Complaining About Students Is Toxic. Here Are 4 Ways to Stop

By Lauren Vargas

June 11, 2019

As a teacher, I spent many mornings waiting in line to make copies for my lessons that day. Coffee in hand, I competed with my fellow waiting colleagues in the Misery Olympics of Teaching: We’d banter back and forth about whose teaching life was more miserable. 

Some of those complaints were about our own lives, like this: “I was in grad class until 10 p.m. last night and then I had to grade 30 essays.” But invariably, part of our griping was about our students. For years, I’d say things like this: “My third period class is driving me crazy!” or “When will Ben ever stop talking?” or “Why won’t my students turn homework in?!” 

Sound familiar? Complaining about students happens in teachers’ lounges and copy rooms all over the country. Teaching is hard work. But complaining about students is not only toxic for teachers’ feelings about their work (and therefore their longevity in their jobs). It’s detrimental to students.

Now my job is to support instructional coaches in their work with teachers, and I get to hear to what pre-K through high school teachers say when they are meeting with their coaches. I am caught off guard more often than I would expect by negative comments about students from even the most otherwise positive teachers. Here’s a sample of the comments I’ve heard recently: 

·       “I have two kids who are really big babies. They always need my attention. I don’t think they can do it on their own.”

·       “I just don’t think this will work with Daniel; he’s one of my older kids.”

·       “You know this is a Title I school, right?”

·       “These kids just aren’t motivated.”

How educators talk about students matters. No matter how much planning time we put into lessons or how much we say we believe all kids can achieve, when we make comments like these it impacts how well we can help all students reach their highest potential.

Why is complaining about students detrimental?

·       It reinforces low expectations. By complaining about students, we reinforce the idea that they’re not capable of meeting high expectations. And complaining with other teachers can create a space where low expectations are validated within the school community. 

·       It absolves teachers of responsibility to reach all students, and blames students instead. As the instructional leaders of our classrooms, we need to be reflective about what changes we can make that will help all students engage and learn better. By blaming students, teachers fail to grow; instead, they are defensive when given feedback. Dr. Haim Ginott wrote in Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers, “I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.”

·       It creates distance between students and teachers. Complaining about students with other teachers can create an us versus them mentality. I was a young, white, middle-class teacher who taught mostly low-income students of color. By participating with other (mostly) young, white, middle-class teachers in complaining about students, I unintentionally reinforced racist and classist norms that schooling should look like me and my culture and students just needed to get on board. 

·       It creates a toxic work culture. Complaining breeds negative feelings about our work. When I’m repeating a message that students aren’t motivated and there’s nothing I can do about it, I start to feel less motivated myself to teach my best lessons every day. Ultimately, feeling frustrated about students regularly can contribute to teacher burnout, instead of a lifelong career of meeting students where they are and joyfully engaging with them there. 

4 Strategies to Counter a Culture of Complaining 

#1 - Consider your vocabulary. 

This isn’t about political correctness. It’s about simply treating students the way we would want to be treated. Here are a few words and phrases to eliminate that reflect low expectations of students: 

·       They are babies

·       They aren’t motivated

·       They have an IEP

·       They are low-flyers

·       This generation

·       Their parents aren’t engaged

#2 - Take the one-week complaint-free challenge. 

Try not to say anything negative about a student for a week. Take time to notice the moments when you want to complain, and how you feel when you cut out the complaining. 

#3 - Call out your colleagues when they complain. 

I often felt that complaining was the norm at my school, and I now regret not taking a more active role to confront that culture directly. When you hear educators complaining about students, make an active choice to sit it out. Even better, find a direct but kind way to call it out. Try, “I know we all love our students. Instead of focusing on the negative, what’s something you’re thankful for about your students today?” And this shouldn’t fall only on teachers—school leaders can play a key role here by setting clear expectations for how teachers and staff should talk about students. 

#4 - Replace complaining with joy and thankfulness. 

Find something positive to talk about. Consider what conversations will bring about more equitable outcomes for students, more joy for you and your colleagues, and closer relationships within the school community. Talk about what you are thankful for, how you’ve seen students grow or challenge themselves, or even ask questions to get you know your colleagues better. 

Mental health counselor and author Kristin Souers said in a presentation about her book, Relationship, Responsibility and Regulation: Trauma-Invested Practices for Fostering Resilient Learners, “We need to remember to speak kindly about our students and kindly about each other.” When kindness replaces complaining about kids, it can transform our expectations of our students as well as our workplace culture.

Educational Equality vs. Equity

Do you know the difference between educational EQUALITY and EQUITY?

Equity and equality are two strategies we can use in an effort to produce fairness. Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful. Equality is treating everyone the same. Equality aims to promote fairness, but it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and needs the same help.

If you have not had the chance to watch the documentary series, America To Me on STARZ, you really need to find the time.

America To Me presents an exclusive look into an academic year at suburban Chicago's Oak Park and River Forest High School. Students, teachers, and administrators from one of the country's highest performing and diverse public schools are profiled in the face of decades-old racial and educational inequities. The series delves into the experiences of the racially diverse student population, sparking conversations about what has and has not succeeded in the quest to achieve racial equity and overcome bias in education.

Micro-Teaching: Using Technology to Innovate Instruction

Check out this article by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey on Micro-Teaching. Coaching and innovating instruction goes to all new levels when video recording of student learning takes place. Have you ever done this? Share your experiences! If you want to do this or learn more about the process- Leverage Learning Group is here to help! #ALLmeansALL

Show & Tell: A Video Column / The Micro-Teaching Advantage

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Videotaping a teacher's practice makes for a better debrief, more learning.

Technology has transformed the ways teachers and leaders conduct much of their work. Classrooms are filled with smartboards, audience-response systems, and tablets. We take attendance electronically, autodial parents with students' absences, and spend hours each week on email. But one area hasn't reflected this change: the process of observation, coaching, and feedback. By and large, peers, coaches, and administrators still visit classrooms, observe a colleague teaching, and schedule a time to debrief with that teacher.

The Trouble with Tradition

There are at least two problems with this. The first centers on the fact that the observation focuses more on the teaching and less on the learning. Too often, the observer attends to what the teacher is doing, documenting what the teacher says during the entire observation. The debrief conversation focuses on the teacher's instructional moves; little attention is paid to whether students learned anything.

Admittedly, it's hard to focus on everything happening in the classroom when you observe. We often have to remind ourselves to "look down as often as we look up." By that, we mean that we should pay attention to the students, the tasks they're completing, and whether there is evidence of learning, rather than just looking up to see what the teacher is doing.

The second problem is that the debrief tends to focus on what the observer perceived—which can be disputed by the person teaching. We've heard of administrators telling teachers things like, "You only called on students in the front of the classroom," "Several students weren't engaged," or "I liked the way you used gestures to make your point." When feedback is relayed in this way, a teacher may or may not remember the situation well enough to be able to reflect on her or his practice. Or the teacher may remember it differently or have an alternative perspective.

This can devolve into a he said/she said situation in which the observer loses any ability to encourage growth. In fact, some teachers are impervious to the feedback they receive from classroom observations because they have a pre-existing "confirmation bias" about their teaching and only accept examples that confirm what they already believe. In addition, some teachers suffer from a "halo effect": They use the experiences of a few students to generalize about what's happening with all students' learning. When concrete evidence isn't part of the discussion, teaching—and learning—might not change. Worse, a teacher may think that the "expert" (the person coming to observe) knows it all—and that he or she just needs to be told how to teach. That's not an effective way to create change.

Enter Micro-Teaching

One way to get past these limitations is to video-record a short segment of a teacher's practice. Not too many years ago, it would have required a Herculean effort to video-capture what goes on in a classroom. Few people had portable video equipment with high-quality sound capabilities. But now we all do! Mobile phones and tablets are excellent devices for capturing real-time learning environments.

We recognize that many educators are wary of being recorded; they fear the "evidence" could be used against them. Thus, as coaches and leaders embrace the use of technology for observation and feedback, they should consult with teachers in advance and clearly outline the appropriate and inappropriate uses of such recordings. For example, in some schools, the digital files are deleted after the discussion. In others, the observer uses the teacher's technology to record so that the file is never in the observer's hands. It can also help to start by recording only teachers who volunteer and allowing others to join in over time.

We call using a video clip (of a teacher giving a lesson or leading an activity) to spark discussion about that teacher's practice micro-teaching.1  We believe the day is coming when micro-teaching will be commonplace.

There is strong evidence that micro-teaching works. In his 2012 research review, John Hattie collected a large number of meta-analyses, or statistical compilations of many studies on the same topic.2  His findings suggest that the average impact on learning of any instructional practice is .40 (this effect size represents a magnitude, or how strong the impact could be). Micro-teaching has an effect size of .88, more than double the average impact.

Watching It Work

Simply video-recording classrooms won't result in the impact noted in Hattie's review. Each video clip must serve as fodder for the discussion a teacher has with a colleague about what that clip reveals. Rather than an observer telling a teacher what he or she saw, the video can be used to encourage the teacher to notice particular moves he or she is making, and the impact those moves have on students' learning.

You can see such a discussion in the video accompanying this column. Two math teachers at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego—Heidi Allen and Joseph Assof—watch a video of Heidi teaching and discuss what they notice. Joseph is Heidi's peer coach, and vice versa. They work together to improve outcomes for both their students; sometimes Heidi observes and records Joseph and other times he records her.

Note that during their discussion, Joseph uses skills in cognitive coaching and reflective teaching to ensure that he doesn't tell Heidi what he thinks about the lesson, but rather thinks with her about what they observe. Both teachers ask reflective questions as they watch the clip. They ponder the impact of specific moves and note things Heidi could have done that might have led to increased learning. Consistent with a micro-teaching approach, they focus on short segments of the video, dissecting instructional moves and students' responses to those moves. In other words, they don't limit their conversation to teaching; learning is also important.

Consequential Conversations

The quest for better learning need not be limited to developing instructional strategies and tools. We can also use micro-teaching to foster honest, reflective conversations about what is being taught andlearned in a classroom. Many of these evidence-based conversations won't be easy. But they will be consequential, impacting both a teacher's teaching and a students' learning.

Educational Leadership, February 2019