How I Learned to Stop Blaming Students

LET ME TELL YOU A SECRET. I am a faculty member who learned from the student development professionals at his university, the people who plan student activities and run residence halls. Most faculty think little of their student development colleagues, to the extent that they consider them colleagues at all. But I learned a lot from them; in fact, with their help, I learned to stop blaming students.

I recall the day I realized this. It was a February day, more gray than cold, and in our faculty commons the atmosphere was no more cheerful. My colleagues and I—all of us team-teaching the same introductory course—struggled with an unpleasant truth: our course was in serious trouble.

Our students, all in their first year in the same honors program, had already embraced this truth. In their midterm evaluations, they were labeling our course “too hard,” “confusing,” “pointless,” and “politically correct.” Clearly, our students were frustrated, and we faculty were dismayed, attempting to understand how our good intentions and best efforts had gone awry. Of course, we wanted to challenge our students, but just as much we sought to engage them, to teach them how to (collaboratively) research questions of their own design. Just like working scholars, we wanted our first-year students to follow their curiosities and produce knowledge.

On that dreary February day we sat in a circle, each in his or her customary spot. After a few pleasantries, two of my colleagues categorically rejected the students' comments. The students are complaining, they said, and not working. Best to ignore their complaints and press ahead with our plan; anything less would constitute a lack of “rigor,” a failure to uphold standards. For my part, I read the same evaluations and reached different conclusions, but, unsure of how to disagree with more senior colleagues, I said little.

Fortunately, our fourth colleague, the most senior among us, spoke up. Bald and bearded, the students called him “Dumbledore.” Nearing 70, he had taught longer than any of us. Known for his energy and creativity in the classroom, he had received as many teaching awards as the university had to give.

Dumbledore spoke deliberately, praising our good intentions and hard work, while acknowledging the students' lack of effort. Then he paused and looked around the room at each of us. The students' anger was pervasive, he noted. With his bushy eyebrows raised, and just a hint of irony in his voice, he suggested, “Why don't we talk to the students? Maybe they can help us understand how things got so wrong.”

His suggestion hung in the room for a moment, and, despite my colleagues' skepticism, I endorsed it immediately. This was a change for me. A few years before, I would have agreed with my two colleagues and disagreed with Dumbledore. A few years ago, tenure or no, I would have discounted the students as lazy malcontents, unwilling to work or to think.

In short, a few years ago, I would have blamed the students.

Why did I stop blaming students? There are many reasons to be sure, but among the most important is my acquaintance with student development professionals and student development literature.

This is no easy acquaintance to make in academic life. Student development professionals usually lead separate work lives, tending to students in ways many faculty neither understand nor value. My encounter with student development was by chance: the residential college that housed the honors program that hired me came complete with a student development staff.

During my first two years, as I sat in meetings, at first quite grudgingly, I heard a new way to think about students. I did not hear moral judgments; I did not hear labels. Instead, I heard students described as “works in progress,” who moved through “steps” or “stages” toward maturity. Of particular interest to me, when activities “failed,” our staff questioned the activity's design: Was it appropriate for that age group? What is too heavy on the challenge and too light on the support?

At first I regarded these notions as preposterous. In graduate school, serving as a teaching assistant, I learned from my professors that if there was a problem in a course, it was the students' fault. Students not writing well? They are lazy. Students not reading? They are apathetic. Students not engaged in class? They are obtuse. Now not all my professors used these excuses; some were truly reflective scholar-teachers, who struggled with pedagogic issues honestly. But at the institution I attended, most of my professors were far more interested in their research than in teaching, and when problems beset their courses, they blamed the students first.

When I voiced these opinions to my student development colleagues, they shook their heads; they had heard it all before, and they handed me books, first William Perry, then Marcia Baxter Magolda. I read carefully and deeply—and what I learned challenged my assumptions about students and the role of the faculty.

According to the literature, students are in process, gradually moving toward more complex modes of thinking. Students, I learned—and my experience bore this out—come to college thinking in dichotomies, right vs. wrong most commonly, and they move (we hope) toward more complex modes, as they understand the contingency of knowledge.

The implication for me was clear. As the professor, I could facilitate or I could hinder my students' intellectual development. Intrigued with this idea, I “scaffolded” my course as a developmental journey, beginning with the more simple tasks, such as summarizing arguments from class readings, and building toward more complex tasks, such as making arguments based on evidence drawn from sources chosen with intention. Perhaps most important, I provided more opportunities for the students to revise their work, incorporating feedback from me and from each other.

A curious thing happened when I adopted this new pedagogy: my students as a whole learned more. In my “scaffolded” courses, most students became not only better writers, but also better thinkers. Once content to simply state opinions, most of my freshmen, by the end of the term, used evidence from multiple sources to support their conclusions.

Of course, I still lost students. Despite my best efforts, about one-quarter of my students continued to submit average-to-below-average work. Unlike before, however, I did not see those students in moral terms. For me, they were now neither lazy nor stupid; in fact, many of them were quite creative and intelligent. They were simply, at this point in their lives, unable to do what I required of them as university students.

It was in the midst of this transformation, about four years ago, that I found myself in that faculty lounge discussing the merits of our class with my colleagues. On that day, I understood well my colleagues' objections. The students were in fact ungenerous and resistive. But I also saw our mistakes. We demanded very complex thinking from the beginning of the term and provided very little support. When our students rebelled in frustration, my colleagues blamed them for our failure to “scaffold” the course appropriately.

In the years since, I have refined my pedagogic approach. I am now learning more sophisticated assessment techniques in order to better document my students' success. (Almost) needless to say, this approach puts me at odds with some of my colleagues, who regard my approach as little more than caving into mediocrity. As one colleague told me a year or two ago, “Well, of course they [my students] do well. You give them lots of chances to get it right.” He did not mean it as a compliment.

My colleague, however, is part of a diminishing number. Everywhere I go, whether to conferences away from campus or to workshops on campus, I meet faculty who take responsibility for improving their pedagogic practices, who learn from the literature and their colleagues, and who see themselves as intentionally facilitating their students' intellectual development. I hear less satisfaction taken in handing out low grades, less pride in “winging it” in the classroom unprepared, and less student blaming.

In making such a critique, I do not mean to romanticize the field of student development. Truth be told, my experience tells me that undergraduates “progress” far more slowly and far more unevenly than some in the literature predict; I also find that, on my campus at least, much of what we term “student development” is little more than “student activities,” pleasant pastimes that provide fun and friendship but few opportunities to develop critical thinking. I am also troubled by the disrespect that some (and I emphasize some) in student development show for what professors do; engaging students for an entire semester is no easy feat, especially when working within a tenure and promotion structure that rewards research, not teaching.

That said, I owe my student development colleagues a debt of gratitude. With their help, I took a developmental path similar to that of my students. Like them, I had to abandon simplistic notions in favor of more complex concepts; like them, I had to question ideas that I previously regarded as Truth. Of course, I might have come to this point without student development professionals or literature; there are, after all, many faculty who feel as I do. But, looking back, I am glad that it happened just as it did—or I too might have joined in the chorus of student blaming on that dreary February day.