“The ability to live well is the ability to live without so many certainties.”
Theologian and Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas
In my job as a teacher, as is the case with most all of life, so much is out of my control. I can’t control how ready and able my students are to learn on any given day. How can I expect my student to care about a book when she got only four hours of sleep last night? How can I expect my student to prioritize writing an essay when a loved one is dying? How can I expect my student to come to school when she is on the brink of the manic side of bipolar disorder? And all of those examples are memories from just one week of one school year. I have such little control.
Because my students’ lives (like my own) can be complicated by loss, need, disillusionment, and pain, it’s easy to feel like everything is out of control sometimes. Yet one of education’s most respected researchers, John Hattie, emphasizes that teachers do have control. In fact, Hattie assures me that as long as I believe that every one of my students will learn and grow, and as long as I believe in my abilities to foster that growth, learning will happen. So in the same moment I control so little, I also control so much. In fact, it’s that control of my own beliefs about my students and my own abilities to help them grow that study after study shows is one of the most influential factors in student achievement.
Of course, in the classroom some traditional understanding of control is needed to create an optimal learning environment; likewise, some freedom is needed to create an optimal learning environment. The trick is to find the sweet spot where my expectations are clear and honored while my students have voice and choice in how they learn. I suspect the same is true for most employers and employees, as well as parents and children. Finding the right amount of control and allowing for the right amount of empowerment is a delicate balancing act for sure and realized in a million different ways for a million different people in a million different situations.
The inspiration for this post was my implementation of Free Fridays in two of my English classes. On Free Fridays, my students could read, write, or research whatever they wanted with a goal of producing a single product to share with their classmates and me near the end of the semester. I didn’t only want to have my students practice skills taught in an English classroom. In fact, my greatest goal was that they would also renew and nurture a love for reading and writing. High school students are often busy with activities, schoolwork, friends, family, and jobs, so I wanted to set aside time each week to breathe, to relax, to read, to write. One student told me English class on Friday felt like his only hour of peace and quiet each week.
My students wrote lyrics, stories, and reports. They read romances, classics, and research. It sounds utopian, but that’s not how it felt for me each Friday as I moved closer to or had conversations with distracted students. As I vigilantly watched for the next person who needed my teacher look, I knew I had given up a lot of control. And, while I needed to inspect what I expected, I also needed to trust. I needed to honor the process, provide only the necessary support, and believe Free Fridays would pay off for everyone in time.
Too often, I have tried to control it all – me, people around me, things around me – and I usually end up worse off than if I had relinquished control and narrowed my focus only on my own decisions and my own responses. Maybe the real problem is that we use the word control at all. Instead of speaking about control, how about clear expectations, reasonable flexibility, and realized consequences? That is the spirit of healthy boundaries that help us all to “live well without so many certainties” and so much control.
