Learning culture
--Originally published at teaching is my element
But what I took from last week is that trust is important. Believing in the students is important. And I don't think trusting them means leaving them to figure out what they have to do, it means really believing that all of them are smart people who can deal with it. And they mostly are.
One must be extraordinarily open minded to understand them and then develop this learning culture according to their needs, and is quite an art to create something that more or less fits everyone style. Sometimes it's impossible. There is always this one student who just doesn't get it, but as my colleagues say, sometimes it's all about them not falling asleep and it's okay.
I guess it all comes to human connections. If you don't create these sincere relationships where you actually care for your students, learning just doesn't happen.