Reflecting on the 12 Touchstones

I believe that education needs to be an empowering craft. I believe that my true calling is as a social studies teacher, but I currently teach math. This dichotomy leads me to focus on Touchstone 8: Create an oasis safety and respect in my classroom. I believe that most of the education of math will manifest itself in quantitative understanding that is far more important than the specific skills that are measured on a day-to-day basis. In my classroom, I have expectations for conduct, collaboration, and academics, but many of these do not involve student input. The best improvements to providing respect and safety for my students have been based on the work of Dr. Christopher Emdin in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too. I realized while reading through Touchstone 8 that most of my interactions with students are superficial and I do very little to authentically hear their voices and implement their suggestions. I set out to combine my learning from these two influential books to increase the feeling of respect in the classroom.

I have seen many improvements in my classroom over the past few weeks. I began with co-generative dialogues with a group of students from each of my classes. The meetings were informal. I did not prepare any notes and other than a couple of loose expectations, I let my students do all of the talking. The students expressed that sometimes they feel insecure when I call on them and they feel tremendous pressure to have correct answers. This came as a shock to me, because I thought of myself as being supportive of students at all levels of understanding and struggle. I promised to allow more thinking of time for answers and validate all answers and give them space to be corrected. I asked my students to help me in my efforts by encouraging their peers to provide answers even when they felt insecure. After the initial round conversations and participation improved and I could tell that the students that participated in the dialogue felt like leaders and owners of the classroom. After implementing the conversations, I learned what it meant for the students to feel genuinely heard. It improved our relationships and the functioning of the classroom as a whole.

The problem was that the improvements were temporary. Some students began again to be reluctant to share their thinking and I could tell that the students had other problems on their minds. In the future I hope to rotate the groups of students that I meet with and meet with them on an ongoing basis. Emdin recommends leveraging the co-generative dialogues to further release power to students. In the future I hope to provide students with the opportunity to co-teach material to their peers, so that they and I can understand differing perspectives in the classroom. I cannot imagine a better way to show students I respect them than to provide them with the tools to guide their peers. In a world of standards, observations, and professional development the perceptions and emotions of students can quickly be forgotten. My work around this touchstone has reminded me of the importance of genuinely interacting with students and respecting their ideas as I would a peer.