The case for professional kindness

in teaching
READER SUBMISSION / SHORT ARTICLES
May 19,2021

Authors: Nan Bahr

‘[Professional kindness] should not just be the preserve of the “excellent” teacher. This is mply
effective teaching ©Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

There are many ways of going about teaching. Still, one aspect that we need to talk
openly about is the importance of kindness.

A teacher can be effective, efficient, inclusive, and strategic. Still, unless they are
professionally kind along with these things, the learners suffer. To illustrate, a
fictional (but familiar) story:

Sarah has always struggled with maths. Until this year, Year 9, she has been in a
special support class for maths. For the first time ever, she has been placed into
a mainstream class. She was very proud of herself at her moving from one
system to the next. In her new class, she tried hard, but the pace of the class
was faster than in her previous experience. Her confusion intensified, things
moved too quickly for her, and she was too embarrassed to speak up. When she
first asked the teacher what she should do, a quick reply of ‘I've just explained
this’ closed her down. The test for the first unit came and went, and the marks
were distributed. ‘Sarah, you received the worst mark of the class,’ was
announced loud enough for everyone to hear. Sarah was ashamed.

In this story, clearly, Sarah's teacher was cruel. Moreover, the teacher was
professionally unkind. It was true: Sarah failed the test, but one that was based on
an undifferentiated unkind pedagogy and assessment approach. It definitely
wasn't necessary to publicly reveal her achievement and doing this was an act of
general unkindness.
How, then, has this teacher been professionally unkind? They were unkind in their
display of a lack of compassion when designing or executing pedagogy, their
professional ignorance in either disregarding or not informing themself of the
background of their student and empathetically adjusting their approach to
assessment, and by their indiscretion with feedback.

In sum, this was more than a demonstration of failure. This was professional
unkindness that interrupted a student's capacity to learn, perform well in
assessment, and be a resilient and motivated learner.

Professional kindness is required when designing for learning, enacting

pedagogical choices, selecting curriculum and shaping assessment approaches. It
is the conscious application of compassion and empathy to smooth the challenges
to engage with each student's learning.

A teacher builds learner self-concept, resilience, and engenders humane values for
each of their students, touching on the heart of our society well beyond their
classroom, and they do this mindfully and through their applied and professional
kindness.

Steve Broidy (2019) has written of the Kindness Oriented Teaching Ethic (KOTE),
linking kindness in the classroom to the democratic goals of education. He explains
that this occurs by establishing a democratic environment supported by
appropriate policies, positive relationships and interactions between teachers and
their students.

Some other researchers assert that teaching excellence requires professional

valuing of kindness. Stephen Rowland (2009), for example, talks of kindness as
being a requirement for teaching excellence. That is, excellent teachers are kind
people that bring that value to their teaching. Once again, this perspective has a
relaxed consideration of a teacher's requirement to develop skills to be
professionally kind. Rowland sees kindness as relevant only for the excellent,
whereas I argue that it is a fundamental requirement for any effective professional.

This professional kindness requires deep professional knowledge of each student

as a learner combined with a careful and compassionate assessment of their
developmental and conceptual needs.

References

AITSL. (2021). Professional Standards for Teaching. Australian Institute for Teaching
and School Leadership. https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

Broidy, S. (2019). A case for kindness: A new look at the teaching ethic. Stylus
Publishing.

Rowland, S. (2009). Kindness. London Review of Education, 7(3), 207-210.

Adapted from The case for professional kindness in teaching - Teacher Magazine