The Instructor’s Dilemma: Caring too much versus caring too little
For an instructional professional, how much caring for learners is too much caring? Too much caring can be deadly. When the strong ideals of a teacher meet the hard realities of current school models, for example, burnout is soon to follow. This study confirms what I’ve seen before regarding burnout statistics that I remember studying more than two decades ago. It indicates that the majority of newly trained Canadian teachers dropped out within their first five years. Their main reasons for doing so being overall workload including the amount of work that had to be done after the school day was over. This report mentions that Canadian teachers work between 10 to 20 hours extra outside of regular school time and those surveyed are torn between their teaching responsibilities and their responsibilities outside of work. As a result the majority of the surveyed teachers felt that stress related to work-life imbalance is increasing.
I’m not certain what the dropout rate is like for those involved in post-secondary instruction; however, I just attended a professional development event at the university where I work that was titled “Examining The Helicopter Professor Label”. The person presenting, a female tenured professor who has been involved in teaching here for around 30 years, based it on an article of the same name she came across last fall. She presented the background that instructors may be taking students who, through their schooling to this point, have already become very dependent and may potentially be making them even more dependent. A large group of about thirty attendees, including instructors, support staff and students, were then asked how they know and manage doing too little from doing too much?
Some talked of students being too entitled, being paralyzed by the fear of failure or not being interested in being made accountable for their own learning. Another talked of accepting that things were different than the way they had been ten or twenty years before and that we needed to accept that and move on. He suggested he leaned toward a helping disposition but didn’t want to go so far as to carry their school bag for them. Others talked about the importance of getting good grades and the pressure that put on students today in order to compete for scholarships, and then later on, jobs. Still another said she had a different definition for ‘helicopter’. She didn’t see herself hovering, she saw herself as flying overhead and pulling out any student she saw that needed help.
While I’m not certain we left with a more definitive plan of what we should and shouldn’t do, I believe we did leave with the confidence to know that the instinct to want to help more is a good thing. Finding a balance between teaching and caring echoed throughout our conversations.
Instruction in the 21st century has been moving away from lecture in favour of facilitation — replacing the sage on the stage, with the guide on the side. Lecturer or facilitator, that part of the instructor’s job description is still the part focused on the teaching but not necessarily the caring.
The definition of ‘facilitate’ says Google:
That still leaves finding a way to anchor caring in this decision making process. How do we represent caring in instruction? And that’s when it hit me — stewardship! Stewardship is caring. Says Google about the definition of ‘stewardship’:
Stewardship, says Carolina Botha, “is not a feeling of urgency that someone is born with, but rather a decision and commitment made on a daily basis.” Stewarding means keeping an eye on the future, not just teaching students content and skills in the here and now. “(T)he most forward thinking teachers volunteer their time, energy, and services and even their financial gifts to help prepare the teachers of the future…”, says Dean William Shenk of the College of Education at Marquette University. Help students to become the type of person that you yourself aspire to be, also notes Shenk.
It’s hard to imagine doing that without caring. And so somewhere between facilitation and stewardship I feel is that happy medium an instructional professional is looking for.
Teaching is a very personal process. Finding the balance between caring too little and caring too much is a journey every teacher must make on his or her own. Sometimes though it helps to know where your extremes are in order to help you find your middle.
