Letting go and learning more

There are times when teachers must know when to take a step back and allow their charges to find their own way and succeed.

THROUGHOUT the ages, one of the most difficult decisions that parents have had to make was knowing when to hold on and when to let go.

From the time the one-year-old child begins his first steps unaided, to the seven-year- old who insists that he wants to take the school bus all by himself right up to the 20-something year old daughter who announces that she has found the love of her life whom she intends to marry, parents have struggled with the decision.

When is your child old enough to do things for himself? To some parents the question would be rather, are they ever old enough?

The same dilemma is one that teachers face all throughout their teaching career. When is it time for teachers to take control of their students’ learning and when is it time to loosen the reigns? To me personally, this has been one of the most challenging parts of teaching.

When I discussed this with my good friend Dilla, she was as usual forthrightly blunt. ‘It is all about being a control freak,’ she said. ‘This inability to let go and allow others to take over has seeds of “control freakism”.

I told her she that may have a point but it was not so much about having to be in control, but worrying whether your students had done something the way you wanted them to.

“Same thing,” she said. “It’s about being in control.”

Looking back I remember how reluctant I was most times to stand back and allow students to do things for themselves, if I felt that there was little chance of them achieving success, or rather, not achieving success the way I perceived it to be.

It took me a long time to realise that success was not just about the final product but was embedded in every step of the process.

To many teachers this is also a huge challenge. We are generally so quick to jump right in to offer our “assistance” at the very first sign of something not going the way we want it to.

We convince ourselves that our students will not be able to get this done correctly without our help.

No way are they going to be able to write those scripts themselves, organise the event and complete the task, unless the teacher is there every step of the way.

The right route

We consider it our solemn duty as teachers to make sure that our students get it right all the time and if they don’t, then it is our duty to steer them back to the right path, or, to our path which we have chosen for them.

I remember the many times I have stepped back from a finished students’ product feeling a little uneasy because there was more of me inside it, than them.

Teaching, and re-teaching when students are slow to grasp something has never been the most challenging part of the job.

After all, that is what we are called to do as teachers. But education is also about knowing when to stop teaching and allowing our students to find their own way.

“But how can I stand back and do nothing,” said one teacher indignantly.

“I can’t allow them to go on making mistakes. Isn’t it my job to correct, teach, guide them back when they are on the wrong track?”

Definitely yes. It is our jobs as teachers to guide our students towards the kind of achievement that spells success. We want them to do those maths problems correctly just the way we taught them.

We want them to write their essays using the techniques we have emphasised and work on the project that we feel is best suited for them.

And yes, it is seems almost ingrained in our teaching DNA to jump up and take over at the first sign of a perceived crack in the structure that we have so carefully planned for them.

Having those urges or feelings is not a bad thing – they are after all, indicators of how invested we are in our students’ learning outcomes.

But harder than the job of deciding when to plunge in and intervene, is probably knowing when to step back and do nothing even if we feel that they are not going to get it perfectly right on their own.

We are all for discovery learning, we profess. We want students to have an enquiring mind, to be analytical and take ownership of their own learning.

We prepare them for this kind of maturity, we say, and wait for the day but when the time comes for us to step back and let our students fly alone, we hold them back, afraid that without our support, they would come plummeting to the ground.

Sometimes, in trying to be so visible or even dominant in my students’ learning progress, is it possible that at times I may have retarded it instead?

Were there times, I wonder, when my burning desire to polish up their act deprived them of polishing it up themselves and more importantly learning from it?

It takes an inner resolve, I think, to steel ourselves and allow our students to test their wings knowing very well that they may fail to get the results we consider are top rate.

And yet, ultimately, we have to recognise that education is about what the student can do independent of the teacher. So what if they fall? They just have to get right backup, brush themselves off and start again.

Perhaps it is easier said than done which is why some of us try so hard to prevent them from falling in the first place. But isn’t maturity deeply connected with learning from mistakes and haven’t we all come away from some disappointment a little wiser?

Perhaps, instead of trying so hard to prevent our students from making mistakes when they are on their own, we should be helping them with getting back on their feet when they do and encouraging them to give it another shot. And another and another. And be the ones to give the loudest cheer when they finally get it right, on their own, without us.