BY AARON BARLOW

From a novel called The Spiral Road by Jan de Hartog, I learned that a physician’s diagnosis doesn’t depend as much on knowledge of medicine as it does on knowledge of the patient. I  was a high-school student at the time and on a de Hartog kick–but I’ve never forgotten that lesson and still apply it to most everything I do, especially my teaching. You develop your skills to as high a level as you can but, in your practice, you concentrate on your patient–or student.

One can use all sorts of diagnostic aids, and sometimes they can even be helpful. But, in the final analysis, there’s always a judgment call, a point where you have to rely on your own experience.

In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Theresa Brown applies this principle to nursing, writing, “nurses invoke ‘gut feelings,’ but they actually aren’t feelings at all — they are agglomerations of observations and experiences that over time have turned into finely tuned clinical judgment.” Teachers do the same thing.

At some point, out institutions need to learn to trust that.

In a couple of weeks, each of us will be meeting a new array of of students in a new line-up of classes. The first thing we will do, even if we do it unconsciously, is start looking at our students. As we talk, we are scanning them, judging their reactions to our every word. This assessment will continue throughout the semester resulting in an end-point that is probably quite different from what we had imagined before meeting our particular classes and adapting to growing recognition of student needs.

Or it should be.

Today, we teachers operate within administrative frameworks that pay as little attention to our skills as, too often, do hospitals to the just-as-real skills of nurses. Just as, “when a nurse says she’s got a bad feeling about a patient, the entire care team needs to listen,” the entire administration of every school should be listening to its teachers–not dictating to them based on generalized assessment data or on “outcomes” far removed from the actualities of student learning. The skills of teachers, like the skills of nurses, need to be respected: neither profession consists of cogs that can be swapped out by administrators.  Each profession consists of professionals whose words should be supported, not ignored or channeled down pre-constructed lanes.

Brown writes:

Part of why I still feel haunted by my patient who suddenly took a turn for the worse and then died is because of that nagging sense I had, early on, that something was wrong. Her disease put her at risk for spontaneous bleeding, but at the start of her third day in the hospital a treatment plan still wasn’t in place. My gut told me we were moving too slowly, and I was able to push here and there. But there was nothing I could articulate as a sign of impending calamity.

Though the situations in our classrooms are not life-and-death, we, too, have gut feelings based on experience and training that needs to be listened to. Maybe they can’t be transferred into numbers (as Brown is hoping some of the almost subliminal cues nurses pick up on can be), but they are more important to successful teaching than any set of numerical diagnostics or imposed goals ever can be.

When someone says to you on the faculty that the syllabus you provide your students is a contract, ignore them: It is not. It is simply a starting place, a roadmap to be altered as the guide, the teacher, gains more understanding of the abilities and needs of the student.  You may discover over the semester that the destination has changed; you need to be in a position to make the decision on the best way to reach the new one–without a bunch of bureaucrats horning in and disrupting or distrusting or judgment.

Trust yourselves.