When I became a teacher, I had exactly one goal.
Not to be Mrs. X (I’ve purposefully chosen to obscure her name.)
This was a woman who would assert “This is a dictatorship, not a democracy.” She would yell. Her interpretation of the course material was the only correct one. She would casually hand us money and ask us to run across the street to the pizza shop to buy her a specific lunch, when obviously there was no way we could refuse (even if we would rather be doing something else with our free time).
In short, this was a person who asserted her power over us all the time.
I didn’t want to be her.
When I began teaching, I was assigned to seventh graders. I didn’t realize how complicated this would be. Seventh grade was the worst year of my life. I recall walking across the parking lot, dragging my rolling backpack behind me, and wishing to be dead. There is no amount of money that would make me repeat seventh grade.
So as a teacher, I was very wary of asserting power. I knew what it was like to be in those students’ shoes. I had empathy- too much empathy. I wanted to be liked (this was an issue having to do with seeking external approval vs. having an internal sense of self worth). I wanted to build relationships with students. I wanted to be the fun one.
I get the sense I’m not the only one who struggles with how to assert authority in the classroom. I think this might be an issue many young female teachers grapple with. It’s not discussed the way it should be. I think this needs to show up in mentorship conversations. There should be an explicit discussion of power dynamics and what it means to wield power well, and fairly, and without abdicating responsibility. The solution is not- as I did, with the best of intentions- to try to pretend I didn’t have authority, or to renege on my authority, or to attempt to escape the power invested in me. Power abhors a vacuum, and when that happens, someone else will fill that space. In my class, that someone else was usually a charismatic student.
People tried to help me. I was told to read, and I did read, The First Days of School. I was told to set up systems and processes. I was also told to spend the first day of class making rules with the students, because if they felt they had input, they would be more willing to follow the rules. I got a lot of conflicting advice. Some people told me to be very stern and not smile till November. Others told me my main job was to be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage,” and that I was merely there to facilitate the students’ learning. “Run a learner centered classroom,” they urged. What happens when the learners have no inherent interest in the material you’re teaching?
Yesterday I read a book called The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker. This book helped me understand how I want to run my classroom- and more importantly, why.
Priya is a professional facilitator. A facilitator “is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations” (xi). In this book, she shares her theories as to why we gather, what makes a successful gathering, how to determine who is in the room, why one should not strive to be a chill host, and why rules matter. I found it very valuable.
Purpose is Your Bouncer
If you gather for a purpose, then purpose becomes your bouncer. As she put it,
The purpose of a gathering is more than an inspiring concept. It is a tool, a filter that helps you determine all the details, grand and trivial. To gather is to make choice after choice: place, time, food, forks, agenda, topics, speakers. Virtually every choice will be easier to make when you know why you’re gathering, and especially when that why is particular, interesting, and even provocative.
Make purpose your bouncer. Let it decide what goes into your gathering and what stays out. When in doubt about any element, even the smallest detail, hark back to that purpose and decide in accordance with it. In the ensuing chapters, I will take you through some of the decisions you must make when you seek to gather better and more meaningfully, equipped with bold purpose.
-pages 31-32
Let’s take me. I teach Judaic Studies, Prophets and Bible especially. But why am I teaching? There are so many reasons: I want students to have facility with the text and be able to decode the Hebrew language. I want students to analyze material and be able to weigh it/ choose between interpretations in a meaningful way. I want students to have an individual and relevant connection with the text. But most of all, I teach because I care about students’ character. The purpose of learning Judaic Studies, for me, is to transform people’s character for the better.
Being able to say that means I now have a mission and a vision for my class. At the end of the year, I want students to walk out being better people- kinder, more understanding, more empathetic, more loving, more interested in taking multiple perspectives- than they were when they walked in. And that means that I need to design my entire class around that outcome.
Who Is In the Room?
To have a meaningful gathering, you will need to exclude some people. Nobody likes this, because we are taught from the moment we are born, “the more the merrier” and the like. Priya argues
[W]hen you don’t root your gathering up front in a clear, agreed-on purpose, you are often forced to do so belatedly by questions of membership that inevitably arise.
[…]
To be clear, I don’t recommend backing into purpose through the question of whom to invite. But the link between the two issues illustrates that the purpose of a gathering an remain somewhat vague and abstract until it is clarified by drawing the boundary between who is in and out. When you exclude, the rubber of purpose hits the road. When you’re hosting a gathering with others, as opposed to hosting on your own, you should spend time not only reflecting on the purpose of the gathering but then also, ideally, aligning on it with the other hosts. Why are we doing this? Whom should we invite? Why?
To put it another way, thoughtful exclusion, in addition to being generous, can be defining. It can help with the important task of communicating to guests what a gathering is.
-pages 40-41
These are not decisions I currently control. What is an Honors Judaic Studies class? Is it anyone who has enough facility with the Hebrew language to engage with the text? People with excellent critical thinking skills? Anyone willing to put in the effort to do the work? My school provides me with a definition of what the Judaic Studies class is, and then I have to work with it.
But. Since I know that for me, the purpose of teaching Judaic Studies is to transform people’s character for the better, I can be very clear in explaining my values. I would rather a student who did not do the work admit to me they didn’t do the work than lie. I would rather a student who is not prepared for the test admit it and ask for an extension rather than cheat. What I care about are core character traits and these include honesty and ethics. The students I cannot work with are the ones who break my trust. If you lie to me, you’re not someone I want in my classroom. Obviously, I believe in teshuva [repentance], and it’s different if someone is willing to apologize and admit they lied. But if you’re just a barefaced liar, if I had the ability to bounce you from my classroom- I would.
Design the Space
Priya explains that you should “seek a setting that embodies the reason for your convening. When a place embodies an idea, it brings a person’s body and whole being into the experience, not only their minds” (55).
I have been doing this without realizing it. Every year I ask the students to do a Hero Project. I ask that the hero be a hero of character or a role model- not someone who is simply famous because they made a lot of money. They have to print out a picture of the individual and also write a paragraph about who the hero is and why they respect them. I then have them hang their heroes on the bulletin board. This goes to my deeper goal of thinking about character, who they (my students) are and who they might become.
What I now need to think about are other, intentional ways to make the values I am trying to transmit obvious in the venue of my classroom and throughout the space my students share with me.
Don’t Be Chill
Priya has a really refreshing understanding of what’s wrong with being chill- which is what I’ve been trying to be. Here’s what she writes:
“Chill” is the idea that it’s better to be relaxed and low-key, better not to care, better not to make a big deal. It is, in the words of Alana Massey’s essay, “Against Chill,” a “laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis.” It “presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations.” It “takes and never gives.”
Let me declare my bias outright: Chill is a miserable attitude when it comes to hosting gatherings.
In this chapter, I want to convince you to assume your proper powers as a host. That doesn’t mean that there’s one way to host or one kind of power to exert over your gathering. But I do believe that hosting is inevitably an exercise of power. The hosts I guide often feel tempted to abdicate that power, and feel that by doing so they are letting their guests be free. But this abdication often fails their guests rather than serves them. The chill approach to hosting is all too often about hosts attempting to wriggle out of the burden of hosting. In gatherings, once your guests have chosen to come into your kingdom, they want to be governed- gently, respectfully, and well. When you fail to govern, you may be elevating how you want them to perceive you over how you want the gathering to go for them. Often, chill is you caring about you masquerading as you caring about them.
Behind the ethic of chill hosting lies a simple fallacy: Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means that the guests will be left alone, when in fact they will be left to one another. Many hosts I work with seem to imagine that by refusing to exert any power in their gathering, they create a power-free gathering. What they fail to realize is that this pulling-back, far from purging a gathering of power, creates a vacuum that others can fill. Those others are likely to exercise power in a manner inconsistent with your gathering’s purpose, and exercise it over people who signed up to be at your- the host’s- mercy, but definitely didn’t sign up to be at the mercy of your drunk uncle.
-pages 73-75
I have been trying to be a chill, relaxed, laid back, understanding teacher for most of my life. Last year, it reached a breaking point. I felt taken advantage of, frustrated and stressed. I realized that something needed to change, and I needed to figure out what was in my control to change.
What I had to realize, and really, deeply internalize, is that setting boundaries does not make me mean.
Setting boundaries, making expectations explicit and enforcing those expectations makes me someone who wants the entire class experience- including my own- to be excellent.
Power Abhors a Vacuum
The following section of the book provided a huge aha! moment to me. It made me realize why it would be important to embrace and own my power as a teacher in the classroom, and that exercising authority does not have to mean hurting people. (Recall that in my lived experience, exercising power meant being cruel.)
AUTHORITY IS AN ONGOING COMMITMENT
As hosts of gatherings, clients and friends of mine sometimes agree to take charge. Their instinct is usually to do so once, early on in the gathering, perhaps by giving an overview of the agenda, or by leading a discussion about group norms, or by going over a set of instructions for a group game. Then, as far as they are concerned, their work is done. Having done their “hosting,” they can pretend to be guests.
But exercising your authority once and early on in a gathering is as effective as exercising your body once and early on in your life. It isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these thing require enforcement. And if you don’t enforce them, others will step in and enforce their own purposes, directions, and ground rules.
I once attended a dinner thrown by one of the more purposeful hosts I know. She seated her dozen or so guests around the table and then suggested we get to know one another by guessing one another’s occupations. She had seen it done at another gathering and thought it was fun. We were game. She explained how it worked: Everyone at the table gets a guess (unless you know the person), and then the person says what he or she does for a living. We plunged in, making rather hilarious speculations about the first person as he tried to maintain his poker face.
With the game off to a good start, as the guests seemed to find comfort and laughter in one another, the host got up to get dinner ready. She must have felt that her work was done: Her gathering was on autopilot now. Leaving put her only ten or so paces from the table; it wasn’t as though she had deserted us. But even this distance- more psychic than physical, since she was now focused on something else and only faintly following the game- created a problem. One of the guests, perhaps sensing the vacuum or perhaps doing what he always does, began to suck up a disproportionate amount of attention. He gave himself several guesses for each person instead of the allotted one, and when that infraction went unticketed, he began to ask follow-up questions to the guests after they revealed their occupation.
The host’s (totally understandable) abdication had made space for a pretender to the throne. Thanks to this pretender, we spent forty minutes on just the first two people. It was completely unsustainable as a pace, and not very interesting. The problem was that no one was invested in the game or its rules besides the host. No one had eve heard of the game before. When the host set the game in motion and left, there was no one at the table to enforce the game’s rules or the norms of brevity and equality that made it work. But there was someone willing to enforce something- in this case, a guest willing to enforce his own idea that the rest of the group would benefit from hanging back a little and letting him conduct. He was wrong.
The man’s casual evening oppression is the perfect illustration of an old quote from the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
What ensued that evening was what so often happens when hosts fail to exert their authority and to enforce it as an ongoing commitment: Many guests get irritated. Some spoke up, and without explicitly maligning the man or the exercise, suggested that we move on and just talk. That was a good suggestion, but other guests were equally right in pointing out that this approach wouldn’t be fair, since some people had now been elaborately introduced to the group and others remained unknown. Even after retaking her seat, the host laid low. We spent the entire night on the exercise. People were grumbling throughout- grumbling being the preferred weapon of guests who feel poorly governed and unprotected by their host.
So remember, if you’re going to compel people to gather in a particular way, enforce it and rescue your guests if it fails.
And the next time you host a gathering and feel tempted to abdicate even a little, examine the impulse. What is compelling you to hang back? If it’s something logistical (like the need to heat up food or to step out and take a call), you might find that a willing guest is much happier to get assigned to play temporary “host” than to be oppressed by some friend of yours for the better part of a night. Often, though, something deeper is at work: a reluctance that you convince yourself is generous.
-pages 77-79
This has been my life. In the interest of giving students power and autonomy over their own learning, I have (with the best of intentions) abdicated responsibility in a number of ways. What I need to learn is how to set up the gathering- and its rules- so that my specific goal for the lesson is achieved. I need to keep people on task and bring them back on task. I need to not abdicate my authority.
And this is difficult. Because I do not like power or authority- my impression of power is that it’s used to hurt. To realize that I do have power, and that it’s my job to use it generously, for the good of the entire group, and to protect their interests, is a mental shift. It means acknowledging that yes, I do have power in this room. This is my party, and I am the host. And since I am the host, I get to decide how things run. And I get to enforce them. But this is not me doing that in order to be cruel. That is me doing that in order to get things done in a productive and meaningful way.
Generous Authority
Priya calls using power in this way using “generous authority.” She explains:
The first and perhaps most important use of your authority is the protection of your guests. You may need to protect your guests from one another, or from boredom, or from the addictive technologies that lurk in our pockets, vibrating away. We usually feel bad saying no to someone. But it can become easier when we understand who and what we are protecting when we say no.
-page 83
She provides an example from the Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater which actually enforces the no-texting rule by having its waiters/ ushers warn you once, then kick you out. They run a separate program called Alamo for All, which “lifts the noise and technology rules entirely and allows people to move around during the movie” (85). This second option creates a “radically inclusive, accessible movie theater for children (including crying babies) and guests with special needs” (85).
When you see a movie at Alamo Drafthouse, the no-texting/ no cell phone rule will actually be enforced in order to protect the experience of everyone who has gathered to see that movie without the “light from a cellphone, a screaming baby or a disruptive teen cracking jokes” which “pull[s] you out of the magic of the movies” (84).
What this means for me is that I have to believe that what I am doing in my classroom is precious enough to be protected, and that when I enforce a rule I am doing it in order to protect the experience of all my other students.
See below [there is profanity].
This woman clearly doesn’t like Alamo Drafthouse. But Alamo Drafthouse doesn’t need to be liked by her. They need to protect their other customers and live by their mission.
That’s my job as well as a teacher. I don’t need to be liked by my students. I do need to authentically fulfill my mission, and to enforce the rules I think are important enough to set up. Setting boundaries and exercising power is not an inherently bad thing.
The Importance of Rules
I tend not to like rules. This is unsurprising to anyone who knows me. But there are situations when pop-up rules are important (as opposed to etiquette). I realized I’ve been leaving many things in my class to etiquette, assuming students had the knowledge and shared belief regarding what that etiquette was, rather than setting rules from the get-go.
Priya explains pop-up rules when she says
Etiquette allows people to gather because they are the same. Pop-up rules allow people to gather because they are different- yet open to having the sam experience. In my observation, many of the people best able to gather across tribal lines these days are those willing to play with pop-up rules. When they do, they often end up creating that temporary alternative world I described earlier. By drafting a kind of one-time-only constitution for rra gathering, a host can give rise to a fleeting kingdom that pulls people in, tries something new, and yes, spices things up.
Let’s now zoom in on one such gathering and see how it works- the Diner en Blanc.
-pages 121-122
In short, Diner en Blanc is a formal meal where everyone is dressed in formal white clothes. You are dining with strangers. There are many rules. Here’s just a few: Tables must be a certain size. All tablecloths must be white. Everything must be made of glass, silver or fine china- no plastic allowed. The food has to be homemade or quality food (no fast food). The wine needs to be white or rose or champagne. Dessert should be special- chocolate covered strawberries and the like. Everyone should remain seated during dinner/ should not wander around.
Check out an example.
Why does everyone do this and agree to abide by all these rules? Because it’s worth it.
When the social code is spelled out, when it is turned into a one-night-only game, you don’t have to know certain unsaid things, you don’t have to have been raised in a certain way, you don’t have to be steeped in a certain culture, you don’t have to have parsed decades’ worth of social cues. You just need to be told tonight’s rules. This is the bargain that the rules-based gatherer offers: if you accept a greater rigidity in the setup of the event, the gatherer will offer you a different and much richer freedom- to gather with people of all kinds, in spite of your own gathering traditions.
-page 130
This is harder to replicate in a classroom setting. I can’t have one night or one day of rules. I need rules that are in place all the time- and that I enforce all the time. But the concept of making it worth it intrigues me. What can I do in my classroom that makes following my rules, whatever they may be, worth it to the students? I’m not talking about paying them with points or grades. I’m talking about an emotional reason for them to buy in and care.
I don’t know yet. What I do know is that The Art of Gathering is a thought-provoking book and that it can help me change my classroom practice, and how I show up as a teacher- for the better.
Also, if I ever end up in a position where I mentor others, I think these are important questions to ask:
What are your beliefs about power?
Are you comfortable seeing yourself as someone with power or as an authority figure? Why or why not?
What do you think it means to be a teacher in a classroom? Is that a position that involves power?
What does it mean to wield power generously?
Being explicit about the power dynamics in play- and how you can harness them properly- might help other teachers figure out how to lead well without the trial-and-error process that I have personally found myself living. And women especially- who have often been taught to be nice rather than powerful- need to learn to embrace their authority, and to use it generously.