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I said it, and I mean it. Trusting students leads not just to better learning, but is also a route to much greater contentment in one's teaching work.
Any dissatisfaction I experienced with the day-to-day work of teaching was almost entirely rooted in my efforts to control students and prescribe the route to their learning. This extended from my policies to my pedagogy on writing. When I gave up control it was transformative.
Of course, giving up control took a series of incremental steps over a number of semesters because undoing the conditioning I'd experienced as a student and the teaching folklore I'd absorbed as an instructor was very ingrained. But each step made it easier to take the next.
Although, each step I took in ceding control to students in my day-to-day teaching work that improved my teaching and the learning atmosphere made me more and more frustrated by the systemic problems that infect education from K thru college (and beyond).
Embracing freedom/agency and transparency when it comes to how I work with students revealed the terrible disconnects between "schooling" and learning. As my experience in class improved, I knew that there was no purely pedagogical solution to the problems of education.
