A major trend in education, especially in reform movements, is to claim that if a student is not learning, it rests solely on the teacher. I understand the line of thinking: a teacher is a very powerful force in the classroom and is responsible for engaging activities and lessons. A teacher should absolutely work to include and engage every student at the highest levels. Teachers should take responsibility for that work.

However, this gets taken to an extreme by many. A student is playing a video game during lessons? Clearly the teacher is doing something wrong. A student is putting headphones in under her hood and tuning out or refusing to engage? Teacher is not engaging enough; the teacher isn’t teaching them.

Here’s my problem with this philosophy: it completely denies a student any agency in their own lives. It says students are empty vessels to be filled with knowledge with or without their consent instead of individual moral agents with personal autonomy. This is problematic because they are not being seen as individuals who make decisions and who are learning how to take responsibility for those decisions. They are being used as a means to another end rather than seen as ends in themselves.

I work in a high school with 11th and 12th graders, mainly. They are young adults who should be learning to act as individuals and taking responsibility for their own lives. Of course they are not adults, and certainly there needs to be understanding when mistakes are made, but the educational philosophy that expects teachers to take the entire responsibility for what happens in the classroom takes away any opportunity for students to take responsibility or not. Students can’t zone out, decide not to engage, or make mistakes because they don’t get that agency. If teachers are entirely responsible for everything that happens in a classroom, then students have no responsibility.

When people are not responsible for outcomes, they have less reason to engage than even before. When people lack autonomy in their lives, they will find other ways to assert their agency somewhere. I feel like I see this when students passively resist: they don’t make waves, but they don’t do anything either. They disengage. They refuse efforts by others to include them. Typically they have something else going on – something with friends, something at home, something personal that they aren’t going to share right then. They are making a choice to disengage.

I firmly believe we, as teachers, need to continue to find ways to include and engage that student. However, do we want to be a place where students don’t have the ability to make choices, including the choice to disengage? And if a student is choosing to disengage regularly, even after multiple attempts at engagement and intervention, isn’t there a larger problem at hand?

A philosophy that says teachers take complete responsibility for everything in their classroom is a philosophy that is able to ignore those larger problems. Instead, the system doesn’t take responsibility for the systemic problems and lays the blame at individual teachers’ feet.

Disclaimer: I think some of this may have been worded inartfully; please know that it is with good intent that I write this – I want students to achieve at their fullest potential, and I think taking away their autonomy harms that opportunity. I know this is difficult stuff. I hope we can do better.

Edit: I went to Facebook after writing and right there on my timeline was THIS ARTICLE that actually talks about the same issues called “Engagement Isn’t Everything.” Not sure about all the ways it’s explained there, but I’m not alone in thinking about this.