Reflecting on the Interaction-Heavy Teaching Style

 As a starter, I asked my students to write a response to the question, “What is Science?”. After 5 minutes, I told them to stop writing and to speak to their neighbor for 2 minutes about what they wrote. Everyone had a partner except for one student, so I decided to play that role for her.

I went up to her and asked what she thought science was. She mumbled a few words while pointing to the 2 – 3 lines she had written. She wrote in cursive, so I could not make out any of the words. Nor could I hear what she was saying. Her words were uttered in a quiet and timid manner.

She avoided making eye contact with me and kept fidgeting. Clearly, she was uncomfortable. So, I decided to re-phrase my question in a way that seemed to me was easier to answer. “What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word Science?” I asked. No response. And she seemed even more nervous.

“This is not a test. I am just trying to find out how much you know about this topic already”, I tried to reassure her to no avail. She remained quiet yet fidgety. At a loss for how to handle this situation, I said something along the lines of “when I give starters, I just want you to write what you know. It doesn’t have to be in complete sentences. A list of words is fine too”. The two minutes were up. I had to go back to the front of the class.

As I sit now reflecting on this uneasy interaction with my student, I am reminded of a similar incident I encountered approximately seven years ago. I was a high school sophomore, still trying to get used to the western-oriented learning environment at my high school. My English teacher, Mr. Renzi had asked us to speak to someone next to us about a certain topic, the content of which I cannot recall.

All I remember is how nervous I was when he approached me and my partner and joined in the conversation. Midway, he was trying to point out something about the term “action”. In an attempt to help me come up with that particular word, he posed a simple question – what he saw as a simple question anyway –  “what people do… what do we call that?”. Timidly, I replied, “deeds?”. He sneered a little, “deeds…” and said, “actions, they’re actions”.

He knew that I was very nervous about the entire conversation, and he probably could not understand why. He was just conversing with me, helping me notice some important points. He could not understand why my brain was “over-efforting”, coming up with a less frequently used word “deed” while not being able to think of the commonly used word “action”. He probably thought the whole encounter was uneasy and unnecessarily so.

Now that I have adjusted to an instruction method that involves much student-teacher interaction, I had almost forgotten how uncomfortable such a method could be to someone who is experiencing it for the first time.

When a teacher approaches you, your mind begins to race. Your insecurity begins to rise. You get nervous. Your mind goes blank. All you can think is, “I wish (s)he just goes away”. During the previously mentioned encounter with my English teacher, I had already been in a teacher-student-interaction-heavy learning environment for more than a year. Yet, I still had not gotten used to it. It still made me uncomfortable.

How can we ease this discomfort that students feel when interacting with their instructors?