Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
—Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”
Robin Neidorf’s Teach Beyond Your Reach (skip the exhaustive and exhausting subtitle), is a how-to, why-to book on effective distance teaching that strongly emphasizes relationships. With a MFA in creative nonfiction, online teaching and consulting experience, and a fully believable bio note that claims “Most of all, Robin loves to teach and enjoys having the opportunity to help other teachers learn to use the tools at their disposal to reach new audiences in new ways” (p. 223), Neidorf has created a book that becomes a distance learning medium in itself as it reaches and motivates its readers.
Teach Beyond Your Reach is a pleasurable piece of technical writing. It is portable (234 pages), practical, and centered on principles of personal interaction as a basis of learning. Like the book itself, the table of contents orients the reader to the basics and background of distance learning, it overviews and appraises available technology, and it addresses learner characteristics as well as course design and management. Neidorf also enriches her book with charts, worksheets for planning and evaluating distance learning experiences, and links to distance learning resources (one may also read the full introduction to the book and find the worksheets and some resource links at http://www.electric-muse.com/tbyr.asp). This much is summary; the heart of the book and the poetry in the title is the idea of reaching.
Neidorf’s title is rich and significant; it is a pun, of course, because distance learners and teachers are rarely in the same place at the same time. Teach Beyond Your Reach also becomes a motivational imperative for the reader (teacher) to metaphorically stretch; to exceed past and even present performance. Finally, Teach Beyond Your Reach embraces the idea of what is always beyond every human’s reach: the other [I’m thinking Emmanuel Levinas here: “But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal” (Levinas, 1961, p. 39)].
For teachers, of course, the all-important other is the learner. Neidorf makes two key claims about students: first, they are complex: “Who knew there was so much to learn about the students before we can even start planning what to teach? No wonder so many educational programs focus on content—it’s much easier to understand than students!” (p. 66). A second claim is that a teacher’s relationship with these complex students is primary to the ability to teach them: “It’s not about you; it’s about them.… What matters is that the individual learner achieves a successful outcome. The learner is the purpose. I am an instructor only when I am in relationship with a student” (p. 150).
Knowing and motivating students is important for Neidorf. Early in the book (chapter 2), she acknowledges learning styles and gives an overview of general characteristics of adult learners as well as how their generational placement influences their cultural/technical perceptions. She also emphatically states that “All behavior, including the learning process, is motivated.… Motivation is the secret ingredient in successful educational programs: no motivation, no learning” (p. 63). This chapter deals in generalizations that help teachers develop distance learning courses that meet students’ needs.
Neidorf revisits the idea of knowing and motivating students as individuals in chapter 6, in which she does not promise that building relationships with students will save time or make life easier [Sound like Steven Covey? “… you simply can’t think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things” (pp. 169-170)]. She puts it this way:
If it seems to take an immense amount of time and effort to focus on individuals and their needs, you are reading this chapter correctly. Because effective distance learning is learner centered, an instructor can have a solid idea of how to instruct only by having a detailed understanding of the learners. (pp. 162-163)
And again, Neidorf has a mission to motivate:
The students without goals are the ones I need to work with most to identify, clarify, and internalize motivators. They are the ones most at risk for dropping away from education without having an opportunity to figure out what they want in life. (p. 158)
Now, Neidorf values the student-teacher relationship, but she acknowledges her own humanness when she frankly states “Make no mistake though: Being in relationship with individual students does not mean you have to like everyone. In fact, one of the ways distance learning brings out the best in me as an instructor is that it enables me to work more effectively with people I don’t like” (p. 168). This statement implicitly invites teachers to nurture student-teacher relationships despite their own humanness, too.
If consciously and sincerely nurturing teacher-student relationships were the only social necessity in distance learning, some teachers would feel they were stretching enough just to do this. Neidorf, however, puts one thing higher yet in chapter 7: “Creating a Community of Learners.” Perhaps the truest test of whether or not one is committed to a beneficial paradigm is if one respectfully feels the need and finds ways to invite others to share it. If teachers are truly reaching out to learners and have enjoyed the benefits of such relationships, they would want to encourage the same relationships among their students. Neidorf acknowledges the challenges of collaboration, justifies it as a teaching method, and gives advice for carrying out collaboration in a distance environment. First, acknowledging the student’s reservations, Neidorf cautions, among other things, that
Many individuals have not previously considered their peers to be an integral part of their learning experience. They may prefer to be in the classroom, where authority is clearly held by the instructor, rather than in the team room, where authority must be shared. They may resent having their own performance depend on someone else’s work. (p. 182)
Acknowledging the challenges the teacher faces, Neidorf once again does not promise to save time or make life easier for distance teachers; her observations merit quoting at length:
Building community is hard work. It may be the most difficult part of creating effective distance-learning programs. Learning communities face the same challenges as other kinds of communities: conflict, personality clashes, warring agendas, differing work ethics, cultural missteps, and more. Add to these the difficulty of working across time zones and with technology that puts many of us at a communication disadvantage, and it may sometimes seem easier to just forget the entire thing. Let the students interact with the material and the instructor, and leave the group stuff alone. (p. 171)
Neidorf, however, warns that being held back by such perceptions and challenges cuts off teachers and students from the potentially richest and most reaching of all possible learning experiences:
While this option may be tempting, it means ignoring a piece of the process that can make learning as engaging, relevant, and enriching as possible. For all its difficulty, the work you put into cultivating a community of learners will pay off for you and your students alike. (p. 171)
Not only does Neidorf justify collaborative learning by mentioning the possibility of producing great outcomes, but by stating—even to her students when warranted—that earnestly practicing collaboration is good because “The ability to work through conflict and collaboratively create a product, despite the challenges of distance and communication, is a life skill. Learn it now, or learn it later, but ultimately, it’s not optional” (p. 178).
Of course Neidorf’s objective is not only to share with her reader what can and ought to be done, but to share strategies for how to do these things, as well. An exciting feature of her advice for how to create an environment where teams can collaborate successfully is the concept and worksheet for creating a “Team Charter” (pp. 179-182). The team charter
is essentially a descriptive document that lays out the team purpose, its members, the specific skills and resources each member brings to the project, a process for leadership selection and conflict resolution, guidelines and policies for meeting and progressing on the work, and criteria for success. (p. 179)
If distance teachers reach for collaboration in the spirit and with the techniques of Robin Neidorf, their students will be in a position to learn not only content, but to learn about themselves and their relationship to others; as Neidorf puts it, “When learners have to combine their ideas, skills, and experience and jointly create a product, they do more than master the material: They also learn about their biases and assumptions, strengths and weaknesses, and ability to help others succeed” (p. 177, emphasis added). Of course teachers want to have effective relationships with their students; when teachers also help engender effective relationships among their students, everyone is teaching beyond their reach.
Teach Beyond Your Reach gives methods and motivation for nurturing teacher-learner relationships in the distance environment. It is an engaging book of practices and principles that invites teachers to reach out and also reach an understanding of themselves as Neidorf has:
Because distance learning puts us into relationship with so many types of people, it’s a great arena in which to discover our own biases, soft spots, and assumptions about people. I have had many of my own subtle prejudices dismantled because I’ve participated in these communities. The personal growth and revelations that I gain from these interactions are what I’ve come to love about distance instruction. I can learn more about all the different ways there are to be a good person, to be a thinking human. (pp. 185-186)
With its experiential base and interpersonal emphasis, Teach Beyond Your Reach won’t reach every audience. Distance educators mostly in need of works that are based heavily on theory, that go into great technological detail, or that stem from rigorously conducted research, would best look elsewhere. That said, Robin Neidorf’s work presents principles and practices that inspire and enable distance educators to build relationships that create learning.
