Have you ever had a faculty member ask you how much is too much to disclose to a student about their personal life? I often get this question following a faculty in-service. The question either comes from a young teacher who is feeling uncomfortable with students asking them questions about their weekend. Or, the question comes from a veteran teacher caught in a teachable moment where personal disclosure appears to be prudent form of engagement.
My friend Susan Porter, Ph. D and I were recently talking about appropriate faculty disclosure. Susan had these wonderful insights.
“While I would never say categorically that personal disclosure by a faculty member is a bad idea (although I am inclined to think so—it is always better to err on the side of too little self-disclosure than too much) I think it is essential for adults to consider their motivation for sharing personal experiences with their students. As we know, teenagers are eager to push boundaries, and for the most part teachers deal with this effectively in the classroom, or when the subject isn’t personal – make the topic personal, however, and adults are put off-guard, and that’s precisely the time adults get into trouble. I am not an alarmist; I would never say that a little self-disclosure on the part of a teacher (depending on the topic, of course) will necessarily damage a student. But that little self-disclosure can hurt the adult a lot.
Here’s why: I explain to adults that despite what students say, and despite how hard they push, they have no interest in the personal lives of their teachers. When they push and prod – teenagers are looking for engagement, they are not looking for boundaries to be crossed. And self-disclosure is crossing the boundary. Adults sometimes confuse these two things–engagement and boundary crossing–and mistakenly think that they can’t do one without doing the other. It is important for adults to recognize the distinction between the two things, and understand what students need is the former, not the latter. To be good teachers we must stay engaged. And to be good adults we must not cross the boundaries. In the final analysis, I believe there is almost never a situation in which a student will benefit from a teacher telling them about their personal business. I advise teachers to think about the difference between engagement and disclosure and to recognize that students need us, just not all of us.
