Education:Self-Improvement
The discussion also covers the importance of relationships in student success, emphasizing that students flourish when they have supportive relationships with non-parent adults who engage in meaningful conversations about purpose and transcendence.
Additionally, the conversation explores practical classroom strategies, such as creating engaging and participatory environments, and the importance of viewing knowledge as a gift to be shared.
The Just Schools Podcast is brought to you by the Baylor Center for School Leadership. Each week, we'll talk to catalytic educators who are doing amazing work.
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Jon Eckert: @eckertjon
Center for School Leadership at Baylor University: @baylorcsl
Jon Eckert:
Hey, we're here today with Ted Cockle, a good friend and colleague who gets to teach in the leadership minor at Baylor University with me, has a great background. So Ted, thanks for being with us today.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks so much.
Jon Eckert:
And could you just give us a quick 30,000 foot view of how you ended up in the office right next to mine at Baylor University teaching all different majors, leadership principles.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah, it's pretty wild. I usually go back to, I've always wanted to be a doctor. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. I love figuring out how stuff works and what's more complicated than the human body? And it took me a little while, but then I realized that wasn't it. I needed more complicated systems. There were more other systems to look into. I was a systems guy. I wanted to figure out all those things. Ultimately led me to start climbing the philosophical ladder. And that got me up to the most complicated and most enduring questions of what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to flourish? And so I am a doctor, as my boys remind me, not the kind that can help people.
Jon Eckert:
That's right.
Ted Cockle:
But a doctor nonetheless, helping us think through what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to flourish? I think those are inherently leadership questions and ones that I help my students explore.
Jon Eckert:
So I'm so grateful that you're here. We both had the experience of being at Wheaton College, me a few years before you, but that formational liberal arts education that we got there plays out in the work that we get to do with kids today. And most of our audience that listens to just schools or K-twelve educators. So what do you see as some of the key themes that you think really matter for educators to keep in mind as they deal with the practical realities of the classroom that we exist in today?
Ted Cockle:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that liberal arts education really formed me. So going to Wheaton and then even the program that I did here helped really think through pulling on a number of different disciplines. And I think that's plays out in the classroom, helping students make connections, for me, that's my goal. So there's so many different specialties and so many different areas on campus in a college university setting, lots of different silos and things. I view my goal as creating a space for them to pull those threads together. So you're asking about practical implications. I just read something the other day that it was something to the effect of, I used to walk into the classroom and say, "All right, students, quiet down, quiet down. It's time for..." But now this educator was talking about how he walks into the classroom and he says, "All right, put your phones away. Let's talk." It's silent. The classroom's silent when you walk in.
And I find that is often the biggest challenge that I face in the classroom is how do you get students engaged? How do you get them to think? And that's why I love thinking about those things that pull the threads together because there's an immediate need. And I love seeing that moment when laptops get folded down, iPads get turned over or turned off. Phones get put back in pockets because students' eyes are now, wait, that's a question I've been asking. So how do I start with where the student is at to help engage them with a question that they've been perhaps wrestling with but didn't know and they're like, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, no. I don't know the answer to that. I don't always get it. I definitely don't always get it. But you know it when you see it. And those are those moments that are so life-giving as an instructor.
Jon Eckert:
Yeah. Early childhood teacher shared this quote I share it all the time. No profession can compete with the spark between souls that occurs between teachers and students. So those sparks are what keep you coming back.
Ted Cockle:
That's right.
Jon Eckert:
What I think, I always am very clear to our K through 12 sisters and brothers that our work is way easier than theirs is. These are students that made it all the way through high school, got admitted into Baylor, chose to be in our class and are paying tuition to be there. And so when I'm complaining about the challenges of engaging students, I realize that that really sometimes falls on deaf ears in a K through 12 world where they're dealing with so many of these issues with students that aren't as formed as ours are. They haven't been able to manage some of the impulses that they have. So I'm curious if there are a couple of mindset shifts that you think are important for us to think about what it really means, because I love where you started. What does it mean to be human as an educator? That's our job is to help students think about this. So what are a couple key things that you do or you think about, the ways you think about things that help you do the things that make it meaningful for kids?
Ted Cockle:
Just on your point about K-12 instructors, that's honestly where I go for most of my practical advice is my brother-in-law, who's a high school English teacher, visiting his class transformed the way that I teach in the classroom, even down to a recent text exchange we had last week where he suggested doing a speed dating or speed friending idea, talking through ideas and working through things. So I implemented that and it worked great. Great conversation. So thankful for him. Shout out to Jake Krogh there on the podcast.
Jon Eckert:
Another Wheaton grad. There we go.
Ted Cockle:
Another Wheaton grad indeed. So yeah, practical shifts there. I think this can be philosophical, but it then leads into a practical implication. What is actually happening in the classroom space? How are we actually fundamentally pursuing knowledge? If knowledge, this comes from a great book that I'm super thankful for called Intellectual Appetite. What is the pursuit of knowledge? It's an appetite. We are pursuing, learning about the nature of reality. But there's two ways that we can do that. There's an ordered way of pursuing knowledge and then a disordered way of pursuing knowledge. An ordered way of pursuing knowledge recognizes that knowledge is a gift that comes from above, comes from the Lord, and we are seeking to understand and better understand his world, how he's created us, what's going on and how we make order out of chaos in this world. A disordered way of pursuing knowledge sees it as something to be hoarded, something to be garnered for myself, for my own purposes so that I can effectively be God.
I'm controlling it, I'm grasping it, I'm squeezing. It's mine and my own. And then I set up barriers as to who can have access to it. That has massive implications. And that's how I start every single one of my classes the beginning of fall, what kind of classroom are we going to have here? What kind of classroom do we want to be? How do we want to be known as a class? Do we want to be hoarders of knowledge or are we wanting to be pursuing knowledge as stewards who are recognizing this is knowledge that's been passed on to us from someone else, and then we are seeking to steward it until we can pass it on to someone else. That then creates this multiplicative chain of knowledge. Me passing on knowledge does not diminish my knowledge, but enhances and expands our overall understanding of what knowledge is.
Practically in the classroom this means we're going to ask hard questions. We're running towards challenging questions. We're never shying away from them. And I want students to know that, particularly in this age where I think students at times are fearful to speak up. The reason why the one-on-one interactions or group discussions work so well is because they feel a little bit safer. They're nervous in a big group setting to articulate an idea that might be controversial, but it's amazing what we can get to. By the end of the semester they'll start saying things like, Oh, this is a studious space, which is the language that this author uses for the ordered pursuit of knowledge.
Studious space, is this right? Can I understand this? Am I understanding this correctly? Or Dr. Cockle, can you explain that to me for the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth time, I still don't get it. And being willing to see them as whole persons pursuing an ordered vision of knowledge, an ordered pursuit of knowledge. So those are just some of the practical ways that I see that. That's how I handle it in the classroom, start that way. And then I remind them of that language throughout the semester. I think that's been pretty helpful.
Jon Eckert:
Love that, because you and I both get to teach the capstone leadership class. And so we have about 15 to 20 people in that class, they are not huge classes, but trying to get the discussion going is challenging in an ordered way. And so, one of the things I did, and we've talked about this, I did this semester because I felt I needed to do it, was we printed out all the readings for the semester. There's about 25 different authors they read. It's about a 650-page course pack. We put it in a binder and we gave it to them at the beginning of the semester and said, Hey, for this class, all you will need is the text, a pen, paper, and each other.
Because we wanted the focus to be on these hard questions, these deep meaningful questions, some of which they've never wrestled with because I find one of the things that a lot of students have not done when they get to me when they're 21, 22, they haven't engaged deeply on these things because they're hard, and they haven't developed the cognitive endurance and Oh, I can just google that, or I can use AI. Well, AI is just consensus. It's not wisdom. How do we get to wisdom? And that's what we need humans for because we are made in the image of God and we can point each other toward those things. And in that relationship, there's that depth. So one of the things I love about you in your classes is you don't shy away from the hard questions, but then you also have this life-on-life perspective.
I know you've been meeting with one of a great student who's a junior here at Baylor. You've been meeting with him I think every week since freshman year in a mentoring role. So talk about how you live life with students, which I think as a huge blessing as a college professor that we get to do this. But talk a little bit about how you do that outside the classroom as well.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah, it starts in the classroom. In the classroom, but before class, I think a lot of times we can, even us professors are focused on ourselves. We're nervous before a lecture. Yes, we get nervous still before lectures, before discussions. Is this going to go well? Is this going to be a good one? Did I prepare enough? Did I read this? Do I understand this enough before the students? And so we can be introspective, we can be using that time. We're in the classroom maybe five, 10 minutes before to shuffle around. But I've really tried to make a commitment that I'm in the classroom no later than five minutes before class and hopefully 10 minutes before, and that's time where all my files are already set up. I'm ready to go and I can focus on students. So I come in, how's it going? I know their names.
I'm asking them, how was your weekend? What did you do? What made it great? What made it challenging? Or if a student is clearly in a state of a disarray or perhaps a little flustered or, "Oh, I'm only on four hours of sleep." "Oh, why?" So seeing them as humans outside of our classroom is the place it has to start. They're not just minds on sticks that come in, receive knowledge and then depart, but they're well-rounded students and whole persons. That's part of what it is to be a whole person, is that we're not just our minds, but we are everything else that's happening in our life.
Jon Eckert:
Which makes teaching a lot more interesting.
Ted Cockle:
It really does. It helps with illustrations too, because I've had a conversation with so-and-so, now I can bring this point home by illustrating something in an abstract sense in a way that doesn't reveal what's going on in their life, but can help speak directly to what's going on. Much like a sermon being given to a particular congregation at a particular moment. I think lectures in classrooms, discussions in classrooms are learning experiences that are given to a particular group at a particular time for a particular reason. And that's why AI can't be a professor. That's why AI can't be teachers. The teaching occupation, teaching profession is unique and it requires humans interacting with other humans in humanly ways. So now I've lost the thread of your question, but, no mentorship, life on life. So then those often lead to follow-up conversations. Students will pop in always asking the follow-up conversation, how's it going? What's going on? What are your thoughts on the class even? Giving them opportunities to evaluate and push back.
Some of my classes, I require time for them to come into office hours to get to know them. I know you do that as well. I've got a teaching vocation class this semester. We're dealing with some pretty big issues about what it means to be human and what it means to flourish. Go figure. And I want them to come in and we're going to talk about it. So I've had a couple of those meetings and I've got a couple more coming up in the next couple of weeks. I can't begin to tell you how fun it is to dive deep into those conversations in a one-on-one setting would make it easy. There's hospitality involved. I've got tea and coffee and hot chocolate, whatever they're wanting to drink, maybe some cookies or something. And we're having a conversation. It's not about a grade, it's about the ideas. So I think that's a huge part of it, and my topic lends itself to that. But other topics can as well, whether you're a math teacher, a physics teacher, or whatever.
Jon Eckert:
Well, because we are humans, so one of the things that we've been able to do over the last 15 years is have students into our home. And Jake, you're a brother-in-law and students for years at Wheaton and now at Baylor where they come in Sunday for lunch and they see our family and whatever status it's in. And we have plenty of food. I'm cooking, so it's one of six meals, but there's always plenty. And our kids that have grown, we now have a 2018 and 15-year-old. They've had college students that are a few steps ahead of them in our home for 15 years. And so it's not just, I think sometimes students think that teachers are just doing things for them, but we get great benefit from the relationships we have with students. So Tavis, the student that you meet with, he is a huge blessing. I had him in our leadership capstone class.
And so it's not just a one-way relationship where we're pouring into a student and we get nothing back. It's this reciprocal learning that we know our content, but seeing it through their eyes and the way they apply it to their context enriches the understanding. And that's why in my classroom where I said, all you need is the text in each other and this, you don't need devices in here. It wasn't a, we're not going to have in a punitive way. You have this rich humanity right here that'll allow you to understand these texts and these big ideas better if we're focused in that way. So again-
Ted Cockle:
That's brilliant-
Jon Eckert:
... I always say we have the best jobs in the world.
Ted Cockle:
Oh yeah.
Jon Eckert:
Because this is amazing. We get to tackle these questions. This is our job to tackle these questions.
Ted Cockle:
And the joy after years, Tavis is a junior, he's still a student, and I had him as a student, but now I view him almost more as a friend than anything. That's the primary identity that he's grown into. And we swap stories about fun movies that we've been watching, and then we'll talk about vocation and calling and meaning and purpose. And I'll share about things that I'm thinking about. He's sharing things he's... It's friendship. It was founded on intellectual friendship and community that then leads to full on.
Jon Eckert:
One of the things I wanted you to spend a little bit of time talking about, because you've worked on this instrument for K through 12 schools looking at faith formation in schools. So talk a little bit about the way you think about that. I think a little bit differently than a lot of the formation tools that are out there. We have, it's very difficult to observe what's happening internally in someone.
Ted Cockle:
That's right.
Jon Eckert:
So faith formation is challenging. So talk a little bit about how you think about that with K through 12 and even in college students, because I know you do a lot of thinking about this.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah. I'll start in saying you can't map the Holy Spirit. A friend of mine-
Jon Eckert:
Good caveat.
Ted Cockle:
Yes, a friend of mine is, he's a mechanical engineering guy, and he's telling me these stories about integrating faith with learning. And his primary one is that after decades and decades in technology and all these things, we still can't map the wind. And he goes, "I think that's the perfect image right there," because the spirit is like the wind. We cannot map it, we can't trace it. We can draw close to it. We get closer to the root, but we can't map it. We don't know where the wind is going to go. And I love that image. And yet I think we can get closer and closer to the root. What I mean by that is we often, when looking at faith, we start particularly in the K-12 spaces, we start with exemplars. We have models of what we'd like our graduates to be like, graduate profiles. They're this. They've got this virtue and that virtue, and they're exemplifying faith. They're reading their Bible every day. And these are wonderful visions of things to aim for.
And we should hold up exemplars. Exemplars inspire us to be like them. So I love that. But it can't stop there, because oftentimes those exemplars are known for either their belief or their behavior. And we're seeing faith evaluated on the base of their cognitive ascension to particular doctrines, important, or their ability to produce particular fruits, particular behaviors, particular practices of the Christian faith. Also very important. But the reality is our beliefs in our head, our behaviors in our hand, they come from somewhere. There's something closer to the root. A good tree bears good fruit. It's not that the fruit makes the tree good. In scripture the tree is always the source of the fruit. The good tree bears the good fruit.
So we need to be careful of the direction here because our behaviors could be, as one scholar writes, Paul Tripp, he writes, we could staple fruit to a tree, but stapling a plump apple to a dead tree does not make that tree come alive. So what if the faith practices that we're upholding is exemplary or measuring as an indicator of faith are actually just being fruit stapled, the right thing, but for the wrong reason. What happens? We've missed it then. Or what if they have the right knowledge, but again, for the wrong reason, maybe they have a disordered pursuit of knowledge and it's hoarding it and it's saying, look how amazing I am. I know all these theological truths, or look how amazing I am. I serve all these different things, but they're missing the key posture that's there. And so, one of the things I've been thinking about, and one of the things that we've been trying to wrestle with and think through is could we measure something that's a little bit closer to the root, so to speak, closer to the trunk of the tree that's bearing good fruit?
And I think the answer there is the heart. How can we measure the affections of a student? Now that's hard to do. It's a latent reality. Again, we're not mapping the spirit. You can't do that. But I think we can begin to get a semblance of understanding a student's posture. And we can do this in college. We can do this in K-12 settings. And we've done it by trying to ask how are they identifying? A lot of the psychological research is using matters of salience, things that are front of mind. If it's front of mind, it's part of the way that you're seeing yourself. It's part of the way that you're identifying yourself. It's part of the narrative identity that you are taking on as you begin to develop your sense of who you are. So if faith and identifying with the Christian narrative is close to their mind and salient, then it's often going to be close to their heart.
Those things that are close to our heart are usually the things that we talk about most. They are indicators of deeper senses of desire that are the source of motivation. So when we're talking about faith formation in a school setting, I think we need to be careful not to just focus on belief, not to just focus on behavior and not just to focus on the heart, but how can the three of those work together in tandem to know the good, to love the good, and to do the good. Knowledge, the head, love, the heart, do, the hands.
Jon Eckert:
Love that. Love that. Well, we're going to move into what's front of mind for you now-
Ted Cockle:
Sure. Sure.
Jon Eckert:
... which is our lightning round. So we generally ask for word, phrase, or sentence about a question that I will ask at random, which you've not been prepared for. So we'll start with this one. What's your favorite book you've read in the last year? I know you're always reading, but what's your favorite book that it just pops to mind? What's front of mind?
Ted Cockle:
Front of mind is probably the book Character Gap by Christian Miller. He talks about this idea that perhaps we're not as good as we think we are, and perhaps we're not as bad as we could be. We often live more often. We often live more often. Good. That's clear. We often live somewhere in that character gap, as he calls it. So what do we do?
Jon Eckert:
What's his background? Is he a-
Ted Cockle:
He's a psychologist at Wake Forest.
Jon Eckert:
All right, all right. Hey, that-
Ted Cockle:
Yeah. Great Christian guy.
Jon Eckert:
... sounds fascinating. Sounds fascinating. All right. Worst piece of advice you've ever received as an educator or a scholar?
Ted Cockle:
Let's see.
Jon Eckert:
Or as a dad or as a husband, you can go anywhere with this.
Ted Cockle:
Worst piece of advice in the academic setting I think is probably just survive.
Jon Eckert:
Okay. That's bleak.
Ted Cockle:
It's a little bleak. It's like, well, it's going to be so hard and you're going to do all these things. And rather than being proactive and thinking about what might lead to flourishing.
Jon Eckert:
That's good. Best piece of advice you've ever either given or received.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah. Rest in Christ.
Jon Eckert:
Good reminder. That's a lot better than survive.
Ted Cockle:
Yes, indeed it is. And I think it comes back to what I was talking about earlier where a lot of times we're focused in on ourself, but when we're resting in Christ, we are free from the preoccupation of the self. So the advice is a reminder for me always. And it's one that I'm constantly reminding myself to look up for my own naval gazing and see who needs the good works that the Lord's prepared for me.
Jon Eckert:
So we get to work with 18 to 22 year olds in general, what makes you most concerned about our students that are 18 to 22?
Ted Cockle:
We taught on ethics today. I asked the question, how do you know what's good? Crickets. How do you know and begin to evaluate what's good? They didn't have any answers. When I put them into small groups, still didn't have any answers. When I drummed up, I don't know if that's a proper term, but when I started asking, dredging for answers, it was things like the law, what people tell you, what you feel.
Jon Eckert:
That's what happens when you're in an unmoored society that's lost touch with what truth is, and especially truth in love. And it's very hard to exist in any kind of way because you live in this individualized relativistic, what's right for me may not be right for you. And so if that's the heuristic, you're in trouble. What makes you most optimistic?
Ted Cockle:
Oh, the fact that there are good people having good conversations with students. I think the number one thing that continues to be a determining factor of a student succeeding and flourishing in life, in college, is whether or not they have a relationship with somebody who's not their parent. And when in that relationship, they have conversations about meaning and purpose when they talk about transcendent things, this continues to be the number one indicator of a student flourishing, working towards success. All the numbers, students are often finding this in church settings. They're finding this in teachers, they're finding this in coaches. So the fact that there are people pouring into students all around the world, that gives me hope.
Jon Eckert:
Yeah, the number two factor, according to Gallup in K through 12 education that indicates student engagement is I have an adult who makes me excited about the future. And that's it. It's those questions because we all have them.
Ted Cockle:
Totally. And I think sometimes we think it's more complicated than that. We want a new intervention, we want a new idea. We want the silver bullet. But you know what? It's showing up day after day and having a conversation, just saying, how are you doing today? And if the opportunity arises, sometimes it does. Students having a tough day, you can ask that next question. And then the next one and the next one. Probably then you're going to start talking about things of meaning and purpose.
Jon Eckert:
And it's not always convenient at the time that works best for you. In fact, it almost never is.
Ted Cockle:
Often not indeed.
Jon Eckert:
But thank you for taking the time to show up and talk today. Appreciated the conversation. Appreciate all you do, Ted.
Ted Cockle:
Yeah, it's my joy. Thank you so much for having me.
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