Children learn from people they would like to emulate, whether it's a matter of learning to talk, ride bicycles, skate, swim, fish, smoke, swear, or hold up gas stations. . . . children engage in learning with someone who does something they want and expect to do themselves and who will help them to do so. The collaborative nature of the teacher-learner relationship in literacy does not require deliberate instruction or that children should work everything out independently. It is a mutual undertaking . . . .

Frank Smith
Essays into Literacy

After more than 25 years of teaching at four universities across the country, Frank Smith's assertions about the learning of children seems to me a perfect description of the best educational relationships in which I have been privileged to be a part-intense, participatory, collaborative.

The intensity of learning in my classes comes from two sources, my commitment to expecting more than students think they can do and their discovery that they can be and do more than they imagined possible. From the beginning, I work to create an atmosphere of belief, a sense of expectancy, and a demand for excellence that can carry us through our time together. In such an atmosphere, students come to understand that education isn't about playing grade or point games–it's about learning the insides of things: how an argument works, what an image says, what shifting the rhythm of a sentence can do to the meaning of the text, how readers feel when they are treated as human beings. We spend hours working together to discover what we mean when we put words on the page, and then we spend more hours massaging those words, interrogating them, wrestling them to the mat until they give up every secret thing. When this happens, we are amazed and delighted.

I believe the best teaching and learning are participatory, with both teacher and student engaged in the process of learning as much as they can in each moment of encounter with the subject matter and with each other. Such participation keeps me alive and sensitizes me to the depth and breadth of what my students know and can teach me. It allows me to see that each of them is different and that those differences dictate adjustments in my thinking about who they are, what they need, and what they are likely to receive from my class. I take this movement a step further by putting my own work on the table for critique, by sharing problems I am having making sense of a piece of writing, and by receiving what my students have to say. When they understand that all learners struggle, fail sometimes, and sometimes succeed, the participation intensifies and deepens, and even the least experienced learners understand that their contributions have value.

When I can accomplish the two objectives above, the result is a form of collaboration in which every member of the learning community is respected, engaged, and accountable for his or her own work and for the work of the community as a whole. The possibility of growth under these conditions is enormous and is, for me, the whole point of the educational enterprise.

As the teacher in such a community, I recognize that I have much to offer the students, both in factual knowledge and in experience. I'm not at all shy about asserting myself, but I'm also conscious of the need to create an environment in which I am not the sole source of authority. I think of my classes as highly structured, carefully managed environments in which learning can't not happen. My philosophical roots lie somewhere between a Platonic dialogue along the lines of the Phaedrus and a Maria Montessori classroom. In both, learning is situated in an environment in which talk and action, cultural and individual needs are balanced to create a wholeness in which knowledge is uncovered, discovered, and made as naturally as eating, drinking, and breathing make muscle and bone. I'm never sure exactly how it happens, but trusting in the mystery of it has never let me down.