Quick Chat: Decisions and Crowded Classrooms

In this issue’s Quick Chat, Tatiana Geron, Ph.D.’23, explains what “crowdedness” means when it comes to ethics and teacher decision-making in the classroom. Geron, a former middle school teacher, wrote about the term recently in the Harvard Educational Review. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Colby College in Maine where she is looking at the intersection of political philosophy and teacher practice. 

In basic terms, what does “crowdedness” mean?  
[Educator] Philip Jackson came up with the term in Life in Classrooms, which he wrote in 1968. In this book, which is a classroom ethnography, he uses the word “crowdedness” to describe how a classroom is a collection of individuals, but also has its own group dynamic. And because it’s a bounded physical space where many individuals are interacting and become a cohesive group, teachers have to worry about things like students’ needs trading off against each other and how to preserve peace and order, but also how to let students be themselves. It’s that interplay between the group and the individual, and teachers have to make decisions that allow that interplay to work. What I add to Jackson’s concept is the idea that these decisions are ethical, not just practical, so crowdedness has an ethical dimension to it too. 

How did you experience this when you were teaching?  
I taught middle school in Boston Public Schools and in New York City for several years. I had come to the classroom with a political philosophy background as an undergraduate. I was always thinking about education as having an ethical and a political dimension, but I rarely felt like I had the opportunity when I was in the classroom to step back and think about how decisions I was making had an ethical aspect to them. They had to do with my own values. Every decision you make as a teacher has to do with the well-being of your students and their opportunities for flourishing. That can feel really weighty as a teacher. And teachers just don’t have opportunities frequently to reflect on or talk about that with colleagues.

Give an example of an ethical dilemma you faced in the classroom.  
One dilemma that I thought about a lot was how to support students with really diverse learning needs all in the same classroom. I had a lot of students who were English language learners in my fifth-grade classroom when I taught in Boston. One student in particular who came in the middle of the year had just moved from the Dominican Republic. He had not had much formal schooling. He was such a dynamic member of the class community. That was really meaningful. However, it didn’t solve the dilemma of how to make sure he was getting the instruction he needed, in his home language and in English, where in both he was reading far below grade level. I had to figure out how to get the student the resources that he needed that didn’t take him out of the classroom all the time and change our community. I wanted him to be with us, but how do I do that in a way where he’s not just on the computer using Google Translate all the time? Once you have a student in your class community, that’s an important dynamic that shapes how you make decisions. When you make an ethical decision as a teacher, it’s based on so many decisions that you made before. It’s based on the group dynamic that you have. And then it impacts the kind of decisions that you can make in the future. 

It’s complicated! 
I came up in a time of “teach like a champion” and a lot of accountability measures. The understanding seemed to be, if you follow these rules and do these best practices, you’ll have this ethical impact. The reality was so much more complicated than that. It had more to do with: How do you get to know your students? How do you know your school environment? How do you understand how the decisions that you make have ramifications throughout the year and among different students? And, of course, how do you do that in a just way?