Teaching with empathy - Clare Jarmy in TES
In an article for TES, Clare Jarmy explains how taking driving lessons taught her a valuable lesson about dealing with pupils who insist they are unable to do something.
Helping a student who struggles can bring elation and despair, hope and hopelessness in equal measure, she says. And a teacher’s belief in their students is frequently met by their total lack of self-belief: indeed, encouragement can just make them feel worse.
This conundrum was thrown into useful relief when Clare recently prepared for a driving test – her third, having failed her first two. She has dyslexia and dyspraxia, and her previous driving instructors, she says, were not alert to the particular challenges this brought.
“Just park it!” one would say, with no explanation of how. Clare would give it a go, and end up straddling the line. She’d try again, and fail. He could not understand why she never got better.
Clare points out that when she tells her pupil that it is “easier than you think”, she is contradicting them and is perhaps not encouraging them in the way intended. She says: “I must not contradict or downplay the feeling of helplessness. The pupil is not right that she can’t do it, but she is right that it feels that way. So often, we understand that students are having difficulties, but not the difficulties themselves.”
For her third test attempt, Clare chose an instructor – Colin – not primarily because of his capacity to drive, but for a capacity to teach that came from a place of empathy. Colin, too, was dyslexic, and Clare was sure he would understand her frustrations and difficulties – not as facts about her, but from the inside.
Colin was calm, he was patient and he kept her going until she made progress. And he recognised her difficulties: he never said it was easy, but recognised that it was hard because she found it so. Slowly but surely, Clare improved a little and became more confident. This gentle building of confidence worked: she passed.
She concludes: “Colin never contradicted me, and I have vowed to myself never to tell someone that something is easy if they seem truly to be saying to me it is difficult. We must listen to the student who says they can’t do something. They may be wrong, but the fact that they believe it to be true deserves recognition and engagement. Colin will never know the full effect of his teaching on me, but my students will, I hope, feel the benefits of the lessons he taught me.”
The full article can be read on the TES website (subscription may be required).