I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to answer the question quickly and without thinking about it. Please be honest, it’s only for yourself. Here goes:
Can you teach someone without caring about them?
Did you have a quick answer? Now you’ve had a moment to reflect on your answer, does it surprise you? I know the rational, nice, answer is that ‘of course we have to care’, but the instinctive (honest?) answer is often ‘no’.
Your initial thoughts might have gone to your students or classmates that you might not know or actually like. Out of a class of 10, 30, 200, you may not know everyone’s names, their stories, who they are…
I have been asking quite a few colleagues in HE this same question, and although a few sat on the fence, the vast majority of first answers have been ‘no – you don’t have to care’. In fact, there have been very few ‘yes’ answers at all.
So, as most of my colleagues responded in the negative, what does that mean about us as educators? Are we possibly uncaring sociopaths, or is it (likely) more nuanced?
Normally, after asking that question, I follow up with a conversation and hear similar post-hoc rationalisations such as ‘what about YouTube videos? They are teaching you things’. On the surface, this is a sound argument, but one I want to counter by suggesting that YouTube how-to videos, and the like, are instructing, not teaching. You may think that is a minor semantic difference and I am being overly pernickety. And maybe I am. But I regard the fundamental difference between teaching and instruction as the inclusion of assessment.
It is this differentiator that is at the heart of my thesis, as I would argue that the act of assessing learning is an act of care for the learner. There is, granted, some nuance in what we call assessment. However, if there is a genuine requirement to instantiate information or instruction after it has been processed (e.g. linking or restructuring knowledge, as in Biggs and Collis’s SOLO taxonomy, 1982), then that is assessment. Parroting facts via poorly executed multiple-choice questions (where the longest answer wins, or it is ‘all the above’) is pseudo-assessment and doesn’t count – there is, in such cases, scant link between the assessment and the outcomes of the learning.
Now, I want to be very clear here: the industries of professional development (i.e. training) and education both utilise elements of teaching and instruction/training. The best corporate training isn’t training at all, it is actually teaching. In the same way that the worst teaching is training, as the assessments and what’s taught don’t align or have value. There is a place for both, and both will likely exist concurrently without any negative value judgement. But there is a fundamental difference: assessment.
So, coming back to the original question, my hypothesis is that assessment is an act of care about your students and their development. To instruct or train, without the opportunity to test if that knowledge or skill has been developed – i.e. usable in other contexts – is not teaching, and it isn’t an act of caring. You are passing across information to your students without any interest in how it might affect their lives.
Assessment is the activity we use to show we care about not only what our students have learned, but also what change in their actions and behaviours that learning entails.
It is not always necessary for the assessment to be personalised to the student for it to be care; but, if you are teaching them, there is an intention that they develop even if you don’t like the person.
It’s also important to consider time and space within this hypothesis and I suggest that the displacement of either does not matter. This means that it is possible for asynchronous, online learning to be teaching. What matters is the intention of the educator in connecting the learning to a learner’s outcome, via assessment.
If I had asked the initial question differently: do you teach to make a difference to your students’ lives? Then I think the answers would have been overwhelmingly positive. If my thesis is correct, then you have the mechanism to know how and why you do care. This in turn might help you think about making your assessments more meaningful, as the focus of assessment is not the right answer, but the right outcome.
Whether you agree with me or not, it begs questions about why our acts of care are often so seemingly uncaring and often traumatic.
As a newly qualified teacher, I enjoyed reading this. I liked your thesis that emotion of caring is the key differentiator between instruction and teaching. I’d like to know more about how care is defined in this context. Your suggestion that assessment can be an act of care needs tightening up. In many classrooms the caring aspect of assessment is replaced by a data hungry top-down requirement for evidence that government imposed targets are being met (Ofsted.)
Thank you for your comments, Vincent. This thinking is very much at an early phase, and does sit at odds with current practice and experience of the education system. My position between the worlds of education and training has given me the perspective to compare the approaches and ideologies. There is an argument that education serves a social purpose, whereas training is driven by a capitalist, economic argument. As you rightly point out, how we experience (formal) assessment in UK schools is more akin to a punishment, but my blog post hopefully starts a conversation that it doesn’t have to be and we can reclaim ‘care’ in our classrooms. As an NQT, I am sure you have had metacognition and AfL drummed into you, and I would argue, these are the current basis for caring in our classroom. Good luck and enjoy your NQT year.