Abby Seeskin, Ph.D.

In my classroom I work hard to create a warm and friendly environment shaped by my sense of humor, my deep commitment to social justice, and a love of learning. The central goal of my classroom is to offer space for students to encounter new ideas, unfamiliar stories, and untold histories so that they can consider how to live in this world more ethically, creatively, and generously. As I offer my students opportunities to work analytically and creatively, I find that students in my classroom not only strengthen their own voices and outlooks on the world, but also emerge as more creative thinkers who can better engage their values inside and outside of the classroom.

Over the past eight years, I have worked with students ranging from rising eighth graders to college seniors. I have worked in classrooms that sometimes appear quite diverse in terms of race, class, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, and political affiliation, and I have also taught in classrooms that appear more monolithic. Yet regardless of whom occupies the seats of my classroom, I assume no experience as “normal” or “typical.” I believe that each of my students carry a multitude of identities not immediately evident, and I work hard to create an environment in which each student knows they can succeed.

Three overarching strategies enable me to build a welcoming environment: the first is that I share texts with students that reflect the diversity of our world and challenge dominant orders. For example, in English 10—a required course at Greenhill generally based in American literature—my students do not just read canonical texts like The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. Rather, we read those novels in dialogue with texts like Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know. The electives I teach similarly reflect my commitment to equity and inclusion: in Women’s Writings, students engage seriously with intersectional feminist thought through writers like bell hooks and the Combahee River Collective. In Modern Fiction, students use Rudine Bishop’s rubric of “windows and sliding doors” as we read a survey of contemporary authors like Haruki Murakami, Julie Buntin, and Tommy Orange. And in nearly every class I teach, I offer students opportunities to choose their own texts to read as they carve pathways forward in their own learning. Choice reading units have become cherished units that enable my more reticent readers to reconnect or connect anew with a love of reading.

The second strategy that has helped me build a welcoming environment for all learners is by using pedagogical strategies grounded in—but not strictly adherent to–Competency-Based Learning. I focus the goals of my class not on mastery over specific texts, but rather on gaining specific skills like close reading, associative thinking, using evidence, and making connections between the text and the world beyond. Students practice these skills through class conversations, journal entries, online platforms like discussion boards and Flipgrid, collaborative tools like Miro, and project-based learning. Sometimes those projects take the form of more traditional papers, but sometimes they might take forms that the students choose. For example, my fifteen students in Women’s Writings created a wide array of projects after reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: one wrote a more traditional paper in which they compared Gilead to Michel Foucault’s writings on discipline, another made a short film connecting the resistance movements in The Handmaid’s Tale to contemporary protest movements, and a third made a series of Scrabble boards showing how the leaders of Gilead “played games” with the women they controlled. As my students work, I offer feedback mid-process both so that students can meaningfully respond to feedback as they work. Using CBL strategies has allowed me to build a collaborative, rather than adversarial, relationship with my students.

The last strategy I use to build a welcoming environment is perhaps the simplest but most important: as an educator, I respond to my students as humans first and students in my classroom second. I teach some students with severe anxiety and depression. I teach some students who work outside of school. I teach students who spend hours honing their skill on sports fields. I teach students whose lives have been pretty rocked by the COVID pandemic. So, my class always starts with a check-in not related to our class content. I offer opportunities for students to share about their lives so that our classroom becomes a community. Following Joe Feldman in Grading for Equity, I no longer penalize for late work—especially when students tell me why they need more time, but even when they don’t. I allow students opportunities to try again when they make mistakes. I don’t give 0s. I have found that implementing these policies has not at all reduced the rigor of work. Instead, it’s given opportunities for my students who face challenges beyond the scope of my classroom to thrive and feel seen. It’s given space for every single one of my students—seriously, barring none—to have moments of success.

As I work hard to affirm my students’ identities while challenging them to take ownership over their learning, I consistently observe that my students want to rise to produce their best work. I create environments in which my students know that trying something hard and making mistakes is a far better learning experience than resting on the skills they have already developed. In my classroom we focus much more on process and inquiry than end results and answers: we workshop, discuss, question, and experiment. When students express that they are “not good enough” or “failures,” I redirect that statement by suggesting to my students that we are all works in progress. I puzzle through questions with my students, modeling that educators are not people who hold all of the answers, but are rather figures who can give space for questions to breathe. In doing so, I am able to encourage my students to approach life beyond the classroom with questions rather than pre-formed answers about how they can respond to the world and further shape it as compassionate, intelligent, and creative people.