Blog
Rules and the classroom
Gerard van der Ree, University College Utrecht
A year ago, I noticed that my students stopped doing the reading in one of my courses. I got annoyed, since it was clear that they didn’t follow the rule of coming to class well-prepared. After wrestling my way through a couple of those awkward classes in which they just glazed at me, I burst out in anger: ‘why do you not read? Why are you so lazy! You know you have to prepare!’ The answer startled me. They unanimously responded: ‘you take so little time to discuss the readings in the classroom- we don’t see the relevance’. After digesting that response, I doubled the time for the discussion of the literature- and low and behold, everyone picked up their reading and came to class well-prepared. We ended up having awesome conversations. This episode made me think about the function of rules in the classroom. The students had not followed the rules (‘come to class well-prepared’). Yet at the same time, they were not to blame- I was. What was going on?
I have a suspicion that our reliance on rules in the classroom makes us often miss out on what actually motivates students. In general, students (or even more general, people) do not follow rules all that much. Rather, they do ‘whatever works well’ in the social practices they are embedded in. As a result, they blend in with whatever the reality of the classroom is, not the written rules. At the most superficial level, this means that if my class always starts 5 minutes late, the rule of the classroom becomes ‘we start 5 minutes late’, regardless of what the course outline says. At a deeper level, it means that if the practice of the classroom says: ‘only the most vocal students gets the attention of the teacher’, the quieter students will just remain quiet. Slapping them on the wrist with the rulebook (a participation grade, for instance) would then be to miss the point. They didn’t ‘choose not to follow the rule’- in fact, they did follow the rule. The rule just happened not to be the one in the syllabus, but rather what we allowed the practice of the classroom to be.
In my case, my classroom had developed the rule ‘the readings are not important’, despite the fact that the syllabus stated otherwise. If I would just have applied the formal rules and punished them, all of us would have gotten out that classroom a bit more alienated and frustrated. Luckily we were able to turn that situation around. Since then, however, whenever my students do not comply with the rules, I try to first look closely at myself, and the dynamics of the classroom.
4 december 2013
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Thank you, it is always good to be reminded of these mechanisms.
These mechanisms also extend across courses. If you ask students why they come to class unprepared, the answer may well be that it was never necessary in earlier courses. This means that we should all be consistent in that what we ask from students (or other learners) should seem worthwhile for the student, so we train them in the behaviour we would like to see. “Worthwhile” could be many different things I expect. Paying attention to the homework in class is one option. If we want the students to study the textbook, maybe the best thing is NOT to cover the topic in class as well, but to leave some topics for them to figure out themselves. However, in that case we should somehow make sure they realise this before the final test. And there may be many other strategies to make some behaviour ‘worthwhile’ for the students.
– Carolien
I’m not sure it implies we should coordinate our expectations for the clasroom between courses in an uniform way. I do not think there is necessarily a problem with courses, teachers, and expectations to be different- as long as students are aware that its not about rules primarily, but about attunement. I as a teacher can get students into a learning mode in a certain way- other teachers do so differently. For me the level of attention that we pay to these processes (and involving the student in them) is more important than rules, since it makes us pay attention to the students, class dynamics, and ourselves as teachers.
Having said this, I completely agree with your analysis of ‘worthwhile’- we are so ‘brainwashed’ into a certain way of teaching ‘just because that’s how we do things’ that we often forget to think about what works and doesnt work. And what ‘works’ can be quite counterintuitive to us- for instance by not ‘going over the materials’ in introductory courses (but for instance only asking questions) we can give students much more ownership of their appropriation of the materials.