The Riskiest Profession

This essay looks at the risk it takes to be a good teacher. Beginning by examining why a teacher takes risk (or does not), the role of questioning will then be examined as a method for improvement. To conclude, the practical considerations, such as professional development and school culture, will be explored.

Introduction

Being a teacher is one of the riskiest professions around. That is, if you are good at it. On the one hand, it is easy to be a safe teacher. The safe teacher can follow previous lesson plans or find classroom activities that “work” and then teach material the same way year after year. If the safe teacher is in a successful school, the teacher might even be considered a good one. The safe teacher may be enjoyable in the classroom by being friendly with the students, showing visual demonstrations, or writing funny quizzes. But this safe teacher does a disservice to the students, the teacher’s colleagues, and even the teacher themself by remaining stagnant.

On the other hand, if you are a teacher who is constantly trying to improve, then you are a risk-taking teacher. You take risks by opening yourself up to scrutiny. You take risks by asking questions of students, asking questions of previous practice, asking questions of your colleague’s stagnant lessons, asking questions of your administrators who might not understand what you are trying to do, and asking questions of education in general. You take risks by opening your classroom for others to observe you. All of this while being frequently confronted with your own shortcomings that have the highest potential costs: the students in your classroom who might lose out on potential knowledge. Additionally, if you are extremely successful, you will need to press against a traditional structure that has likely had “success”, or alternatively you will be pressed out of the classroom towards administrative positions. To top it off, even if you take risks, you won’t fully know if you are effective until decades later, where even then you won’t fully be sure of your contributions.

Why risk leads to improvement

In order to improve, I have to be comfortable with questioning. By questioning, I mean that I must question my own practices, my own knowledge, and my understanding (internal); question my colleagues, my institutions, and my administrators (external); and question the role of education in general (beyond). Additionally, I have to be open to being questioned. This is how I learn about my own beliefs and, more importantly, my own misunderstandings.

Asking questions allows me to gain—and impart—more knowledge. By receiving the answers—or not—to questions, I learn more. But to those I ask questions, I also deepen their understanding. It is this questioning that can bring us both greater insights. Questioning can allow us to grow by pointing us toward the unending path to excellence. As an example, Higgins comments on the questioning process for striving for good; “our knowledge of what brings us closer to the good stands to teach us something about the good itself” (Higgins, p. 453). Questions allow us to better understand knowledge itself.

The risk arrives when I have to make a conscious choice to pursue the path of questioning. That is because, as Tim Urban puts it, “wisdom gives people the insight to know what ‘fulfilled and meaningful’ actually means and the courage to make the choices that will get them there” (Urban, np.). While there is no “there” to get to, it is clear that knowing the direction toward “fulfilled and meaningful” alone is not enough; I must also actively seek it. In order to grow, I need to continue to ask, particularly in times when things are going well.

Risk comes when questioning in three domains: internal, external, and beyond (described briefly above). When I question the internal, I put my own practices into doubt. I doubt my own knowledge and understanding. I take a chance and risk coming to grips with the fact that I don’t know as much as I thought. I risk being ashamed.

When I question the external, I risk losing face to others. If I question a colleague practice, I jeopardize the friendship or professional relationship I might have with her. Questioning school practices puts administrators on the defensive, and I may become the “trouble maker” teacher.

When I question the beyond, I risk determining that what I believe in the purpose of education is not being fulfilled by my practice. I worry that the problems are insurmountable and that, being just one teacher, I am relatively powerless to do anything to actively change things—or even help them a little. Questioning the beyond can be scary, risking my faith in myself as an educator.

But I, as an educator, particularly need to be challenged. While challenge is inherently uncomfortable, it leads to positive arguments. Either I am challenged by another and have an opportunity to learn or I challenge another and can help another learn (and learn something myself). Higgins describes this part of education as “the ongoing conversation taking place in the space opened by the question of what best facilitates human flourishing” (Higgins, p. 451). Challenging each other rehearses the potential answers to the largest questions. The pursuit of excellence teaches us more about excellence itself.

The default system

With so much to learn from being risky, asking questions, and learning to become an intellectual, why isn’t this the “default” approach to education? Unfortunately, the better question is: what motivation exists for a teacher to be risky in the first place?

While risk can lead to improvement, the default is to avoid risk. While avoiding risk is a natural human tendency, it is nearly predictable in education. Many complain how education is failing, but it would be hard to argue that schools have not been successful. Literacy rates have increased on a large timescale, the US (and world) economy continues to produce jobs, and schools fill colleges. One could argue that the current education has worked, overall.

Add to it that teachers are nearly discouraged from being pushed, at least effortlessly, to become Higgins’s “intellectuals”. Teachers join a pre-existing system of successful education, which promotes conformity because of, in part, a draw towards the past. The past holds lessons that worked to produce educational victories. Administrators would like to continue the achievements and naturally continue to pour resources into practices that work, or more importantly, faculty that abide by the guiding principles of the institutions that have prospered. It is no wonder, as Waller points out, a teacher “may become rigid, didactic, narrow, and lose one’s inventiveness and appetite for learning” (Higgins p. 445 citing Waller, pp. 392-395).

Teachers take one of two routes in order to avoid risk: kitsch or rigidity. Kitsch is the default to platitudes and vapid statements. Most dangerously, kitsch is “a world in which all questions are already answered” (Higgins, p. 446). With no questions to ask, there is no risk. The other route is rigidity, growing from pessimism and denial. Rigid teachers will avoid change, often being fearful of it. These teachers will continue practices year after year. They may comment that they are a “team player” because they “just do their job.” Because these teachers have their heads down, there is no way to look beyond themselves. However, they aren’t even able to look at themselves to begin to ask questions. Questioning doesn’t reach the internal stage (which, while not necessarily the first, can be the most difficult as internal questioning requires uncomfortable reflection). Both kitsch and rigidity protect the teacher from asking any questions and safely protect the teacher from risk.

Let’s go for it

To break the isolation that teachers have, to break the natural tendency towards placation (kitch) or frustration (pessimism), we need a community. We particularly need a school community because “the school has power to modify the social order” (Dewey, p. v). Our school community models and shapes future behavior, future risk-takers. Our school community provides opportunities for us to be more aware of and more ready to react to the environment. Our school community combats the natural tendency for us to default to isolation in the classroom. Isolation doesn’t allow us the space to ask the full gambit of questions (internal, external, and beyond). If we're closed off then we aren't open to new questions and then can't push forward.

Beyond isolation, we need the community itself to resist the natural tendency for good things to stay stationary. Higgins describes how teaching can, if done right, resist the momentum to remain the same: “teaching offers a constant check against the dominance of one voice, and against the tendency for the great human questions to become mere academic topics” (Higgins, p. 441). Academic topics can be the place where questioning stops. Once the syllabus is set, the room for questions is minimized. Academic topics are safe, not risky propositions.   

One traditional place for learning about new questions, or at least a place to avoid rigidity, is through professional development (PD). However, PD is often filled with kitsch. For example, a description for a session at an upcoming conference shows that if we attend we will, “learn the importance of play-based classrooms” that will “allow the necessary space children need to play, socialize, wonder, and explore." Nothing of substance is described, but it sounds nice. Alternatively, PD leads into rigidity by providing “immediate skill may be got at the cost of power to keep on growing.” (Dewey, 1904, p. 15). Traditional PD is not very risky for teachers, and it certainly doesn’t allow for many questions.

In order to create a community of risk-takers and questioners, we need our leaders “to be clear about what is negotiable and what isn’t” (Evans, 2012). It is not good enough for us to know content. It is not good enough for us to know pedagogy. We need to be ok with taking risks, which sometimes can mean saying that we don’t know. Knowing what we don’t know provides a space for growth, a space for future pursuit. To find these spaces, we must create a culture of asking questions.

Conclusion

If one stops asking questions, the momentum of stagnation will kick in. Teaching forces one to look at knowledge through the eyes of uninitiated (students), to look at learning itself, and to look at past educational thinkers. This combines the past, present, and future. By taking risks and asking questions, one can better understand knowledge.

References

Dewey, J. (1909). Moral principles in education. Houghton Mifflin.

Dewey, J. (1904). The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education » 1».

Evans, R. (2012). Getting to No: Building True Collegiality in Schools. Independent School, 71(2), n2.

Higgins, C. (2010). Teaching as experience: Toward a hermeneutics of teaching and teacher education. The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice, 241-281.

Urban. (2014). Religion for the Nonreligious - Wait But Why. From http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.htm