Jeff "Captain Kirk" Wolfsberg

About a year ago, I was giving an assembly to a large school in the Midwest.  There must have been over a thousand people in the auditorium, both students and faculty. It was 8:00 AM and the weather on the way to school was cold and rainy.  Because of my schedule, I was speaking a week before finals.

These are not ideal speaking conditions. There is a big difference between a crowd who voluntarily comes to your talk and a crowd who is mandated to come.  As students clumsily took their seats and faculty assumed their perch along the sidewalls, cups of coffee in hand, papers to correct in the other, I sensed passive hostility.

Students assume the worst of course.  Another guy who going to tell us what to do, faculty if they don’t know me often default to if you’ve seen one drug speaker you’ve seen them all.  Students are barely awake and teachers are eager to retreat to their classrooms to prepare for finals.

I walked around the room introducing myself to those students willing to make eye contact.  This is a little speaker trick if you feel nervous. Maybe you’ll find a few friendly souls to make eye contact with during your talk.  Instead, one student asked, “How long are you talking?” and another said “I saw you last year at another school, are you going to say the same thing?” I was.

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.