Take the Brush Out of Your Hand

I couldn’t get the tree to look right.

I was taking an art class—a painting class, to be more precise—and I couldn’t get the tree to look the way it did in the photograph. My art teacher, who may not have had the utmost faith in my art skills, hovered over me as I futzed with the branches and leaves. I expressed some frustration and asked for advice. In response, she snatched the brush out of my hand, dabbed it in the paint, and produced an exquisite tree on my canvas in no time. “That’s how you do it,” she said. “Thanks,” I muttered. I didn’t know any more about how to paint a tree than I did when I asked for help, and I was suddenly very unproud of my painting as a whole since the most difficult part wasn’t something I could claim responsibility for. How easy is it for us as teachers to take the brush away from our students and complete the painting ourselves, figuratively or literally? Seeing students struggle is hard. Wait time requires patience on our part and perseverance on theirs. Oftentimes it’s easier for us to do it ourselves, to tell them the right answer, to do the heavy lifting. We become like helicopter moms, hovering over our students and rescuing them before they have a chance to make mistakes and figure it out on their own. We have to become more comfortable at watching our students struggle. We have to become better at guiding rather than doing the work ourselves. We have to become encouragers, prompters, questioners, and coaches.

I love when my friends who are parents post videos of their babies working at taking their first steps. Watching the little ones prop themselves up, wobble and catch themselves, reach a moment of balance, and then take the first tentative and precarious step is so exciting and gives me such hope because I know that baby will soon be walking confidently, running, skipping, dancing, riding a bike, and, eventually, navigating the adult world. Along the way, parents, teachers, and other adults will offer guidance, praise, and encouragement, but ultimately the work will be done by that child. There will be times when parents will swoop in to rescue their child. That’s inevitable. But good parents know that people learn by doing, by experimenting, by troubleshooting, and by making mistakes. The college freshman whose mom did his laundry until the moment he left to live in the dorm is going to be walking around with pink socks, pink undershirts, and tighty no-longer-whities unless he finds someone willing to teach him how to wash his own clothes. In my own classroom, I have been completely guilty of metaphorically taking the paint brush away from my students and doing the work myself. I have rewritten their awkward sentences, explained what students should have been getting from something they’ve been reading, told them the “correct” theme of novels and short stories, and provided my own expert analysis of works both artistic and literary rather than letting my students write, interpret, or analyze themselves. I’ve clarified extremely vague student responses by putting words into their mouths rather than asking probing questions to help them state their answers in more complete or articulate fashion. Students in my class learned that they didn’t have to listen to each other because Mr. McKinney would eventually tell them what they needed to take away from the class discussion. Recently, I have also noticed that students have a hard time watching one another struggle. Their patience for wait time may be less than most teachers’. Their camaraderie and esprit de corps cause them to want to rescue one another. This I’ve-got-your-back mentality makes them lousy coaches. I watched some students in a class earlier this week who were supposed to be coaching one another as they attempted to place commas in some commaless sentences. One student made some pretty significant errors. His partner, rather than helping him understand or coaching him through the process, took the pencil away and repunctuated the sentences correctly. The struggling student learned nothing about how to use commas today from his partner, which was not the goal of the paired coaching experience. It’s important that we help students understand something we ourselves often struggle to understand: when you don’t do something for someone, you are doing that person a favor. In other words, it’s better to ask questions than to provide the correct answer. It’s better to let that person do it on their own than to do it for them, but it’s best if you do it alongside them. Don’t grab the pencil and work the problem yourself. Take the paintbrush out of your hand. Provide feedback. Show them how to do a similar example. Ask questions. Help them locate and work through their points of confusion. Peer coaching isn’t answer-giving. AVID students become adept at this type of peer coaching during their in-class Socratic tutorials. The idea is that the members of the tutorial group help one of their members work through a self-identified point of confusion by asking questions rather than by telling them the answer. AVID students know that we learn by doing our own thinking, not by having someone do the thinking for us. We become better at doing things by doing them, not by watching others do them. And once we learn how to do those things ourselves, we can be deservedly proud of our accomplishments. If you’ve never seen an AVID tutorial in action, I encourage you to seek one out. It’s an impressive experience. In the coaching work I do with teachers, I’m working to—as Michael Bungay Stanier says— “tame the advice monster.” It’s so easy to do the thinking for others that it becomes the default practice for many of us. What we know about learning, though, is that true learning happens when the learner does the thinking, not the teacher. I’m trying not to always have the right answer, and I want to work with students to help them understand that often it’s best not to have the right answer and instead to help someone else find the right answer. If that art teacher had let me keep the brush in my hand, if she had explained what to do, offered some suggestions, or even showed me the technique on a separate canvas, I might have liked that painting enough to keep it. Instead, she painted the tree for me. And I still don’t know how to paint one myself.