“Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” In the hubbub about public education, this message has risen and spread in the blogosphere. It is a kind of billboard message we read along the highway that catches a passing eye and then rolls around in our heads. However well intentioned, I read it as a shaming message. It infers educators do not care enough about the children they teach, and it conflates knowledge with teaching. Instead, I posit this: the profession of teaching requires caring, but teaching is not one of the “caring professions.”
Teaching and learning.
Our mission as educators is to cause children to learn. This simple sentence says it all. We can play around with the various nouns but not the verb. Educators, teachers, coaches, directors, mentors — each name properly says who we are. Children, students, adult learners, kiddos — they are the subjects of our teaching, people who will be changed by their education. The verb is what we do. We are in the profession of causation.
As a verb, the word “cause” has simple meaning. It means “to make something happen.” In the profession of education, teaching causes or makes learning happen.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/cause?q=causing
The French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes examined his world to understand fundamental truths. He observed that the physical world has abundant examples of situations where one action results in a predicted outcome. His empiricism led him to four questions that created his theories of cause and effect.
- What would happen if I did X?
- What would happen if I didn’t do X?
- What won’t happen if I did X?
- What won’t happen if I didn’t do X?
Concepts of direct instruction derive from Descartes. A teacher determines an educational outcome and constructs a lesson that teaches students to achieve that outcome. Teachers plan and deliver instruction that causes learning.
Jean-Jacque Rousseau conceived that the best education occurs when children explore and experience their world. Rousseau is not empirical but relies on the happenstance of events; learning is not planned but is what is encountered in life. Problem- and inquiry-based learning derive from Rousseau. Teachers plan and facilitate rich environments in which students learn.
We see both schools of thought today in education. Early childhood education that is play-based allows children to experience situations from which they learn. Later, curriculum is both direct and inquiry-based and methodologies of explicit and implicit instruction are used to cause student learning.
Teachers are taught, trained, and licensed to cause children to learn and experience learning in childcare and 4K thru grade 12 settings.
Teaching professionals and Caring professionals.
The concept of caring is complex in the field of education. While we intuit what caring means, definitions help us to better understand what it is and is not.
- As an adjective, caring means displaying kindness and concern for others.
- As a noun, caring refers to the work or practice of looking after those unable to care for themselves, as in the caring professions.
All the synonyms for caring as an adjective — kind, warmhearted, softhearted, tender, concerned, thoughtful, responsible, considerate, benevolent, humane, sympathetic, understanding, and patient — apply to teaching. Teaching requires caring but its outcomes are different from those of a “caring” professional.
We expect teachers to know and understand the personal, familial, cultural, ethnic, social, and linguistic backgrounds of the children they teach. These expectations are explicitly written and described in the initial preparation standards for teaching licenses. We expect teachers to use this understanding to construct meaningful and appropriate instruction for individual children every day and each year the child in school. Caring is understanding children as individuals and each child’s educational conditions that must be effectively accommodated to teach children to learn. Caring is a commitment to move each child from not knowing to knowing, not able to do to doing, and not thinking about to thinking about.
These are examples of the “caring” professions: social worker, human services professional, human resources professional, law enforcement officer, lawyer, legal assistant, victim advocate, academic advisor, emergency medical technician, nurse, crisis counselor, psychologist, mental health counselor, firefighter. Each of these “caring” professionals requires specific teaching, training, and licensing for them to practice their profession.
https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/social-sciences/helping-professions
Legal limitations to caring in schools.
While we expect teachers to care about the students they teach, we also demand a distancing of teachers from students. Teachers are not parents or guardians of the children they teach. There are legal and professional guardrails that keep caring teachers out of the realm of caring family members
We endow teachers with the status of “parentis in loco” meaning in the absence of the parent. In school, on the school campus, on school buses, and during school activities away from the campus, teachers, coaches, and directors are to care for the safety and welfare of students. We make rules and regulations to help school personnel know their responsibilities in caring for student safety and welfare. We also take careful precautions that limit the extent of care. “You can administer a band aid for a cut or abrasion, but you cannot stitch or authorize stitching.” “You may comfort a child who is in distress, but you cannot hug the child.” You may be criminally prosecuted if you cross professional lines.
And there are lines of teacher-student intimate contact that cannot be crossed.
Teaching also has professional limitations. A teacher has a contract to teach a specified curriculum to a specified group of children for a specified period of time. And to be parentis in loco during the child’s school experience but not outside that defined experience. At the end of the school day, teachers and students separate and go to their respective homes. During vacation periods, teachers and students lead separate lives. The idea that teachers are inextricably linked to the school classroom is told by a child who sees her teacher in the aisle at a grocery story on a weekend and asks “what are you doing here? Don’t you belong at school?”
The calling to teach.
In school interviews, I ask candidates for a teaching position, “is teaching your calling or your job?” The question requires an old-fashioned concept of “calling” that is not commonly used today. A calling involves an intrinsic need to do something that you feel uniquely qualified to do or passionately enjoy doing. Even if the candidate does not recognize the word, those that feel a calling to teach usually convey the concept without defining the word.
We hire teachers who approach teaching as a job as well as those who are “called.” Those who see it as a job can become effective teachers. However, teachers who are called add a significant care factor missing from those who think of teaching as a job only. A calling plus effective teaching skills make an outstanding teacher.
Teaching is not childcare though childcare may be part of schooling.
School has changed because both parents or guardians in a household work to support their family. Working hours and school hours do not align and many families need some form of childcare before and after school. This relates to the supervision and care of infants and young children. The cost of childcare in 2023 averaged $13,600 per child.
To help their school families resolve this, many schools added childcare programs before and after the school day. School classrooms, gyms, libraries, and studios are available at these times for childcare activities. Schools make efficient childcare facilities because they have space, access, and toilets.
The purpose of daycare is simple: to provide parents with enough help to be able to function as independent adults: to go to work, to do chores, to take care of other adult responsibilities
Teaching and childcare are two distinct professions, and each requires training and a license to practice. “The childcare licensing program is a component of the services provided by Department of Children and Families (DCF). The program is accountable for the statewide licensure of Wisconsin’s childcare facilities, including family childcare, group childcare, and day camps. The purpose of the program is to promote the health, safety, and welfare of children in licensed childcare. The Department ensures that licensing requirements are met through ongoing inspections of childcare facilities.
Under Wisconsin law, no person may provide care and supervision for four (4) or more children under the age of 7 for less than 24 hours a day unless that person obtains a license to operate a childcare center from the Department.”
https://dcf.wisconsin.gov/cclicensing
What do we know?
Caring matters but not all caring is the same. Children know when adults care for them. Children learn the difference between caring parents and guardians and caring teachers and caring adults in childcare centers. Each care for children in a distinct way, at a distinct time in the child’s life, and with distinct outcomes.
When a caring teacher and child connect, we see how a significant adult can add greatly to the quality of how and what a child learns. Teaching fundamentally is caring about the adults children today will become in the future.
And frankly, teaching children today is underpaid, under-respected, and, given all the social and media distractions, downright hard. Why would a person be a professional teacher if he or she did not care deeply about children?