When Perceptions Don’t Match Reality in the Classroom

After a particulary frustrating College Writing class a few weeks ago, I tweeted in exasperation: “Ugh: when is it okay to concede that a particular class has failed?” My question exaggerated what I was feeling, but it was honest. My students had been unable—on one of the final days of class—to accomplish something that I felt I’d been preparing them for all semester. I was angry: a little at them, but mostly at myself. I felt that their failure was mostly my failure—if they weren’t prepared for that final exercise, I hadn’t prepared them.

My community on Twitter (many of them fellow ProfHacker writers) responded immediately to my barely-obfuscated confession. That exchange looked something like this:

Several folks on Twitter insisted that, in my frustration with this one class period, I was likely overlooking the arc of the course as a whole. Moreoever, I was conflating my own standards of failure or success with those of my students. I decided to test these ideas in my very next class period. I wrote an evaluation form for my students to complete. The form was similar to a course evaluation form, but the questions were more specifically tailored to the goals and assignments of my College Writing section.

I found that my colleagues on Twitter were exactly right. Overall, my students reported that they had learned quite a bit from my class. They felt much more comfortable writing in their other classes; their grades on writing assignments were improving. Many of them did report that the final assignment—the one that prompted my “failure” tweet—was less clear to them than our other assignments during the semester. So they validated my feelings about that one assignment. However, their answers refuted the way I’d transfered those feelings of frustration to the course as a whole.

It will be easy to improve that assignment the next time I teach this course. And that’s the point of this post: it’s often easy to lose perspective when teaching, but we do ourselves a disservice when we forget that our perceptions don’t necessarily line up with reality. Emotional responses to classroom failures are natural and human—but we can’t let them control our opinions of ourselves as teachers. We need to breathe—deeply and often. Has there been a time when your perceptions in the classroom didn’t line up with those of your students? Tell us about it (and what you learned from the experience) in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user NessaLand.]