Most teachers, of course, do not enter education because of their passion to partner with parents. However, it does not take long for a new teacher to realize that one key factor for a successful year is going to be this relationship. Philosophically, this is natural because parents are the primary stewards of their children and possess key insights about their development. And, at a more pragmatic level, independent school parents are paying a premium for their child’s education and expect to be informed and, to some extent, involved throughout the year.

To end the year well, master teachers provide closure with parents regarding their child’s growth and development. Whether this happens formally at an end-of-year parent-teacher conference or through a different form of intentional conversation, teachers can leave parents feeling grateful and deeply appreciative. In this article I will offer three particular ways teachers can build upon the partnership they have cultivated through the year with parents, so that everyone can leave for the summer on a positive note.

1. Demonstrate your understanding of the parents’ hopes and fears for their child.

In Understanding Independent School Parents (Wise Teacher Press, 2012), psychologist Michael G. Thompson and teacher Alison Fox Mazzola map out the core principles of a successful family school relationship. This relationship, the authors note, is complex. But with some foresight and planning, teachers can build strong alliances with parents.

One suggestion is, at the beginning of the year, to ask parents about their hopes and fears for their children. It is common for teachers to feel the pressure to perform in their interactions with parents. Whether it is demonstrating their knowledge of the curriculum or sharing insights about their students, teachers often err on the side of dominating the parent partnership with their own voice. But Dr. Thompson suggests that the key to a productive relationship of any kind is to first build trust by seeking to understand what the person is hoping for or worried about. Taking time to listen, and listening well, is the key to forging a strong partnership from the beginning.

Then, at the end of the year, a teacher can reference these desires in her conversation to wrap up the year. For example, a teacher might share with a parent, “At the beginning of the year, you mentioned a concern that your son would continue to struggle in math. Well, as you know, there have been some bumps this year. But there have also been some real victories that I would like to remind us about. This is worth celebrating together.”

When parents feel heard and understood, they are much more likely to trust and respect their child’s teacher throughout the year. Then, at the end of the year, the partnership can conclude with shared appreciation and gratitude for the journey together.

2. Debrief the plan you implemented in collaboration with parents to help the child grow.

It is a common mantra in the business world to underpromise and overdeliver. This insight can, to some degree, be applied in the parent-teacher partnership. It is important to not hubristically claim that any one teacher can “fix” a child or solve a learning problem after years of struggle. There are no guarantees when dealing with humans, no sure-fire way to guarantee a particular outcome, whether it be a particular grade, college acceptance, or habit development. Teachers are therefore wise to not overpromise what they cannot deliver with certainty.

At the same time, at the beginning of the year, teachers can instill confidence with parents through crafting a specific plan to help a child grow in a key area. Identify a root obstacle in the way of a child’s growth and then share a proposed strategy for collaborative implementation. This is what Dr. Thompson calls “claiming a child.” After all, parents partner with schools because they want their children to be known, loved, and educated. While “educated” is a vague term, as classical educators we can think of all the ways we support whole-person growth: habit formation, character and spiritual development, the cultivation of friendships, skill mastery, knowledge acquisition, and more.

Teachers can end the year on a strong note with parents by revisiting the plan they agreed upon at the beginning of the year. This communicates to parents, first, consistency in the teacher’s plan for the year, and second, that the teacher has been thoroughly committed to helping the child grow. By debriefing the plan at the end of the year, both teacher and parents can conclude the partnership with a sense of clarity and accomplishment about everyone’s hard work throughout the year.

3. Demonstrate professionalism and respect through the last day of school.

It may be impossible to go back in time and do over again a particular parent-teacher conference that did not go as planned. But it is never too late to step up one’s professionalism when interacting with parents.

Like it or not, independent schools are service organizations. Terms are clarified, the enrollment agreement is signed, tuition is collected, and the service is provided over the course of the school year. Parents pay a particular amount and expect a value in proportion to what they have paid. And while there are no guarantees in education–teachers do not have full control over whether a child passes math or overcomes a particular character flaw–parents can and should expect their interactions with teachers to be professional and respectful.

One way teachers can demonstrate their professionalism is through having effective and respectful conversations with parents. For parent-teacher conferences, this includes keeping track of the time, having an agenda prepared in advance, sharing student work in an organized and confident manner, and listening to parent opinions respectfully. Similarly, in phone conversations, teachers should strive to listen well, communicate the agenda up front, and be sensitive to the direction the conversation is going.

At the end of the year, teachers can conclude the parent partnership on a strong note by asking, “How have you seen your child grow this year? Do you have any concerns or questions as we wrap up this year? How can I help you and your child leave for the summer feeling at peace about the year?” Asking these sorts of questions helps parents process the year, including the victories, challenges, and perhaps unresolved questions. This processing then leads to clarity and an inner sense of gratitude about their relationship with the teacher.

Conclusion

There are many joys of working in education, but in my experience, the greatest joy of all is the myriad of relationships that are formed over the course of the year. While for many teachers the parent partnership can be a source of stress, it does not have to be. By implementing the guidance outlined in this article, both teachers and parents can depart for the summer with a sense of gratitude and deep appreciation for how the Lord worked in and through the partnership, and ultimately, in the life of the child.

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Today the term ‘philosophy’ is almost synonymous with abstract questioning and skepticism; too often the modern discipline is construed as anything but practical—more likely to be concerned with whether or not we are in the matrix, or if words have any definite meaning at all, than how to live life in the here and now. As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi mentions in his classic Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

“’Philosophy’ used to mean ‘love of wisdom,’ and people devoted their lives to it for that reason. Nowadays professional philosophers would be embarrassed to acknowledge so naïve a conception of their craft. Today a philosopher may be a specialist in deconstructionism or logical positivism, an expert in early Kant or late Hegel, an epistemologist or an existentialist, but don’t bother him with wisdom.” (138)

The specialization of modern philosophy has resulted in a focus on the obscure to the neglect of the tried and true. To be sure, deep and unanswerable questions are not new to the philosophical tradition, but the workable wisdom of the tradition has too often gotten lost in abstruse reasonings.

Part of the problem with this development is that philosophy is neglected among the young: at our PreK-12 schools and in home education. Parents, teachers and curriculum planners have imbibed the assumption that philosophy is for college students. The unfortunate outcome is that few college students have been inspired with the love of wisdom that would make collegiate study of philosophy fruitful. But more than that, the moral reflection and wisdom necessary for life are absent from the time of life when they are most necessary to form character.

Of course, I know very well that philosophy was conceived of as the culmination of the liberal arts tradition. (Clark and Jain make a movement in the right direction by according it a place in 9^th-11th grades in their paradigm; see The Liberal Arts Tradition, 2^nd ed. Appendix VI, p. 287.) In the Roman period only after gaining mastery of the liberal arts of language and mathematics would a student proceed to Athens or some other school of philosophers to pursue the deepest questions. But this didn’t mean that philosophical questions were neglected along the way. And if we’re going to recapture the love of wisdom and restore the school of philosophers in our educational renaissance, we’re going to have to find ways to embody the issues and subject matter of moral philosophy more clearly in our pre-college teaching.

There are three clear steps to doing this that are more or less hinted at in our psychologist’s reflections on finding joy and fulfillment by getting into the flow of thought through amateur philosophy. They are 1) to recapture the vision of teachers and parents as amateur philosophers, 2) to embrace the humble path of wisdom, and 3) to avoid the trap of specialization by becoming philosophical generalists, approaching every subject from the perspective of moral philosophy.

Teachers as Philosophers

Our cultural conception of the ideal teacher is haunted by the ghost of amateur philosophers. Mr. Miyagi from the 1984 film The Karate Kid is a good example of this. While the character Daniel benefits from the domain knowledge and skill of Mr. Miyagi in karate, what he is really in need of is instruction in a way of life. Mr. Miyagi teaches him how to overcome obstacles and setbacks, by, for instance, repairing the damaged bicycle that Daniel had simply thrown into the dumpster. Even Mr. Miyagi’s famous trick of teaching Daniel karate blocks through household chores is just as much a moral and spiritual lesson about humbly accepting the necessity of work and submitting to elders or the tradition even when you don’t understand. And the heart of the movie turns on the acceptance of tragedy and grief through stoic and eastern conceptions of self-mastery.

This is just one example that could be multiplied many times, with the point being that our culture still has this dream of a philosopher-teacher whose role it is to guide us on a quasi-religious quest for wisdom and the good life. This fact owes something to Socrates and to stoics like Epictetus, but also to many others in a great tradition of philosophical schools down through the centuries.

But in the modern educational system the possibility for teachers to take on this role has been all but crowded out through the domain-specific siloing of teachers into prescribed time-windows and the competing conception of teachers as professional bureaucrats who dare not venture into the personal lives and values of their students. (To be sure, if my children were attending a government school, I’m not sure I would want just anybody trying to play Mr. Miyagi for them….)

In the late 19^th and early 20^th century Charlotte Mason expressed a similar critique, except that she feared that a focus on cramming content into students was undercutting the teacher-philosopher approach. She felt that her philosophy of “living books” tested immediately by narration went a substantial way toward avoiding this problem:

“The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.” (vol. 6 p. 32)

The logic here is that when a teacher is too focused on forcing content into the minds of students, he or she is not able to focus on being the philosophical mentor that the student needs. Since the practice of narration helps to ensure that content is being assimilated well, the teacher is free to all but ignore that and focus on the deeper questions, the moral and intellectual habits of the student, and where next to point the student in their journey toward wisdom.

This dovetails well with the problem of specialization mentioned earlier. Our psychologist’s goal is, of course, to make us all amateur philosophers, and so his encouragements are particularly helpful to us as teachers, as we consider taking up Mr. Miyagi’s mantle:

 “Amateur philosophers, unlike their professional counterparts at universities, need not worry about historical struggles for prominence among competing schools, the politics of journals, and the personal jealousies of scholars. They can keep their minds on the basic questions.” (138)

Teachers at PK-12 schools and home educators should view themselves as amateur philosophers and focus on the big picture and the basic questions of philosophy. We should major on the majors, especially because we have the freedom to do so, but also because it’s what our students need at this stage in their development. And while natural philosophy and metaphysics have an important place, moral philosophy is the beating heart of an education centered on the formation of character or the development of virtue. Therefore moral philosophy should be pursued with an appropriate passion, as Socrates did, focusing on almost nothing else.

The Humble Path of Wisdom

For some of us teachers and parents, this will mean going back to philosophical school ourselves, in the sense of dusting off that old philosophy textbook from college. Or, even better, we could pick up for the first time those philosophical classics the textbook references, like Xenophon’s Memorabilia or The Memorable Sayings of Socrates, any of Plato’s Dialogues, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, or Epictetus’ Enchiridion. If we’re going to approach our teaching with a philosophical spirit, we have to catch the bug somewhere. It’s best to embrace that humble path of wisdom-seeking for ourselves and learn to revel in it. As our psychologist comments,

“Again, the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same rout because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable.” (139)

Of course, this is good advice if our goal is only attaining flow in the pursuit of wisdom for ourselves. However, one of the first principles of philosophy, or the love of wisdom, is that it cannot be merely self-referential in this way. Csikszentmihalyi has caught himself in a philosophical paradox here, recommending the modern dream of a light and easy path of pleasure.

Reading whatever I feel like doesn’t seem like the transcendent pursuit of wisdom. After all, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and a sense of humility and submission to the tradition in the midst of and in spite of painful emotions is one of the first lessons we have to learn. Even Mr. Miyagi knew that…. (“Wax on… wax off.”)

Christ’s yoke may be easy and his burden light to the one who has taken it on himself (see Matt 11:30), but this is only so for the one who has taken up his cross to follow the master to the place of his own brutal execution. Even for Socrates, the love of wisdom was a “practice of death” (Phaedo 81a). So perhaps I should rather urge you to read philosophy not for flow and pleasure, but for pain and death, and because you must, not because you will want to. Such is the minimum commitment necessary of one who would be a philosopher-teacher.

The Philosophical Generalist

But reading in this way to become philosopher-guides, we do not therefore embrace the steep climb of the specialist. We may need to climb the steep hill of Parnassus, or of Sinai, or finally of Calvary, but that is a different thing. As our psychologist mentions, specialization has its pitfalls:

“While specialization is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialization is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget their initial purpose in scholarship.” (139)

We can be content to be generalists, especially if we can zero in on wisdom as the goal, rather than even the enjoyment of the pursuit of wisdom, which after all is a rather strange self-referential circle that our secular psychologist is unwittingly leading us into.

Part of the reason he feels he must do this is because of the splintering of moral philosophy into the social sciences (like psychology) in the first place. In The Liberal Arts Tradition (2^nd ed) Clark and Jain tell of the quest of the modern social sciences, like psychology, ethics or economics, to unmoor themselves from the unproven assumptions of traditional moral philosophy:

“The contemporary social sciences… often attempt to study aspects of man in isolation from one another without reference to man as a whole person in society pursuing happiness in and through his relationships. They also tend to ignore the central question of how virtue and meaning in life contribute to human happiness…. The methodologies of the contemporary social sciences implicitly critique traditional moral philosophy by suggesting it relies on assumptions about human nature and human purpose that are not rationally or empirically verifiable.” (132)

Our psychologist feels the need to justify recommending philosophical study merely on the basis of its potential for entering the flow state—an empirically verifiable method of increasing positive emotion. And since we all know positive emotions are a good thing, in a value-less world, he can recommend it to us without breaking our taboos (ironically) of radical individualism, since the positivity of positive emotions is a lowest common denominator value that we can all get on board with.

Of course, one of the reasons that we have been able to go as far with Csikszentmihalyi as we have in this series is that he stands within the new positive psychology movement, which is itself a revival of the virtue tradition of moral philosophy. In fact, Clark and Jain commend Martin Seligman, a founder of the positive psychology movement for how he “has powerfully and successfully unmasked the assumptions of the old therapy model and defended a return to the notions of eudaimonia [happiness or human flourishing], virtue, and the pursuit of meaning in life” (158); he “recognizes that there is a moral nature to human persons and that the social scientists have to recall lost categories such as responsibility, will, character, and virtue” (160).

My readers will have no trouble embracing such concepts, embedded as they are within a Christian worldview. But we can still feel intimidated away from employing these concepts and questions in our teaching. Especially if we’ve received some higher-level academic training, we may have been indoctrinated into the reigning social science dogma that aims to keep philosophy at bay.

When teaching history, for instance, we’re more inclined to focus on insuring proper delivery of content and the mastery of facts. We tend to avoid discussion of the virtue or vice of figures, why certain courses of action were right or wrong, and the questions of proper relationships or the purpose of government. In literature classes, we focus on questions of technique and artistry, authorial background and narrative trivia, to the neglect of the central moral dilemma of the book.

The example of Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi should encourage us to embrace the perspective of moral philosophy in our teaching of any subject, but especially in the humanities. Where are you on your journey in the love of wisdom? Let’s restore the philosophical school in our hearts, our homes, and our PK-12 classrooms.

Previous articles in this series, The Flow of Thought

Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom.

Final installment: Part 9, The Lifelong Love of Learning.

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