Safe, Seen, and Stretched in the Classroom

The Remarkable Ways Teachers Shape Students' Lives

Julie Schmidt Hasson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367640712
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000470147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Everyone remembers their favorite teacher, but why? What makes some teachers so memorable? Julie Schmidt Hasson spent a year interviewing people about teachers who've shaped their lives, and the result is this captivating book. She shares stories that are both inspirational, highlighting the ways a teacher's actions can make a lasting impact, and also informational, providing models to help teachers make a more consistent impact on the students they serve.

Chapters cover topics such as commitment, vulnerability, power, connection, expectations, community, identity, and equity, while underscoring the importance of making students feel safe, seen, and stretched. In each chapter, the author brings you along as she conducts interviews and hears emotional stories. She also offers practical takeaways and applications for educators of all levels of experience.

With this uplifting book, you will be reminded that your seemingly ordinary interactions in the classroom have extraordinary implications, and that you indeed have the power to influence students' lives – each and every day.

1Lessons on Commitment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003122029-2

The influence of our teachers is indelibly woven into the fabric of our lives. I let this truth wash over me like the afternoon sun as I stood in the street with Ellen. We met just three minutes ago, but now her hands were holding mine. I bent down to look her in the eyes, paying little attention to the other patrons at the farmers’ market as they dug through the bins in the booths surrounding us, picking out peppers and avocados. Halfway through her story, I felt a warm tear roll down my cheek. At the beginning of this project, I would strain to hold back my emotions as people revealed such personal memories. I believed the detached stance of a researcher would serve the project well. Now, nearly a year and 276 stories later, I have realized the futility of suppressing my feelings. And, most importantly, I have come to appreciate pants with pockets big enough to hold a pack of tissues.

When this particular stranger approached on her motorized scooter, she first caught the attention of my husband, Brian, who patiently knelt down to tell her about the project. Happy to let him answer questions, I packed away the banner and folding table. The market was closing, the temperature was rising, and I was shutting down. I could feel the heat of the brick street through my sandals, and I wished I could teleport myself out of the crowd. I’m an introvert, and I typically have five good hours of story-collecting before I hit my wall. Brian, whose emotional batteries stay charged much longer than mine, believes in pushing past walls, so I wasn’t surprised when he waved me over. “This is Ellen,” he said. “You need to talk with her.”

I forced a smile as I took his place. Ellen removed her straw hat, fluffed her silver curls, and took my hands in hers. Her firm grip betrayed her bony, crooked fingers. “I need to tell you about my high school speech teacher,” she began. “It’s been almost 70 years since I last saw him, but I never forgot him.” I was sure she could not possibly remember details from her school experience, but I was wrong.

Ellen continued, “Mr. Dillon was a legend in our town, a gifted orator and longtime speech teacher. He seemed invincible, until he announced his throat cancer diagnosis. He promised students he would return after treatment.” Eventually, Ellen explained, Mr. Dillon did return to school—but he was almost unrecognizable. He was alarmingly thin, and a tracheostomy left him with a hole in his neck. He had to hold a microphone near his throat in order to speak. “At first, the students were a little uneasy,” she admitted. “It was difficult to focus on what he was saying as he struggled to get the words out. But after a while, we all got used to it. He was just Mr. Dillon again.”

I asked Ellen about the lasting impact Mr. Dillon had made on her life. She paused for a moment before answering. “I have experienced many challenges over the years since I was in Mr. Dillon’s speech class. When I start to feel sorry for myself, I remember the way he showed up every day, fully committed to teaching. Mr. Dillon has been my model of perseverance and strength. He is proof that it is possible to keep moving forward, even when obstacles get in the way. I appreciate how much he taught me—about giving a speech and about living a purposeful life.”

“Wow,” was the only response I could summon. In Ellen’s eyes I could still see traces of that young girl from Mr. Dillon’s speech class. While sharing the memory of her high school days, she became animated and lively. I felt strangely connected to this woman I met only minutes before. We talked a bit longer, then she squeezed my hands one more time and I watched as she disappeared into the crowd.

I was struck by the lesson Ellen had carried for almost seven decades. The most powerful lesson Mr. Dillon taught was not about grammar or diction; his life was his greatest teaching tool. Although he was a speech teacher, his actions spoke much louder than his words. The gift of the story left me re-energized. I felt grateful, and I couldn’t wait to add it to the collection, certain it would provide insight into the lasting impact teachers make on their students’ lives.

Early Inspiration

It’s my curiosity about teacher impact that led me to collect these stories in the first place. In fact, the origin of this project likely goes back to my own childhood. It was the morning of September 8, 1975, and I was standing outside a heavy blue door. My 6-year-old heart was beating fast. It was my first day of first grade, and (as my academically gifted older brother kept reminding me), I was not yet a reader and thus not ready for the challenges waiting on the other side of that door. Just when I decided to run back to my old kindergarten classroom, the door opened and out stepped a beautiful young woman with long, straight, brown hair. She was an angel in a sage-colored bell bottom pantsuit. I clutched my new Holly Hobbie lunchbox and peered up at her through my fringe of blonde bangs. With a reassuring smile, she guided me inside. Her name was Nancy Russell, and her impact on my life is undeniable.

I came to love everything about first grade. I clearly remember the easel with cups of thick paint and fat brushes in the tray. I can still picture Mrs. Russell setting the needle of the record player down on a spinning vinyl disc to play Carole King singing “Chicken Soup with Rice.” That year, with considerable patience and diligence on Mrs. Russell’s part, this dyslexic and highly anxious kid became a reader. I could believe in myself because my teacher believed in me. Looking back, I realize that if she had shown frustration or doubt instead of comfort and confidence, I would have seen myself differently as a learner.

The following year, I started second grade with a new attitude and a new lunch box … Charlie’s Angels. My confidence had grown and I felt like I belonged in school. Eventually, I became a teacher, just like Mrs. Russell, playing “Chicken Soup with Rice” on the CD player for my own students. After 20 years of teaching, I became a principal. I even had the unexpected privilege of being Mrs. Russell’s principal for a few years, but that’s another story for another day.

By the time Mrs. Russell retired in 2015, I had accepted a position as an assistant professor in the School of Education at my alma mater, Florida Southern College. My beloved teacher’s retirement led me to contemplate how some teachers leave a legacy of impact. Everything I achieved was built on the foundation Mrs. Russell laid, and there were hundreds of others like me. Her students became teachers, doctors, and parents, and our performance in all of those roles was colored by what we experienced under her care. I began to wonder if everyone had a Mrs. Russell. As a new professor, I was expected to research important phenomena in my field. I could think of no better topic to explore than the lasting impact of a teacher on students’ lives, but I wasn’t sure how to tackle it or even where to start. So, I did what I always do when I struggle with a big idea: I called my best friend, Laura, and asked her to meet me for lunch.

Teacher Talk

Laura slid into the booth across from me and dropped her red leather tote on the bench. “What’s going on?”

“I’m thinking about a research project, and I need to think it out loud with you.”

Laura stirred some sweetener into her iced tea and settled in. “Hit me with it.”

“I want to find out about teacher impact. What is it? Can we measure it?”

“You mean like how much students learn? How what we teach helps them in the future?”

“Sort of. You’ve been teaching high school English for almost 20 years. What do you think your impact has been on students?”

Laura sat back and looked at the ceiling. “It’s hard to say. I know what I hope my impact is. And my former students sometimes reach out to share something they have remembered or used from my class. I guess that’s really my only evidence.”

“So, you’re saying unless former students reach out, teachers don’t really know their long-term impact?”

She nodded. “Yes, it’s hard for us to know.”

“It seems I won’t get too far asking teachers about their impact.”

“That is going to be tough for you,” Laura said through a smirk. “Everybody you know is a teacher.”

I had to admit she was right. If I wanted to find out about teacher impact, I’d need to go outside my circle, and my friend knew how challenging that would be for me, an avowed introvert.

“How about you?” I asked, “Was there a teacher who shaped your life?” It struck me that in our 40 years of friendship, I had never asked Laura this question.

She stirred her tea again, pausing before responding. “I suppose Judi Briant was the teacher who uncovered my gifts. You remember what I was like in high school. I had little interest in academics and a solid reputation as a party girl, but Mrs. Briant somehow saw past that. She figured out what interested me and offered it up in an engaging way. She hooked me with The Great Gatsby,” Laura said. “The portrait of a generation obsessed with fun and unconcerned with consequences spoke to me. Beyond the themes, Mrs. Briant helped me see the grace and elegance of Fitzgerald’s writing. All I wanted to do was write like that.”

Laura described Mrs. Briant’s class as the one place she felt smart, and she defined her beloved English teacher as the one who inspired her to write. She still counts her as a mentor and a model. She said, “Mrs. Briant made me want to do exactly what she was doing. I try to channel her passionate presence in my own classroom every day.”

Laura and I had many of the same teachers, and I remembered Mrs. Briant fondly, too. “You know,” I admitted, “I calculated that we spent around 16,000 hours in school and probably had over 40 different teachers. Much of those hours are a blur for me, and I can’t recall many of the names and faces of our teachers.”

“Same here,” Laura agreed. “Much of it is a haze, but a few of those teachers, like Mrs. Briant, stand out. Why do you think we still remember some of them so clearly?”

“It’s a mystery to me. I can’t help but wonder what made them so memorable. What did they say and do that stuck with us for all of these years? I guess that’s what I hope to discover.”

As I waved goodbye to Laura and pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot, I tried to remember the teachers who stood in front of us during our high school years. I could picture some in clear detail. I recalled every book I read in Mr. Resciniti’s literature class and every project completed in home economics with Mrs. Khan. They taught different subjects and each had a unique teaching style, yet there were commonalities. I knew it had something to do with the way they all made me feel, but I couldn’t articulate it yet.

A Persistent Narrative

While driving home, I considered what teaching was like in the 1980s. Although Laura and I were unaware at the time, a significant event impacted our teachers in 1983. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrel Bell, convened a commission to investigate his suspicions about the quality of education in the United States. He believed students were falling behind other nations, and his commission found data to support his hunches. The average score of all students who took the SAT had dropped from the 1960s to the 1980s. In addition, students in the United States did not rank first (or even second) in any of 19 selected tests of academic achievement when compared with other industrialized nations.

Bell’s commission drafted a report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, which was widely publicized. Amidst the Cold War and a recession, the report stoked fears about the vulnerability of the United States to threats from other countries. The narrative of failing schools and rampant mediocrity in education began. The report was the subject of evening news stories and landed on the front page of newspapers. In the month following the report’s release, The Washington Post alone published two dozen stories about it. Teacher blaming, shaming, and criticism became the focus of pundits and politicians. But if our teachers felt the sting of that storyline, it was never apparent to us. Mrs. Briant, Mr. Resciniti, Mrs. Khan, and their colleagues still showed up fully committed to teaching us every day with undeniable enthusiasm.

The narrative instigated by A Nation at Risk persists to this day, despite evidence to the contrary. Seven years after the release of the report, Admiral James Watkins, the Secretary of Energy, sought more information as part of an education initiative. He commissioned the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico to look more deeply into the data on which A Nation at Risk was based. The scientists at Sandia examined the data from every angle. They found that when they disaggregated it into subgroups (based on characteristics such as gender, race, and economic status), nearly every subgroup held steady or improved from the 1960s to the 1980s. So, how could overall average scores have dropped? How could it have appeared that our nation’s students were falling behind?

The scientists found the answer in Simpson’s Paradox, which shows the average can change in one direction while the subgroups change in the opposite direction if proportions among the subgroups change. They realized that it was mainly students from privileged backgrounds that participated in the SAT during the 1960s. At that time, test-takers were mostly white, economically advantaged students who had access to tutors and other support. However, by the 1980s, college became a possibility for a larger and more diverse set of students. SAT examinees in the 1980s had expanded to a broader population, and the proportion of wealthy test-takers had decreased. The Sandia Report decreed schools were not failing. In fact, edu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Meet the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Lessons on Commitment
• 2 Lessons on Vulnerability
• 3 Lessons on Power
• 4 Lessons on Connection
• 5 Lessons on Expectations
• 6 Lessons on Memorable Moments
• 7 Lessons on Community
• 8 Lessons on Identity
• 9 Lessons on Overcoming
• 10 Lessons on Equity
• 11 Lessons on Generativity
• 12 Lessons on Impact
• Epilogue