Over the past several years, Republican politicians in my home state of Kentucky have mounted unprecedented attacks on public schools as part of an effort to redirect tax revenue into private hands. Watching these attacks unfold, I often think back to one of my first teaching positions at Phillips Exeter Academy.
I arrived on campus with some trepidation. Would my classes be full of young Brett Kavanaughs? Would the prestige and wealth that was part of the campus environment taint the curriculum?
Located in New Hampshire, Exeter is one of those private high schools where the 1 percent send their children. It is among the highest-ranked prep schools in the country, sometimes the highest. It has a thousand students, a billion-dollar endowment, and a list of prominent alumni that’s longer than my arm, including former President Franklin Pierce, author Gore Vidal, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and historian Heather Cox Richardson.
I arrived on campus with some trepidation. Would my classes be full of young Brett Kavanaughs? Would the prestige and wealth that was part of the campus environment taint the curriculum? What I found instead was an astonishing example of what education can be when teachers are given resources, respect, and freedom.
Exeter faculty offer three classes per term, with each class capped at a dozen students. Instead of letter grades, the students are given written feedback. There are no standardized tests. Lectures are rare. Instructors and students alike sit around a big oval table and explore the material together, whether the topic is poetry or calculus. More often than not, the person getting up to write an idea or equation on the chalkboard is a student. One Exeter graduate described to me the “thrill” of watching an idea “grow from a kernel into something I could articulate and fit into the larger conversation.”
The contrast between this student-centered approach and the lecture-based schooling experienced by most students in the United States—particularly in low-income communities and communities of color—could not be more stark. In the public schools I attended in eastern Kentucky, the teacher stood at the front of the room and talked at the students, who sat passively at their desks.
The dominant emotion was not excitement, engagement, or curiosity, but rather, boredom. Such schooling does little to foster powerful, fluent literacy and lifelong learning. Indeed, many of the students I work with now at Berea College begin their post-secondary education with a dim view of books and book learning, estranged from the very things school was supposed to provide.
So why can’t all children have an education like that offered to students at Phillips Exeter?
Part of the answer, of course, is that the wealth in the United States is distributed so unevenly. Some crucial reforms, such as reducing course loads, would require redistributing that wealth.
But a central element of Exeter’s approach—a collaborative, non-authoritarian pedagogy—does not require more funding. It doesn’t have to wait for changes in policy or permission from Charles Koch. Creating student-centered classrooms is something that teachers can go ahead and do right now.
There are, to be sure, real institutional hurdles to student-centered approaches. Facilitating discussion is easier with twelve students than thirty. Giving substantial space to student voices can make it harder to march through government-mandated curricula. A boisterous classroom may get an instructor into trouble.
But some of the most difficult hurdles are not imposed on teachers from above—they are things we carry with us. One such hurdle is that many teachers never saw a student-centered classroom during their own school experience. In that case, breaking with the standard teacher-centric model requires inventing a new approach, as it were, from scratch.
But some of the most difficult hurdles are not imposed on teachers from above—they are things we carry with us.
“Inquiry-based teaching,” as professor Mahsa Kazempour notes, “is simply an abstract idea to teachers who never encountered this type of teaching during their own K-16 education.”
I can relate. By the time I entered the University of California at Berkeley as a graduate student, hoping to become a teacher, I was determined to create a classroom more vibrant and meaningful than the ones that led me to drop out of high school. But I didn’t know how.
At the time, I was in my thirties and had spent twenty years in school, yet rarely had I seen a student-centered approach. That only changed through a stroke of luck.
“Sit in on Michael Burawoy’s class,” a friend told me. “You can thank me later.”
When the day came, I found a seat in an auditorium with 150 freshmen in an introductory sociology course—and then watched, stunned, as Burawoy, an affable, grey-haired English fellow, walked around the room asking students a series of down-to-earth questions. He talked with them for the entire class, one on one, with a smile on his face, just like a conversation.
A second major hurdle is that creating a student-centered classroom is hard emotional work. For many teachers, it involves changing deep-seated habits; indeed, research has shown that it often requires changing our very identity.
Designing my first course—three sections of world geography at Eastern Kentucky University, with about thirty-five students in each section—was one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve ever done. As class began on that first day, the students sat silently, accustomed to their passive role.
When I left the podium and walked among the desks to converse with them, I violated the unspoken norms that every one of us had brought into that room. My body urged me to flee the uncertainty of human interaction for the predictability of a lecture, the safety of a PowerPoint.
Now, after twelve years of practice, I cannot imagine teaching any other way—even this year, when all my classes took place via Zoom.
Student-centered classrooms come in many flavors, but they share a key feature: They are radically democratic. Not in the usual sense of checking a ballot, but in the deeper sense of creating a space where everyone participates in shaping what happens.
Student-centered classrooms come in many flavors, but they share a key feature: They are radically democratic. Not in the usual sense of checking a ballot, but in the deeper sense of creating a space where everyone participates in shaping what happens.
In a society in which most institutions are authoritarian—not just classrooms but churches and workplaces and families—this cultural work of deepening democracy is difficult, even frightening. But it’s a crucial kind of activism.
This is a perfect time to push for student-centered reform. Miguel Cardona, the nation’s new Secretary of Education, has a deep understanding of the challenges facing both teachers and students. Unlike the former Secretary, Betsy DeVos, Cardona attended public schools in a low-income community and spent twenty years working to improve those same schools as a teacher and principal. He knows what’s at stake.
“Investing in public education changes lives and saves lives,” he said at his February 3 confirmation hearing. “I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.”
That is good news for educators, and the students they serve.