Classrooms exist in existential time

Classrooms exist in existential time. Roles played by teachers and students are response-able in that there are interactive, reciprocal, and synergistic elements that are worked out in the classroom. The ongoing transactions that occur in the classroom are based on a mutual trust that each of the players will take steps designed to fulfill appropriate roles assigned based on position or status. Teachers are response-able for teaching while students are response-able for studenting according to Gary Fenstermacher.

Classrooms are interactive places. Teachers work within assigned curriculum that is understood to be both age and developmentally appropriate. Within the notion of curriculum, teachers make decisions regarding what to teach, how to teach, and how to know that they have taught. In short, teachers exercise response-ability as they determine methods, strategies of instruction, and finally, appropriate assessment tools with which to evaluate teaching and learning. Planning is not execution. Interaction begins as the teacher executes his or her plan in the context of the classroom, a living, breathing organism encompassing the teacher and his or her students. The interactions in a classroom are varied. There are teacher to student, student to teacher, and student to student encounters every moment a classroom is engaged in the active process of teaching and learning. Students, as well, play an important role in the interaction of the classroom. As much as the teacher’s response-ability is to do the stuff of teaching, students are equally response-able for doing the stuff of studenting. Students must read the assigned work, do the assigned homework, participate in classroom discussions, inquiries and projects. In short, students student while teachers teach. While these response-abilities appear to be distinct, they are not. They begin to meld when one considers reciprocal and synergistic roles in the classroom.

There is a sense of reciprocation in the classroom as well. The notion of reciprocation hinges on the social nature of the classroom. The system breaks down if either of the parties fails to take response-ability seriously and neglects to plan, execute or student. Teachers cannot fail to plan appropriately. But, even if the teacher is meticulous about his or her planning and execution, if the students in the teacher’s charge fail to student then the system falls apart. The same is true if the students do, in fact, student but the teacher disregards his or her response-ability to plan and execute lessons in a meaningful way. The classroom is dependent upon the ethical behavior of all parties participating in the context of school.

So, when the teacher plans and executes his or her plan flawlessly and students, in fact, student so that the interactions in the classroom are focused, engaging, and just plain fun, and the classroom focus is on the mutual response-ability of the teacher and his or her students, then a sense of reciprocation can be observed in the day to day activities of the classroom. When this occurs then a synergy or sense of cooperation seems to wrap itself around the classroom like a blanket covering a bed. When there is synergy evident in the classroom, students and teachers trust one another to be response-able for the work of the class. There appears to be little tension, everyone is working to his or her potential, accommodations are being made for individual differences, work is getting done and children are learning.

This is all happening in existential time. There is a fluidity in the moments of teaching and learning that are observable. The classroom is temporal where from moment to moment new knowledge is being created because students are constructing knowledge presented by their teachers, teachers are learning from their students, and students are teaching each other as they engage in purposeful inquiry.

And then there is No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a force that invades the classroom in historical time. Imposed from without, NCLB disrupts existential time by imposing mandates that serve as historical artifacts, memories that harken to a time when things were simply better–the good old days. Even the language of NCLB–every child, for example, is entitled to a highly qualified teacher so that teachers scramble to become highly qualified by attending meaningless professional development workshops and fill out paperwork that attests to their new-found qualifications. All the while, the qualification game is just that, a game designed to satisfy some nameless bureaucrat that is not response-able to anyone directly.

When response-ability is removed from the mix we are left with something less than satisfying. To be unable to elicit a response is not unlike talking to the dead who are no longer response-able.