Quiet children in the classroom: On helping not hurting

Most teachers enter the profession to help students. Yet. with the possible exception of parents, teachers have an unparalleled potential for harming young people. Unfortunately, that potential is realized far more often than we might think. Almost without exception kindergarten teachers tell me how delightful the little ones are when they first enter school. I am tOld that almost all of them are warm, affectionate, and anxious to learn. On the other hand, many secondary teachers tell me how miserable many of the young people are by the time they reach their classes. They are described as cold, unresponsive, and hostile to learning. The consistency with which these comments are repeated has led me to pose a question to students in my graduate classes in instructional communication: What have we as a profession done to produce this change in young people? Although blame is cast at many factors-society in general, TV, peers-almost everyone has to conceed that the teaching profession must admit to a major share of the blame, at the very least. 'While there are many things that teachers do that harm children (for the most part unknowingly, not maliciously), I want to restrict my comments here to things that teachers can do or avoid doing to help one portion of our young