EMPOWER Your Students - Lauren Porosoff

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then they have to confront their failure to be who they most want to be. They might believe that they can’t, shouldn’t, or don’t want to change, or they might worry about embarrassing themselves, getting in trouble, or disappointing those who care about them. Sharing values invokes many difficult thoughts and feelings, which is why trust is crucial. How can we build that trust in our classrooms?

      Having our students’ trust begins with making sure they can trust us. In class, we make sure they learn essential content and skills, and we give them assignments that are worth the time we expect them to put in. We prepare, focus, listen, and use every minute productively. These might sound like basic teaching principles, but planning meaningful lessons and assignments sends the message that our students’ time matters, and by extension, that they matter. When they see that they matter to us, they’re more likely to do hard work—including the work of clarifying and committing to their values. When everyone in the room—the students and the teacher—is doing hard work, we build a sense of solidarity: we’re in this together.

      Like any learning experience, learning about their own values will involve attempts, mistakes, questions, and doubts. You can affirm these moments of risk with statements such as, “I’m not sure you quite got the idea, but I really appreciate that you’re trying to understand what I’m saying.” Or, “You seem hesitant, and I think it makes a lot of sense to take your time working out an idea like this.” If taking a risk becomes a source of affirmation instead of embarrassment, students are more likely to do it. Affirming responses also make you a source of compassion and reassurance, which helps students feel safer as they explore and share their values (Gilbert, 2014).

      Beyond treating your students like they matter, you can also help them treat each other like they matter. One way is to give them opportunities to respond to each other’s work in an interested, nonjudgmental way. For example, on a writing assignment, you can ask students to summarize what a peer is saying, indicate lines that stand out without saying why they stand out, or ask questions to show curiosity (Elbow & Belanoff, 2000). This type of responding is different from typical peer review, where the point is to critique. Even critique, when offered in the spirit of improving work, can build trust. Again, these are fairly basic practices you can use while teaching regular old academic content, but they help students become the kind of supportive community required for them to talk about their values.

      Whatever you do to build community among middle or high school students, you’ll get moments when they’re disrespectful or outright mean to each other. In these moments, you can simply say, “We’re not doing that.” Saying we holds not only the offending student but the entire classroom accountable for treating each other with respect and kindness. Of course, you can follow up later with a particular student if a longer conversation is warranted. Chances are that student is feeling vulnerable, and his or her behavior is an effort to avoid that feeling.

      Yet another way to make space for vulnerability is by being vulnerable yourself. You can notice and name your attempts, mistakes, questions, and doubts. For example, you might say, “That made no sense. Now I’m embarrassed.” Or, “I feel like this isn’t working and I don’t know why. What do you all think is going on?” or even, “I have this thing I want us to try but I have no idea if it’ll work. How would you all feel about trying something weird?” Just as your students’ behaviors will sometimes cause problems, yours will too. You can notice and name those behaviors: “That came out sounding really critical. I’m really sorry.”

      Finally, you can invite students to be vulnerable with each other. Understand, though, that they don’t, won’t, and shouldn’t trust each other. Distrust is a safer bet in ambiguous circumstances (Wilson, 2009). If we trust someone who’s untrustworthy, we face consequences from social humiliation to financial ruin to death, but if we don’t trust someone who turns out to be trustworthy, we just miss an opportunity to build a relationship. Middle schools and high schools aren’t famous for being havens where no one hurts anyone. If students avoid making themselves vulnerable, that just means they have normal responses to realistic fears; they are not doing something wrong.

      The very students who find school highly aversive and would benefit most from connecting it to their values will often be the most avoidant. You might notice an urge in yourself to convince them to participate, to argue with them if they say they don’t care, or to use your power to coerce them into the work. These urges come from our passionate desire to make our students’ lives better. But if we try to convince, argue with, or coerce students, will that make school more or less aversive? Will that get them closer to discovering their values? Will that help them be vulnerable the next time? We recommend simply inviting students to participate. Whether they take you up on that invitation is, as always, up to them. But even if they don’t take you up on it—even if they make sarcastic jokes or roll their eyes or refuse to talk—they will also understand that you respect them enough to give them an authentic choice. That builds trust, too.

      Despite all these suggestions, there is no rule book you can follow to create trust in your classroom. In fact, if you start focusing on doing the “right” thing to encourage trust, you’re no longer focusing on the actual human beings who need you to be your authentic, lumpy, vulnerable self if they have any hope of being theirs. Your best shot is to be as present, attentive, compassionate, and flexible as your beautifully imperfect self can muster.

      Again, values are qualities of action. Contextual behavioral science is a modern version of behavior analysis that proceeds from the assumption that actions—behavior—can only be understood in relation to their context (Villatte et al., 2015). In your classroom, for example, student behaviors are influenced by contextual factors such as the furniture arrangement, the time of day, their moods, your mood, the words you use, current events at school and in the world, their relationships with each other, race and gender dynamics, and their various physical needs. Altering elements of a person’s context, whether that means moving the furniture or changing the way he or she thinks about school, can profoundly affect that person’s behavior (Hayes & Brownstein, 1986).

      Contextual behavioral science’s ultimate goal is to help people notice the various elements of their context and then do what’s consistent with their values—not what’s easiest or most fun, not what makes them look cool or sound smart, and not what relieves them from unpleasant feelings like sadness, anger, fear, shame, and boredom. Accepting unpleasant thoughts and feelings is a normal part of living in accordance with our values. That ability to choose, in any context, a life guided by values is what we mean by empowerment.

      Part I of this book (chapters 1 through 7) offers activities that help students transform school into a context for values-consistent behavior. These activities help students discover the elements of empowerment: exploration, motivation, participation, openness, willingness, empathy, and resilience. Chapter 1 covers exploration, which begins with curiosity; chapter 2 covers motivation and helping students find reasons for doing their schoolwork; chapter 3 addresses participation and helping students create opportunities to enact their values; chapter 4 is about openness to sharing one’s values; willingness to serve one’s values when it’s difficult to do so is addressed in chapter 5; empathy, which allows us to treat others according to our values, is explained in chapter 6; and chapter

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