​Brookfield

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A teacher cannot be a fly on the wall if that means being an unobtrusive observer. If you say nothing this will be interpreted either as withholding approval or as tacit agreement. Students will always be wondering what your opinion is about what they're doing. Better to give some brief indication of what's on your mind than to have students obsessed with whether your silence means disappointment or satisfaction with their efforts. A critically reflective teacher will make sure that she finds some way of regularly seeing what she does through students' eyes. In learning about the different ways in which students view her silence, she will be in a much better position to make sure that her fly on the wall presence has the helpful consequences she seeks. She will learn when, and how much, to disclose, and she will know about the confidence-inducing effects of such disclosure. She will also know when keeping her own counsel leads to students doing some productive reflection, and when it paralyses them.