Monthly teacher favourites

Fanaroff wrote an editorial on the subject in his school newspaper, the Churchill Observer. Some of the examples he saw during his elementary and secondary years were benign, like the candy incident. Others were more significant, like an extension of a homework assignment.

As many students start the new school year, they might not see eye-to-eye with the teacher. Or, alternately, they might be adored by their teachers.

The topic recently came up in a discussion I had with my husband. After my daughter's preschool orientation, I remarked to my husband how well she did and how I thought she would be one of her teachers' favourites.

That sparked a lively discussion between us. Do teachers indeed have favourites? If a teacher has a favourite student, does that lead to blatant favouritism? Does it start in preschool? Later? Is it harmful? Should I not want my daughter to be a favourite? What can be done about it if a child either is or is not a favourite?

Finding answers

“I would say, first off, that teachers do their best to treat all kids fairly,” said Dryw Freed, who has taught for 16 years in public schools in North Carolina and Virginia. “With that said, we are only human and do respond differently to different children.”

But it's not as simple as having one favourite. In a class of 27 students, Freed says, the majority of the children would all rotate and have "moments of being one of (her) favourites."

"With very few exceptions, each kid has something that endears her to a teacher, so there don't tend to be dramatic, clear-cut favourites," says Freed. "It's not a case of a few favourites and a bunch of goats. It's more like a collection of beautiful, funny, endearing little people, a couple of whom happen to stand out slightly at one end of the spectrum or another."

Parents may not readily admit this, but there may be a small part of them that wants their child to be a teacher favourite or, at least, not "that kid" who always seems to be in trouble. 

One-on-one education

"Your child is in school 180 days out of the year. You wouldn't want to work for a boss that didn't like you for 180 days."

Do it in a non aggressive way. "Parent-teacher cooperation is important. ... Get on the same page against whatever is the problem," says Hartwell-Walker.

Arca agrees that the parent-teacher relationship is a partnership that can only work with open and honest communication and with the child's best interest at heart.

She says teachers will interact with each individual child based on the student's temperament and unique personality.

 

Here is the truth: I have favourites. I also have the opposite of favourites. I have tried to think of a less clumsy phrase than "not favourites" but I haven't yet come across a word which describes how I feel about this particular group without crossing into nasty territory. It's not that I hate them – I don't – I save all my hatred for pointless bureaucracy and petty staffroom politics. Instead these students, just, well, they're not my favourites.

All my students fall into three categories: favourite, not favourite and "meh". The categorisation of these students is wholly subjective (and often spectacularly random) so admitting to these behaviours in school is frowned upon. I am perfectly happy to confess in private but I'd rather be caught stealing the office manager's handbag than treating students differently depending on their favourite status because that would make me the kind of shoddy teacher that we complain about to our therapists.

Although the categorisation of students can be random, sometimes it takes something miniscule to change a group. Perhaps you will be my favourite because you show me kindness, even just a glimmer of it. You'll smile at me not because you're trying to get an extension on a deadline or you're hoping I won't notice that your hair turned red overnight, but just because. You won't join in when the class decides to play a game of Derail the Lesson. You'll be kind – gloriously, uncomplicatedly kind. And just like that you'll appear on my mental list of favourites.

The granting of the not favourite status is a little more murky. All the reasons I can think of only highlight my immaturity – "she was mean to me and I don't like her" etc. While I indulge this, I am self-aware enough to know that I have not yet left my high school years entirely behind me. There is pointlessness but assured unavailability to basing my self-esteem on what a 14-year-old thinks of me – thank you, popular girls in my high school circa 1997, that's all down to you.

How do I manage the favourites and the not favourites? Camouflage. I have a giant birthday chart, like the ones you usually see in pre-schools, in my classroom. Whether I'd give you a kidney or whether I'd quite like to stand on your toe, you are on that birthday chart and you will get exactly the same little card and chocolate on your birthday. I will remind everyone around me that today is your special day and at the end of the day I will ask if you've had a good birthday.

This leads me to the next strategy: FITYMI ("fake it 'til you make it"). It works with and for everything: public speaking, caring about everyone in your class, talking to the head of department about the test you haven't finished setting yet but which you feel "very confident" about.

It is from not favourites that I learn the most about myself as a teacher. There is a final year student in one of my classes who looks at me as though I am trying to nick her mobile. From her I learn the art of not caring about what others think of me. I try to avoid buying into the idea that because you're a student, you're somehow less and so I don't need to care about your opinions. I do need to care, but I need to have limits. From this Queen Bee of the Dark Side, I am learning that those limits need to shift, not just with students, but with people in general.

The most remarkable moment is when a student moves from the not favourite to the favourite list. There is a senior girl who, when she initially met me, loved to engage in a game of Derail the Lesson. Then one day it changed. I hadn't ever responded to her comments or behaviour in the way that she'd expected. I'd used my trusty FITYMI strategy and it didn't let me down. During break or after class, when I would greet her I would smile, genuinely with nascent crows feet and all. She has now decided that I'm not such a baddy and we're working together on building her academic confidence and her wholly understandable fear of showing any vulnerability.

There isn't always a happy ending though. Sometimes, I get nowhere; my FITYMI strategy fails and the camouflage is patchy. Then I just wait the year out. When the student is irritating me or I have to share a space with them I sing ABBA songs in my head and pretend that I am dressed just like Agnetha Fältskog circa 1974. A little unusual perhaps, but a hell of a lot more fun than counting backwards from 10.

We need to disrupt the idea of having only one teacher in front of a group of students at once. With so many different learning styles and students at different places in their learning within a grade and within subjects, students and schools will benefit greatly from co-teaching models. Depending on the complexity of the topic and how the concepts are integrated into the curriculum, students might have teams of two, three, or four teachers at once. If students are learning about the recent recession, for example, they will have a math or economics specialist tag teaming with a historian. If students are learning how to write a persuasive essay, they will benefit from having multiple language-arts specialists each provide their own unique perspective and response to students’ writing and approaches. Individual teachers will not be responsible for individual students as much as the team of teachers will be responsible for the learning outcomes of each student they touch within the school day.

The good thing about having several teachers is that if one of them is not very good, you only have him or her for part of the day. Also, shuffling from class to class breaks up the monotony and allows for brief jokey chats in the hallway.   

During class, side conversations seem to sprout when a class goes above five students. Chaos is logarithmic. One micro-class made up of one, or two, or three students, plus a sympathetic tutor, can get more done in an hour than a roomful of 25 bored, loud fidgeters plus a shouting, pleading instructor can accomplish in a week.

Ask elementary-school parents if they prefer their child be in a class of 15 or a class of 30, and you can bet what their answer will be! If you want to know whether low class size is valued, just look at the class sizes of exclusive private schools.

Lower class size has been associated with higher achievement, better test scores, higher student self esteem, lower dropout rates, and other positive outcomes. The effects of lower class size are especially beneficial for disadvantaged students, especially in the early grades. The most extensive study ever on class size, the Tennessee STAR study, showed that the positive effects of smaller class sizes were doubled for poor and minority students.

In a recent research brief on class size, the National Education Policy Center identified class sizes of 15-18 to be ideal, with the understanding that there would be some variation in some classes, such as larger classes for band or for physical education.

Ideally, every classroom will have two teachers, or at least one teacher and a well-trained assistant. An extra set of eyes on the work of learners can provide invaluable feedback and assistance to the lead teacher.

I like the idea of team teaching, especially for subjects like science and math where students could benefit from more one-on-one attention from teachers. I don’t think teachers always feel like they can, singularly, meet the needs of all of their students. There will be a ratio of no more than 1:16 for cooperative learning, so students can be broken down into groups of four or even dyads. For younger students, 3- to 7-year-olds, the classroom sizes would have a ratio of 1:5 in order to foster the development of relationships between the teacher and younger students. I would avoid a 1:1 ratio because it would exclude the social engagement and development students benefit from as part of the learning experience.

1. Content experts who focus on developing curriculum 
2. Small-group leaders who provide direct instruction  
3. Project designers to supplement online learning with hands-on application
  
4. Mentors who provide wisdom, social capital, and guidance  
5. Evaluators to whom other educators can give the responsibility of grading assignments and, in some cases, designing assessments 

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