Owning the Responsibility for Learning
Teachers aren’t responsible for their students’ learning. Their responsibility is to create the opportunity for learning.
I feel enormous shame for a particular moment of my career as an educator. I was running an academic after school program in a Boston public high school. One afternoon, I sat down with a student who was struggling with grades and attendance. I didn’t know the student well, but we had a basic rapport. I asked what his plan was for getting back on track. He looked at his hands, at the floor, at the walls — anywhere but at me. I told him he was smart and capable, but this was a crucial moment as a 16 year old to make a firm commitment to take responsibility for his learning. He left my office and didn’t come back to school for a few days.
I failed that student. I challenged him to take responsibility for his learning with no knowledge of the support he needed to do that effectively. I didn’t know anything about his family, his friends, his daily life. I didn’t know about his mental health, his passions, his fears. As a White educator, I would never truly understand how being a young African American man shaped his sense of self and relationship with the world. I failed to recognize the weight of that reality and how my race gave my every word potential to oppress. I called a student to take responsibility for his learning at the same time I disregarded my responsibility to support him as a learner and person.
Principle of Learning and Teaching #8:
Each person is responsible for their own learning.
Learning is often treated as a commodity. In higher education, degrees come with a clear price tag, and students weigh the value of a degree differently based on the institution and the job the degree will enable them to attain. In K-12 education, we commodify learning, too. Testing measures progress toward standards, determining the return on investment of tax dollars. There is a logic to this framing of learning and schooling. And, it has a value in certain settings.
One of the biggest problems with this framing, however, is that it positions students as consumers of learning. In exchange for tuition or tax dollars, students should be handed learning that has meaning, purpose, and value in their lives and the world. This doesn’t happen. Frankly, it isn’t possible. When our pedagogy, institutions, and educational policy fail to recognize this, we set everyone involved up for failure.
Where Responsibility Lies
Teachers can’t control learning. Only learners can do that. Learning can’t be imposed upon or given to students. It is something they have to do for themselves. As such, it makes sense that they take responsibility for their own learning.
But what does that mean, exactly? It means learners have to invest the time, energy, and focus to develop understanding. They have to define the purpose of their learning and determine how they will wield it in their relationships with themselves and the world. They have to struggle with and overcome the obstacles to learning that exist within themselves and are imposed by society.
This is a tall order for any learner. When infants learn to walk, they face the unrelenting force of gravity and the risk of pain when they fall. The first day of school comes with challenging dynamics rooted in social and family relationships, a foreign classroom culture, and new vocabulary and language. A graduate thesis requires dramatically more attention to detail, research skills, and endurance than most students have ever invested in a single project. These examples point to intellectual, social, and emotional challenges learners must take on and overcome in the process of learning.
Unfortunately, society places significant additional barriers in the path of many learners based on race, class, gender, and other physical and cultural factors. These barriers are ubiquitous and potent, suggesting to learners from the earliest ages that their fundamental human capacities for learning — love and intellect — are less than.
Dispelling the Myth of Individualized Learning
Readers can be forgiven for concluding that the above is an argument for individualized learning. It’s not.
Learning is fundamentally a social process. We need the emotional and intellectual support of others to help us overcome the barriers that prevent or limit learning. This is where educators come in. Whether a teacher or relative or friend, educators are responsible to support others in their learning.
Every learner needs support. Parents hold our hands for our unsteady first steps, mitigating the full force of gravity while we learn to find balance and coordinate our limbs. Teachers welcome us with smiles and song as we enter a classroom for the first time, creating a sense of emotional safety and security in an otherwise foreign space and culture. Peers and professors provide mentorship and feedback as a thesis takes shape, assuring us of our capacity to make it to the finish line. At virtually every step of our learning journey, our ability to accept responsibility for our learning is possible because educators have taken on their responsibility to provide the support we need.
Because of the inequity and injustices in society, the majority of learners need more than just basic support. Explicit and implicit messages falsely diminishing the capacities of classes of people to learn are powerful. They can be so pervasive that they resonate for learners as truth. Educators must assume these oppressive messages enter the classroom with the students and have shaped who they are as learners. Educators must also assume they carry these messages, too, shaping their perceptions of their students and themselves as learners.
For educators, advancing justice requires more than avoiding unjust narratives. It requires commitment to advancing counter-narratives that push learners to see themselves as fully human and endowed with powerful capacities for learning. The only way learners can reasonably be expected to assume responsibility for their learning is if they believe they have the capacity to do so.
Differentiating the responsibilities of the learner and educator reminds us that learning success is always the result of the work of the learner. The role of the educator is to help create a space, community, and process that supports the learner’s particular needs. In a classroom, this means intentionally shaping a culture conducive to collaborative learning in which students support one another. It means addressing emotional needs in a holistic manner. It means creating a community where each learner is seen and treated as a whole human. In case you missed it, this is what creating a just society looks like, too.
An Epilogue to Failure
I don’t know what happened to the student I failed that day nearly 20 years ago. Fortunately, there were other far more experienced educators who were engaged with this student who were more attuned to treating him as a whole person. After realizing my failure, I called on them to reach out to him and offer support.
I’m heartbroken and ashamed every time I think about the actions I took. While I know I was driven by a belief in him as a learner, that doesn’t excuse my failure to meet my responsibility to him as an educator and a person. To challenge someone to take on the responsibility for their learning without offering adequate support is a violent act. I set an already highly vulnerable student up for a fall. I didn’t offer anything close to the level of love and support he needed to believe a counter-narrative to the one surrounding him as a young Black man in America. I assume there were others in his family and community offering him support. But, my voice — however limited it may have been — added to the cacophony of voices suggesting that if he failed to learn, it was entirely his fault. It’s been nearly 20 years since that conversation, and I think about it constantly.
It’s my responsibility to learn. I’ve reflected with trusted colleagues, friends, and family on moments like this in my career and life. I need their support to learn, even when it requires me to do the really hard work of owning my failures and pain I’ve caused others. I’m grateful to those who have accepted the responsibility to support me in my learning. With their support as educators, I continue to learn how to create a more just world through teaching.
This post is part of a series supporting educators in reflecting on their pedagogy and practice. Read the intro to this series If We Don’t Work on Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters or explore the most recent posts below.
Learning to Let Go as a Teacher ← P R E V I O U S
N E X T → Great Expectations in Education
