From Battlefields to Common Ground: Embracing Nuance, Paradox, and Empathy in Education

Something about the current educational climate has me feeling unsettled. Although I often write about PBL, educational technology, and student empowerment, I want to share something different this week. It’s about paradox, nuance, empathy, and the danger in making things a “war” in education.

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What if we are wrong?

I meet up with my friend Tim (whose name I changed for privacy reasons), who I used to work with when we both taught middle school social studies. We started talking about parenting and uncertainty and in a more vulnerable moment he said, “I so badly wanted to be different from my own dad. I wanted to be kind and gentle and approachable. I wanted to be everything that he wasn’t but now I sometimes feel like I failed to be some of what he was.”

“Tell me more,” was all I could say.

“Well, I got really into gentle parenting and, honestly, I judged you a little for some of the firm boundaries you had put on your own kids. But now, I don’t know. I feel like your kids ended up more balanced and I wonder if I need to pull things back a bit.”

We talk for awhile about parenting. I appreciate his unvarnished honesty and vulnerability. No pretentions. No defensiveness. No, “I just need you to affirm for me that I’m still a good dad.” And yet, that’s what I do. Because Tim is a great dad. He’s kind and vulnerable and self-aware and I tell him all of these things.

We start talking about teaching. And it’s here that I ask, “Okay, being one hundred percent honest . . . what were we wrong about in education?”

Tim nods. “I think I was wrong about homework. I was against it. I thought it stole time from families. But now, with teenagers? I kind of like homework. I think it preps my kids for college.”

I nod. “I was wrong about devices. At the time, they were great. Let’s make podcasts. Let’s blog. But I see the damage of social media and I’m now firmly in the camp of ‘Kids shouldn’t even have phones until high school.’ Does that makes sense?”

He takes a swig of his IPA and laughs. “Dude, you used to write for a blog called Teach Paperless. You remember?”

I nod. “I really though that tech could help students leverage the creative and connective capacity of learning.”

“And . . .”

“I was wrong. I just didn’t see how much harm social media would do,” I answer.

“What if wrong or right is the wrong lens?” he asks. “I mean, can we all just admit that we are fallible humans in a broken world trying our hardest to do what’s right?”

I raise my pint to that.

“Can we also admit that no one has all the right answers? Can we admit that the research is fuzzy and nuanced? Can we agree that there is no instruction manual?” he asks.

It reminds me of a sketch video I created a few years back.

The truth is there is no instruction manual. Nothing is quite as black and white as we think it is.

 

Find Your Dystopia

One of my favorite writing prompts I used to use in social studies was “Create a utopia. Now explain how that utopia became a dystopia.”

I think about this often in education as well. One question I often ask myself is, “What are my core values and beliefs about teaching and learning?” Then I ask, “What does it look like if it’s taken to an extreme?”

For example, I believe that self-efficacy is vital for student learning. However, the research has shown that there is a shadow side to high self-efficacy. It can lead to small mental errors, to overconfidence, and to stagnation in innovation. I believe learning should be engaging. But the shadow side is that if we try to make everything fully engaging, we fail to teach students that sometimes learning is boring (and that’s okay).

I often write about the need for project-based learning. I genuinely believe PBL can help students gain the skills they need to navigate an unpredictable world:

I know the research about how it improves student outcomes while also leading to vital SEL skills. And yet . . . the dark side is that if we do PBL all the time, we fail to grasp that there are some standards that don’t fit with project-based learning. Sometimes kids need to do phonics and blending or two-step equations and that simply doesn’t fit with PBL. If we aren’t careful, we start to craft authentic PBL that doesn’t incorporate some of the structures, scaffolds, and supports needed to reduce cognitive load.

I believe in helping students become self-directed learners. But also . . . I want them to learn to ask for help. I want students to learn how to depend on others in their learning. Yes, I want voice and choice but I also want students to say, “I don’t find this relevant right now but I’m keeping an open mind about it.”

When we ask, “How does this utopia become a dystopia?” we open ourselves up to important guardrails. True, PBL is a great framework. But also . . . we need direct instruction. We need learning supports. We need to be cognizant of cognitive load. When we ask, “How does this utopia becomes a dystopia?” we avoid the pitfalls of purist ideology and instead settle into the beautiful mess that is nuance and paradox.

Ultimately, this nuance keeps us from becoming overly idealistic. We learn to test our core convictions and we land in a space that is ultimately more paradoxical, empathetic, and intellectually humble than a simplistic ideology.

 

It’s Almost Always Both / And

I have a friend, Jenn, who spent her college days doing improv. Although both she and her wife, Melissa, eventually became math teachers, they fell in love with the dynamic process of saying, “Yes . . . and” throughout improv. Jenn teaches eight graders who are struggling with linear equations. Melissa teaches AP Calculus. They incorporate elements of Peter Liljedahl’s “building thinking classrooms” routines. But they also do mental math, explicit instruction, and skill practice. Both of these master teachers have watched the fiery debates about “back to basics” versus “authentic learning” and they step aside and instead ask, “In what context does each approach work best?”

At one point, Jenn said to me, “We talk about this stuff on date nights. Don’t you dare judge me, John. And, we just keep cycling back to the idea that it’s not either / or.”

I’m not going to judge them for talking about math pedagogy on their date nights. Okay, I might judge just a little bit. But I think they’re onto something here. Nearly all truth is nuanced and paradoxical.

I mention this because I have a new book coming out called New Teacher Mindset. My friend, Trevor Muir, and I spent close to three years crafting the manuscript. Our goal was to create the new teacher book that didn’t exist when we started out — one centered on student voice and choice and authentic learning. Along the way, I sent final draft to a friend of mine who said, “I love this. I feel like this is the anti Harry Wong. This is for teachers who don’t want desks in a row and hours of direct instruction.”

However, I don’t want to be the anti-Harry Wong. I love First Days of School. That book was a lifeline when I was brand new. Was it a little more traditional than my taste? Perhaps. Was it more structured than my style? Definitely. But I still have that book with annotations in every margin. I used so many of the ideas within it. I have no desire to abandon it. My hope, instead, is that New Teacher Mindset might complement it by adding nuance. I want to share some fresh ideas and new approaches that can help teachers say, “I love First Days of School but I’m going to go a little more student-centered here instead.”

We need both.

 

Finding the Paradoxes

I’m sitting at the airport in Philadelphia. Two hours ago, I left a technology conference. In the keynote, I talked about the need for vintage innovation. It’s the overlap of the tried and true and the never tried. It’s the embrace of high tech and lo-fi tools. It’s the notion of embracing technology but centering it on the human experience.

I then led two workshops on how we can leverage AI for creating scaffolds and supports for students. There are moments when this feels like cognitive dissonance; where I wonder if I should place a flag firmly in the anti-tech or pro-tech spaces. But I’m reminded of Jenn and Melissa. We need both. The truth is that nearly every aspect of education is paradoxical. Sitting here in the airport, I make a list of the paradoxes I have been living out for over two decades as an educator:

• Students need to learn how to use their devices wisely and ethically but also they’re not developmentally able to do this at all times so sometimes we just need to block smartphones in school
• We need go follow the science of reading and embrace phonics and blending but also the science of reading is complicated and prior knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical structures, and language play a huge role in reading instruction
• Kids will read more if they fall in love with reading but they can’t fall in love with it if they don’t know how to read
• Students should learn content knowledge. Background knowledge is huge (ED Hirsch) but also we want students to learn how to think in a particular discipline so they think like historians, mathematicians, etc. (Bruner)
• Student self-direction and ownership is vital for long-term learning but we also need students to be others-centered, empathetic and intellectually humble
• Assessment should be about mastery of standards but we also want students to know that deadlines and hard work are equally important in the long run
• We need lo-fi and high-tech tools
• Students should feel safe but true psychological safety requires students to wade into discomfort
• We need to focus on both quality and quantity in creative work
• Students need firm boundaries and consequences but we also need to show them grace and kindness

Some would look at this list and claim that I’m being wishy-washy — and I might be. However, I’m not advocating for a moderate middle. I’m not pushing for compromise. Instead, paradox is a recognition that truth is often found in holding two extremes in your arms at the same time and recognizing that these extremes often complement one another, if we’re open to it. The key, though, is recognizing the role of context.

 

Context Matters

I have often been on the side of various educational arguments only to step back and say, “Well, actually, I’m not sure that’s always the case.” Consider homework. I’m generally opposed to the practice. However, if a student is goofing off during class, I have no problem saying, “You wasted class time. The natural consequence is that you need to make up the class work.” Furthermore, I also see value in ramping up some homework in high school to prepare students for trade schools and universities. If our goal is authentic learning, I think it’s pretty authentic to say, “This is what you will experience in the next phase.”

Or consider worksheets. I used to rail against worksheets. But then, in teaching multilingual students, I realized that we needed to do some systematic skill practice worksheets around verb tenses and irregular verbs. I now believe that worksheets and project-based learning can go hand-in-hand. So can PBL and direct instruction.

When we shift our focus from “This strategy is good or bad” to “When is it the best time to use this strategy?” we begin to embrace the art of teaching. We step close to empowering teachers by saying, “Look, we know that you are the expert in your context.”

I mention this because we are entering into a new era of machine learning where we are asking the question, “What can humans do that machines cannot do?” A few answers come to mind: empathy, curiosity, divergent thinking, and contextual understanding. Note that these are all elements that make teaching an art and a craft rather than a predictable algorithm. As a teacher, you can empathize with students and say, “I think you need _____ right now.” You can say, “I don’t understand ______ completely, but I will remain curious.” You can say, “I know my context. I know my students. And what they need right now is _____.”

In other words, the nuance is often forged in context, curiosity, and empathy. And when that happens, we avoid the dangers of the war metaphor.

It’s Not a War

Six months ago, I wrote a post about my concerns with treating all reading intervention as if it were an issue of phonics and blending. I presented a nuanced view of the research relating to reading instruction. Three minutes later, I faced a barrage of comments. People told my I was ignorant. They blasted me for lacking empathy toward dyslexic students. They called me names. They told me I shouldn’t be a teacher, much less teach other teachers. One person accused me of educational malpractice and abuse.

I stepped away from the keyboard and de-activated my Twitter (or is it X) account for two days. I had just gotten caught in the crosshares of the reading wars.

Emphasis on the word “war.” According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, we nearly always identify an underlying metaphor in any conversation by connecting the language to the implied metaphor. We know that a conversation has become an argument when we see war metaphors: it’s getting heated, don’t get defensive, why are you “shooting down” an argument, etc. As we think about the reading wars, we see the violent rhetoric all around us. I actually created a short video about this experience:

 

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A post shared by Dr. John Spencer (@spencereducation)

Truth is often nuanced. It’s paradoxical. But when we slip into these war metaphors, we create straw man arguments about the opposite side. We treat opponents as enemies. We ratchet up the language to the point that well-intentioned educators become “the enemy.” It’s a dark and dangerous process and it ultimately prevents us from seeing nuance. But more importantly, like all wars it leads to causalities. And ultimately the greatest casualties aren’t just the teachers who burn out and leave but also the students who become pawns in a form of ideological warfare.

I’m not sure there is an easy solution here but I think it’s found in embracing paradox and wonder and nuance. My hope (and I don’t always do it well) is to start from a place of nuance and curiosity and ultimately recognize that teaching is often messy and muddled and imperfect — and that’s the beauty of what we do. Our students don’t need perfection. They need us.