Don’t teach a restless class; steer it

As an educator who teaches the first class of the day, I am often entrusted with what many teachers consider a daunting task: keeping a 7:00 am classroom awake and engaged. My students are largely pursuing professional qualifications in Commerce and Business Management, and many view subjects outside their immediate career goals as peripheral. Whether this disposition is a product of the times or simply a characteristic of youth is a question for another day. What I have learnt, however, is that the theory of restlessness we often lament in our classrooms can become a powerful pedagogical resource.Intellectual engagementOver the years, I have come to see restlessness among students not as a barrier to learning but as an invitation to rethink how learning happens. Through one particular classroom experience, I realised that students who appear distracted, impatient, or unwilling to sit through a lecture are often capable of remarkable intellectual engagement when given the opportunity to participate, rather than merely listen.The episode unfolded in a General English course titled Contemporary Debates I: Negotiating Identities, offered to second-year undergraduate students. It introduces learners to questions surrounding nationhood, caste, gender, multiculturalism, and other forces that shape contemporary society through literary texts and emerging forms of expression. On that particular day, I chose to discuss the idea of borders through the poem Nation of Birds by K. Satchidanandan, which imagines a world in which birds move freely across territories, unconstrained by the borders that humans create and defend. As expected, the students understood the poem’s central argument almost immediately. While my intention was to ensure that they agreed with the poet, I invited them to challenge him.If there is one thing that adolescents are rarely short of, it is the willingness to question received wisdom. Educational psychologists like Eric Erikson and Jean Piaget have long noted that adolescence is a period marked by identity formation, scepticism, and the testing of boundaries. Rather than viewing these tendencies as disruptions to classroom order, I wanted to harness them.DebateI divided the class into two teams. One team would defend the idea that national borders remain necessary; the other would argue against them. The only rule was simple: every claim had to be challenged. Students were encouraged to use their phones to access information, verify facts, and strengthen their arguments. To make the exercise more engaging, I gave it a dramatic title: Sink or Float. The objective was to keep your team’s argument afloat while sinking the opposing side’s position. What followed was one of the most animated discussions of the semester.Arguments emerged from all corners of the classroom. Some students insisted that borders are essential for security, governance, and national identity. Others questioned whether borders continue to serve their intended purpose in an increasingly interconnected world. One student remarked, “We are not birds; we cannot simply live without systems and structures.” Another student challenged the assumption that existing political arrangements are immutable merely because they have existed for a long time.The discussion moved swiftly from literature to history, politics, migration, and economics. Examples ranged from contemporary debates surrounding migration across the United States-Mexico border to questions of indigeneity, ancestry, and belonging. Students who usually retreated into the glow of their mobile phones became active participants, eager to defend their positions or challenge those of their peers.At that point, my role had ceased as a lecturer delivering content. I became a facilitator. I steered the discussion, introduced alternative perspectives, asked probing questions, corrected facts, and encouraged students to support their claims with evidence. Whenever an argument became overtly rhetorical or speculative, I pushed the students to substantiate it. The learning emerged from not only from my explanations but from their engagement with one another.The success of that session lay not merely in the fact that the students remained awake at an early hour. It lay in the quality of intellectual exchange that unfolded. They were learning to construct tightly structured arguments, evaluate evidence, identify assumptions, and respectfully challenge opposing viewpoints. These are skills that extend far beyond the study of literature.Recognise the potentialThe experience also forced me to reflect on a larger question confronting educators today. Many of our students inhabit a world vastly different from the one in which traditional classroom practices evolved. They are accustomed to interaction, immediacy, and participation. While lectures continue to have their place, an exclusively teacher-centred approach often struggles to sustain attention or inspire curiosity.This does not mean that educators must constantly entertain students or transform every lesson into a spectacle. What it means is that we must recognise the potential embedded within their energy, impatience, and desire to participate. The challenge is not to suppress restlessness but to channel it productively.That morning, I left the classroom having learnt as much as I had taught. I encountered perspectives I had not anticipated and examples I had not considered. More importantly, I was reminded that meaningful learning often occurs when teachers relinquish a measure of control and allow students to take ownership of inquiry. Every classroom consists of students who are eager to learn. They may not always respond to conventional methods, but that does not make them disengaged. Often, they are waiting for an invitation to think, question, contest, and contribute.Perhaps, then, the task of the contemporary educator is not simply to teach a restless class. It is to steer one. For within that restlessness lies the possibility of curiosity, critical thinking, and the kind of democratic dialogue that education, at its best, seeks to nurture.The writer is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, St Joseph’s College of Commerce, Bengaluru.