly, impediments to good learning, particularly if they have the effect of causing the learner to judge himself negatively. Positive judgments, perhaps surprisingly, can also produce undesirable results. For example, if a learner becomes totally dependent upon the positive judgments of an authority (teacher) for both motivation and reward, what you have is an intellectual paraplegic incapable of any independent activity, intellectual or otherwise. The point to all of this is to help you become conscious of the degree to which your language and thought is judgmental. You cannot avoid making judgments but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it. Which means, among other things, that we behave in response to our judgments rather than to that which is being judged. People and things are processes. Judgments convert them into fixed states. This is one reason that judgments are commonly self-fulfilling. If a boy, for example, is judged as being "dumb" and a "nonreader" early in his school career, that judgment sets into motion a series of teacher behaviors that cause the judgment to become self-fulfilling. What we need to do then, if we are seriously interested in helping students to become good learners, is to suspend or delay judgments about them ... you can practice suspending judgment yourself tomorrow. It doesn’t require any major changes in anything in the school except your own behavior. |
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