Trusting/Fearing Students
Debra K. Borkovitz
In 2005 my Crohn’s disease flared during the first week of classes at Wheelock College. I ended up needing to miss two weeks, and I wasn’t able to find a substitute for my advanced class. The six students, most of whom I knew from previous courses, made a lot of progress working through the book on their own. When I returned they said their work would have been easier if they’d had an answer key. I reflexively responded, “If I give you the answer key, you have to make sure you still do the problems and don’t just look at it first.” One student responded with an eye roll and one of my favorite things any student has ever said to me, “Debbie, that’s kind of a duh.”
The students were proud of themselves, as they should have been. They had stepped up, and they knew they deserved my trust. When I responded with a typical teacher scold, they weren’t having it. Their empowerment carried over for the rest of the semester, and easily made up for learning time I had missed.
The majority of the students I taught in my 25 years at Wheelock were future elementary teachers, who started out math-phobic, and our curriculum was designed to show them a more engaging view of math than they had seen before. When I started, I still gave traditional tests, and I remember how I dreaded returning the first test papers, where many students would panic and do far worse than their work in class. I walked around the room seeing the betrayal in their eyes: I’d told them they could do math and this class was different, but actually I’d lied and nothing had changed. I started using alternative assessment systems, which included things like assignments and quizzes scored “Pass” or “Not Passed Yet,” Oral Group Exams, and Projects, to try to align my walk with my talk and to be a person my students could trust.
In 2018 Wheelock merged with Boston University, and I joined the Math/Stats department and started teaching mostly STEM majors. The next summer, I met Jesse Stommel, asked him about his teaching philosophy, and was genuinely startled by his four-word answer, “Start by trusting students.” I had been thinking about trust in teaching for decades, but had never centered it as a philosophy, as Jesse did.
At the time I was planning to teach the first BU course I’d designed myself, a liberal arts math course that also satisfied learning outcomes in creativity and oral communication. The students on the roster were 60% STEM majors, with the rest mostly Humanities and Communications majors, which wasn’t my original plan. I kept Jesse’s words in mind when I decided to use a labor-based grading system, where students kept time logs, and their grades were solely determined by how much time they put into the course. I trusted students to choose between many ways to engage in the course, and to reflect honestly on that engagement, well beyond accurately keeping the time logs.
I had moments where I was terrified teaching that class. Students at BU are overall much better at gaming school than Wheelock students were, and I wasn’t even trying to prevent that; maybe I was just a chump who was going to fail miserably. I would intermittently decide I needed to shut something down and maybe make students turn in something tomorrow to prove they were working. At each of these junctures I would ask, “Have the students betrayed my trust or is this just my fear?” Every time the answer was that it was my fear. It was scary having my college close after so many years and trying to figure out how to navigate a new job that I didn’t apply for in an institution with very different values. It was scary trying to teach such an unusual course. “Start by trusting students” became a practice to help me identify my fears, prevent projecting them onto my students, and realize when I needed to get appropriate support from peers.
In the individual conferences at the end of the class, many students talked about ways the course had been transformative for them. STEM majors talked about solving problems creatively instead of their usual memorization. Non-STEM majors talked about realizing they could do math and like it. Some international students made their first friend from the US and vice versa. One student said for the first time he started thinking in English, an important step in learning a new language, and a goal not usually associated with math classes. Trusting students led me to start thinking more broadly about what a math course can achieve.
The standard math syllabus communicates deep mistrust for students. Sometimes (and I have been guilty of this myself) it is a compendium of rules based on avoiding every stupid thing an adolescent has ever done in our classes, with the hopes of guarding against things most would never think to do. Yet when we set up classes this way, the students still manage to disappoint.
Here are some questions I now ask myself as I plan my classes: How would I teach this class if I trusted that the students wanted to learn? How is that different from the current course design? If I am not willing to trust the students in a particular way from the start, how might I be encouraging what I most fear? Where am I compromising and why am I making those compromises? Is there room for students to surprise me in a positive way?
I now think of “Start by trusting students,” with a coda, “…but don’t expect them to start by trusting you. You have to earn that.” In order to have a trusting relationship, someone has to make the first move, and as the one with more power, in a situation where almost all students have been hurt by people in my role, that’s on me.
One of the ways I’ve built trust into many of my classes in the last few years is by asking students to set some of their own goals, and working to support them in meeting those goals. I’ve included projects and activities designed to tap into intrinsic motivation; these activities are often graded solely for completion, and I trust students to engage in them. For more details, see my blog post about ungrading in Discrete Math last semester.
My classes at BU are all much bigger than that six-person Wheelock class, and now students basically have the entire Internet as an answer key. I’m finding that while my BU students know how to treat school as a game, when I start by trusting them, and work to earn their trust, overwhelmingly they are eager to learn and to connect with classmates and with me. My students still make mistakes and sometimes betray my trust (Jesse was clear that his philosophy is not simply, “Trust students”), but usually these are issues I can deal with locally without designing my entire course around them. Risking trust remains scary, but it’s better to start with trust and deal with my fears, than to start with fear and make trust impossible.
Debra K. Borkovitz is a Clinical Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education at Boston University. Prior to the college’s merger with BU, she taught at Wheelock College for twenty-five years.