A MiddleWeb Blog
JESS*, engaging in the non sequiturs characteristic of seventh grade: I packed my lunch! I really like Mrs. Ronnie.
All students agree firmly.
STRASSER, supervising lunch in her room, breaking her rule to not talk about other teachers by name for the sake of this column: Ok, so, why do you like her?
All students begin talking at once.
NORA: Because, she’s like, nice, but not TOO nice.
RIDER: Yeah, like, when other kids mess around she doesn’t just ignore it. She does something about it. But she’s not too mean.
JESS: She can get mad about stuff, but she doesn’t yell.
NATE, summing up for everyone: She’s…. She’s someone who you know wants to be your friend. [pause] But she’s not your friend.
STRASSER: So you don’t like it when teachers are too friendly?
NATE: There’s, like, a line. Like, some teachers can be too buddy-buddy. I don’t like that.
All students agree.
STRASSER: So… researchers have studied this in schools, actually. They call teachers like this “warm demanders.”
Students are hanging on Ms. Strasser’s every word.
STRASSER: It means that students know that the teacher really cares about them, but those teachers also are firm about their expectations. You know what you’re supposed to do as a student, but you’re not afraid of the teacher.
NORA: Well, maybe a little afraid. But in a good way.
NATE: Yeah, she is like a warm demander, like you said. Like, I know some teachers who are just … warm.
Students nod thoughtfully.
JESS: Awesome!! I forgot I packed cookies!
END SCENE (*All names changed to protect the innocent.)
“Warm Demander” has a history
I was tickled this week to hear my students express, spontaneously, that they know exactly, to them, what warm demands look like in a classroom – and prefer it over other approaches.
“Warm demanders” as a mark of high quality, culturally sensitive teaching has a history that stretches back to 1975, when it was first coined as a term by researcher Judith Kleinfeld. Over the years it has been adopted by James Vasquez, Franita Ware, and Lisa Delpit, and associated further with the research of Gloria Ladson Billings – all experts on urban minority students.
I came across the expression myself in one of the textbooks I use in a graduate class, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain by Zaretta Hammond. So you can imagine how fascinated I was to hear its characteristics cropping up all by themselves in my small, rural, overwhelmingly white seventh grade lunch.
Diving into why my rural white farming kids and urban African American kids seem to see the same qualities in excellent teachers is a question whose answer goes far beyond the scope of this column, I quickly discovered. (I even asked for an extension on my deadline before realizing that wasn’t going to help at all.)
For now, though, I’d like to posit the two following possibilities – and two “howevers” – for us to chew on.
1. These middle schoolers need – and want – boundaries. Most of their comments at lunch, I noted, were centered on whether the teacher in question was able to control the behavior of their students. They expressed discomfort, even disdain, for teachers who ignored bad behavior, didn’t directly address bad behavior, couldn’t see bad behavior, or soft-pedaled bad behavior. They longed for, and appreciated, those teachers who were able to effectively manage the lesson and the classroom at large. This is right on the money for both the psychological and ethical stage of development of Western middle schoolers: they want concrete, tangible justice.
However…
We need to consider that the vast majority of psychological research up until recently was conducted within WEIRD (that is, among Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. To the degree that my kids and African American kids reflect subsets of WEIRD culture, we have to think about the fact that despite Piaget being a genius, his work and others’ may not map directly onto where our kids lie.
2. Warmth and competence might be universal dimensions of social perception. It is possible that warmth – another way of saying “positive relationship” – and competence are two of the main ways people judge other people. This is certainly what is in evidence when listening to my kids at lunch. They are actively answering the questions: “Is that teacher nice?” and “Does that teacher know what they are doing?”
However…
Even in the very, very brief survey of the history of “warm demanders” I conducted, I could see many ways in which both “warmth” and “demand” could be measured differently by both the researchers and the students they were researching.
For example, Judith Kleinfeld, who was white, conducted her research on rural Alaskan Inuit children in assimilative boarding schools in the 70’s. Lisa Delpit and Gloria Ladson Billings, on the other hand, focus their research primarily on the urban Black child’s experience in public schools in much later decades.
Is it possible to take Kleinfeld’s label and transfer it from one minority group to another, then? And even if that is possible, why and how would that label be resonating with my kids at lunchtime – who are neither minority nor urban?
It’s a frustrating MiddleWeb column that leaves the reader with more questions than answers, I realize, particularly when those readers are time-strapped teachers. I suppose the takeaway here would be this: it is illuminating to boil down teacher effectiveness to ideas of “warmth” and “demand.” But it’s also essential to know what your kids mean culturally by those words.
- How warm are you with your students?
- How much academic excellence do you demand of them?
- What do your students interpret as “warmth”?
- Where is their line between “meanness” and “academic demand”?
We might be surprised at the answers.
