Tim Walz and Trust as a Precondition for Learning

"Coach Walz" is helping us think about teaching and teachers.

The selection of Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate has been interesting for lots of reasons, but given my own interests and the theme of this newsletter, I’m particularly fascinated by some of the news coming out about his longtime work as a teacher of social studies/geography and multi-sport coach.

Writing at Slate, Shirin Ali reports on some of the public commentary from Walz’s students, including contacting some who had posted publicly on what it was like to have Walz as a teacher. One former student told Ali, “I’m just incredibly proud of him and the way … he conducts himself and how he’s maintained being an authentic, genuine, caring human being in positions that seem to not attract that type of person or those qualities in people.”

It is interesting to see the qualities we like to see in teachers - authentic, genuine, caring - being characterized as incompatible with being a public servant through elected office, but this is perhaps not surprising. Walz’s chief political talent appears to be his ability to be genuine when interacting with other people in various contexts.

Walz’s chief asset as a teacher appears to be his ability to engage students through establishing a relationship of trust, with one student telling Ali, “everybody seemed to trust and wanted to have, no matter where you were, what clique you were in.”

Given how close Walz’s political and teaching skills are, maybe we should look more often into the teaching ranks for political leaders.

That same student said that Walz was the first person to stoke an interest in the wider world by requiring her to bring in news stories that interested them. Walz took the students’ perspectives seriously, and required them to take ownership of their own views and values.

Thinking about Walz’s use of current events to engage and empower his students I was struck by the contrast with what my friend Nick Covington of The Human Restoration Project experienced as an AP history teacher in Iowa at the end of his time as a classroom teacher. When teaching an AP European history unit on nationalism, Covington had students working with sources ranging from speeches given by the French nationalists to the statements of those participating in the Charlottesville, Unite the Right rally in 2017. Following anonymous complaints, Covington was called into his principal’s office and told, explicitly, “Current events do not belong in history class.”

Here we see the change in trust from the late 1990’s period of Walz’s career, and Covington’s, and how this distrust will inevitably harm engagement.

As I think about it, the lack of trust is perhaps one of our greatest barriers to increasing engagement. Consider the push among some for the most extreme versions of direct instruction where teachers are asked to work from literal scripts.

Or attempts to wall certain books off from students.

Or what about what generative AI is doing to the relationship between students and their writing, as some instructors now inherently distrust what students are delivering?

I often focus in my writing on particular pedagogical techniques in order to get students engaged with school and learning, but these techniques only work if there is a shared belief that all parties involved in the learning equation are after the same things.

How often are these conditions in place? How often are these conditions the chief concern of the people have the power to shape those conditions?

The other thing that jumps out about Walz’s work as a teacher and his students’ engagement is that student engagement begets teacher engagement and so on and so on in a virtuous circle.

Anyone who has taught knows that it is difficult, sometimes both physically and spiritually draining work.

But teachers have also experienced the amazing high of connection and engagement that can sometimes happen when things are going well. This sensation gets flattened out to “making a difference” in students lives, and I don’t mean to suggest this is an insignificant thing, but teaching also makes a difference in the teacher’s life.

It is literally the experience of being alive, engaging in work that can only happen in communion with others. Trust is a two-way street. Learning is a team sport.

So is democracy, for that matter.

Walz, like all good teachers, seems to get this, which maybe why they’re calling him “Coach Walz” at the Democratic National Convention.

I have no idea what November’s election is going to bring, but as someone who cares very much about how we teach and believes that the first order for improving teaching requires us to improve the conditions under which teachers work, I’m glad that we’ll have a teacher as a major part of the national conversation for a few more months, if not longer.