Organic Initiatives Start with Relationships

Lately, school leadership has been tasked with organizing systemic approaches to local problems.  When literacy is low, we take on literacy initiatives.  When teacher resourcefulness is stretched, we implement coaching initiatives, ad nauseam. The initiatives, while well-meaning, are often instituted school-wide as a blanket solution. And they tend to show initial success.  While blanket approaches may begin to solve the problem, the pieces of fabric used in each department, even each classroom, resemble the other swatches to such a degree, the a deeper, systemic solution is never reached.  What we see working, that x-factor, is the relationship resonance between those tasked with carrying out the initiatives.

The cookie cutter research-in-practice approach to school initiatives will always fall flat.  This is because the culture that produces a model initiative necessarily differs from the culture that will apply it later. The general framework and truths of a good practice will hold in spirit at any school site, but the course of the initiative must grow anew at every new application of theory.  That growth only happens when the school and district provide the cultural space to have real conversations that devise real solutions.

Viviane Robinson ("Student-Centered Leadership") asserts that the task of school leadership is to assure a proper place for learning. The problem, she points out, is achieving student gains "to scale" among all schools.

The answer lies in situational, relationship based solutions. Just as I have discovered that the true laboratory of teaching is in the classroom, and the true observer is the teacher, I can extend this to say the true laboratory for school programs is in the school itself, and the instructional leaders are its true observers. An analogy for this falls in the physical sciences. The heart of oceanography happens in the ocean, while the conditions for these studies are set in the think tanks and research facilities where the conditions for the science to happen are formulated and assessed.   However, the quality of these initiatives depends on the resonance between those involved in the experiment.  The scientists in the research facility, and those in the depths of the sea need have a dialogue that resonates as it develops.  They don't have to agree, but they have to synergize.

I would say, on a practical level, that all schools that wish to cause change, should ask local school leadership to devise an initiative. The leaders should pull from research to inform the conditions of the initiative, but the heart of the initiative must come through a transformational process via conversation, data analysis, and culture building.

Systemic work must be done through relationships.  This is the consensus of my peers at leadership conferences and courses.  It's not that any old initiative will work. But an initiative, addressing the problem of practice, can be grown organically and effectively at each school site. It must be specific to the school and the culture of the school.  And it must happen through developing the resonance among those involved in the groundwork.  The classroom shows the prima materia for observation, and the leadership team's primary task is to grow those observations into information that guides the course of the initiative. 

How Do I Influence My Own Initiatives?

How much 

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets." - W. Edwards Deming 
"Every interaction is perfectly designed to produced the relationship it gets." - Me

In schools, and I suppose other organizational systems, our relationships with others play a distinct role in supporting the system that is organized around us.  And impressions being what they are, our interactions produce the quality of relationships we have with others. It appears to me that interaction begets relationships.  However, relationships do not beget interaction; they set foundations and contexts for more interaction.

How are we interacting with others via talk, email, and gestures?  Are people's reactions to our ideas a direct result of the quality of our interactions with them?  How much do we as innovators, thinkers, leaders control about our interactions?

Keep it Core - Just Read the Standards

Any educator interested in literacy owes it to the kids to read the standards with the grain, and go to them over and over again to flesh out the actual approach that will be taken.  After all, the research and thinking about college and career readiness has been done already by the dreamers of the new standards.  We just have to put it into practice. 

Often when I come into a conversation about curriculum, I jump into a cycle of talking about "standards". Much of what I and my colleague say about standards comes from a combination of rumors, op-ed pieces, unplanned conversations with others and even some ideas from disappointingly incomplete staff trainings. Lately, however, I have gotten the nerve to say,  "Hmm. We should look into what the standards say."  It's a simple solution, and seems obvious.  But I am constantly surprised by how few people (myself included) relate the standards with fidelity when talking curriculum and instruction.

It is too easy to say, "It's common core!" when we talk about tasks and texts and strategies.  It's almost like we depend on the phrase "common core" to refer to a generalized foundation for anything we want to promote.  The common core can promote literacy.  It can promote literature.  It can promote English in math, and math in English.  It can suggest creativity and analytics all at once.  And while superficial use of the ideas in the common core may support any innovation that anyone has, we must always look at the details and the spirit of the frameworks.  There is no substitute for good reading and analysis of what exactly that enormous and credible consortium tried to do when they produced these new standards for American education. 

Observed Performance

Observed Performance

Introduction to and Definition of Observed Performance

I have had a number of students who flourish in my class, but they shut off in other classes.  I will call this symptom limited observed performance (LOP). Quantitatively, they perform along the same standard wave of content proficiency as other students of the same grade level and class.  But when compared to the other subjects, these LOP students have only lowered their affective filters enough to excel in one class.  Whereas a student with standard observed performance (SOP) may achieve passing grades relatively across the board, LOP students struggle to maneuver the protocols set forth by multiple teachers.

Problem

An SOP student has learned, through some sort of unique chain of experiences, that the classroom and the expectations of individual teachers are no threat to their psychological autonomy.  School has been a relatively painless process, and the impact of life’s distractions was diverted often enough so as to not cloud the student’s general attitude toward schooling.  Once in high school, these students are able to navigate the various and sometimes arbitrary class systems created by teachers.

An LOP student, on the other hand, is depending on psychological correspondences to the systems and personalities he or she meets.  That is, the student will only perform in a class that is structured in a way and by a certain type of person that resonates with the guarded, safe, positive interior image that he or she has at his or her disposal.  All the worse for those students who have had nothing but bad teachers in lackluster educational settings; they require intimate attention and high quality, engaging teaching strategies more than anyone else.  The range then of LOP students goes from those that I say have little resonation to those with high resonation.  (Resonance describes a classroom atmosphere that is not necessarily harmonious but affords the interaction between the various psychologies at play, and it possesses both the teacher and the student.)   If a student has had little problems with teachers (or adult figures, females, males, authority, etc.), then he may still show symptoms of LOP because of poor engagement. This student craves interactive, hands-on, group and individual work with high levels of critical thinking and creative, imaginative activities.  If the student has had problems with teachers or others but has had engaging school activities, the LOP student requires much of a teacher: a consistent attitude and a merciful bottom-line, essentially someone who has put the ego and power-stance in the backseat.  This is not to say the teacher should be a pushover, on the contrary.  The teacher should purposefully use his or her ego, power and sense of control to strategically guide the student, to maintain consistency and a sense of justice, or to teach a lesson in limits; but any arbitrary displays of power will be quickly identified and rejected by the perceptive, experience-laden psychology of the adolescent.  

The LOP student cannot be measured quantitatively.  Their performance varies greatly. Interestingly, I have met many of these students who shine on standardized tests, only to be shuffled through the system as chronic underachievers.  By tenth or eleventh grade, these students are ready to drop out or go to some sort of continuation school.

Solution

The obvious solution is to create a classroom with high resonance to the multitude of personalities.  This has to be done schoolwide, and not as a methodical initiative, but as a natural, phenomenological and diverse process of observation and strategic action. Any faked standard practices take away from the unique personality-relationships created by a teacher who is not going through the motions, but is taught to perceive the experiential and psychological dynamic of the moments at hand.  This classroom, then, would be as unique to each of the students as it would be to the teacher, and primarily, it would be non-threatening for all parties.

The heart of the problem, from a systemic standpoint, lies in our formation of educators and our concepts of classroom management and school wide initiatives.  School wide initiatives are not in themselves harmful, but they should be used as outlines rather than dogma.  Administrators and teachers alike would be far better off being good observers than good managers.  This point connects us to the formation of educators and the term “classroom management”.  

Firstly, education should be seen as a psychological art first, and an organization second.  The myriad comparisons of the school organism to that of a corporation or a science lab may serve the purposes of bureaucracy, but they do little to solve issues of underachievement, disengagement and problem behaviors.  

Secondly, the term “classroom management” implies a structure that can have the same tenets as a retail store or a business firm.  People can be fired, written up, and people can move up through meeting certain marks and playing the political game set-forth by those of higher status (i.e. teachers and administrators).  While at some level, this type of “management” approach to classroom engagement may help to model correct behaviors for real-world private employment, the classroom experience is much more than modeling for the real world.  And any amount of real world modeling passes through a numb mind if that mind has not been treated like a human first and an employee second.  I would even venture to say that most adults in the real-world will avoid a job if at all possible when faced with working for demanding and micromanaging employers.  In fact, one of the reasons work in academia is so enticing is its lack of a returns-based power structure.  We can all transfer if we don’t like the boss.  The idea of the real-world being a standard for all classroom structures necessitates an exploration into the multitude types of power structures in real-world employment that we have yet to delineate.  I will discuss this in another essay, but the idea is important when prioritizing classroom practices.

The classroom with resonance is a classroom in which those with power understand the dynamics and depths of the psychological atmosphere and strive to attend to this reality with an eye on both academics and the psychological development of each individual student.  This classroom is not afraid of giving students coming in with different moods and habits because the educator has put effort toward the students’ psychological and intellectual engagement as a real relationship.  The ideal teacher can quickly identify disruptions in student emotional patterns and work with observations, interactions and dialogue to achieve a recentering for the teacher and the student.  

The observations come from a position of trying to understand, asking the king or queen why he or she is disturbed.  The student, in his or her ego, and for better or worse, is first and foremost royalty.  He or she does not have the disposition for a teacher to come into his or her psyche and start telling it to relinquish the crown to a new form of government that has only failed in all previous attempts.  The student wants to get back in the throne, and the student doesn’t mind having more advisors in the court, or allowing a great teacher to occupy a central role in the development of the royalty’s refinement and culturing.  

This leads us to the interactions.  Interactions can happen in a passive or active fashion.  A passive interaction (often unwillingly) deems the student as just another number.  It, in its worst form, solely blames students for low achievement, low engagement and poor behavior.  At best, it is a classroom in which students are compliant, and no one rocks the boat.  In such a classroom, little is achieved as far as maturity is concerned, and little growth is apparent in student academic levels.  All students perform as expected, and no flags are raised.  There is, therefore, a deep connection, the primordial and essential connection, between learning and relationship atmosphere, or the varying dynamisms at play when two or more people enter into each other’s perception.  As can be deduced, an active interaction, then attempts to always be in tune with the appearances available in the relationship atmosphere.  It is important to understand that even the most highly developed observer will never be completely in tune with the relationship atmosphere, because by writ the phenomena at play in any given moment is always in flux.  Because of perception, we are always one step away from complete understanding, but any attempt at gathering the apparent and constant phenomena into our realm of understanding adds to our resonance with our students. (Clearly, this works in all relationship atmospheres, even those outside of the classroom.)  That resonance builds on our abilities, and it creates an exponential resonance among all of our interactions.

Dialogue, finally, can happen in two ways.  One way to dialogue is to explicitly ask the problem, inquire and assess.  The teacher may find it prudent to not give advice and only listen.  And with other tones in the student’s speech and posture, a teacher may feel it apt to give advice.  Some problems require a solution from outside, others require an internal reasoning through speaking and hearing oneself speak with a positive personality in front of the student.  Another way to dialogue is to speak about anything other than the problem.  The interested and aware appearance of the teacher in this type of dialogue opens the student to the possibility of “another way of looking at things”, and the internal images of the student are activated toward change.  In a positive dialogue, this is change for the better, and in a dialogue with an unsympathetic teacher, the student is lead toward withdrawal and self-isolation.  One could talk about something as banal as a baseball score, and if the student’s psyche perceives a intention of support from the teacher, he or she will be gradually liberated from the destructive mood.  But if the teacher emanates an air of disconnect from the psychological interests of the student, then the dialogue is as good as lost.

Teacher formation, quite simply, should have a heavy focus on the ability to observe and interact with the ever-changing relationship atmospheres.  This may require some sort of psycho-analysis of the teachers themselves to add to the knowledge of one’s strengths and weakness.  In addition to an initial analysis phase for new teachers, instructional coaches should include in their rubric for classroom practice a section on resonance or relational atmosphere.  This rubric should not be evaluative.  It should be formative, experimental, and non-formulaic.  It should be a practice of reflection lest it become a practice of prescription.  While I am hopeful this will one day be a reality, that teachers will come in with psychological tools and lenses to interact more wholly with students and others, it may only be possible in our current system through each individual teacher’s own volition.  Teachers should, then, take it upon themselves to submit themselves to a process that makes for more keen observation and understanding of the relationship atmosphere.

Relevant Conclusions about the Method

After observing a student type or a classroom phenomenon, I created a label, “observed performance”, to identify the phenomenon and try to trace its origins and, more importantly in my opinion, its movements.  Through looking at this, I discovered other aspects, such as resonance, observation and interaction, that work to create the optimal scenario and circumscribe some sort of barometer for the overall harmony of the classroom.

Observation

Observation

Experiential Context

When I walk into my classroom in the morning, I am doing one of various things that have unconsciously become routines.  Sometimes I begin taking roll, others I am looking at something on the internet, or checking mail, or creating some new document for some new idea.  The bell rings, and I finish what I am doing while students get adjusted.  Still other times I stand and begin talking right away.  This is good for the work ethic of the class, and it sets a tone of dedication to the period of activities that is planned and ready to go.  

Academic vs. Psychological Aims of Education

If we look at teaching as solely the instruction of an academic subject area, we are often contented with a well planned lesson, and a well-executed work period.  It is my contention, however, that deeper, lasting and intelligent learning occurs when classroom resonance is at a maximum, as such a classroom atmosphere gives a solid foundation for academic learning.  It generates a cognitive setting that begins to see knowledge as part of the human experience, and at once the personalities involved feel valued, anxiety is low, experience is efficient and profound.  Thus, psychological wholeness is also attended to.  While some may defend the claim that school is solely an academic venture, I am of the party that disagrees, and feels school to be an academic environment through which psychological wholeness and mature development are the ends and the means to a self-fulfilled young adult.  The academic and the psychological nature of school is not dualistic, rather, two exist as one in the same sense that our mind exists in our body and at the same time contains our perception of our body,  The psychological validates the academic, and the academic validates the psychological.  The two dispositions and goals, maturity and knowledge, are, in spite of our opinions, inextricably part of the same whole.  

The Metaphor of Reading

The other day, as I tend to do, I challenged myself to image a world in which I only wrote and spoke, but in which I read nothing. I imagined this to take a glance at the discourse of experience.  I wanted to see if it was more important to experience or to learn via transmission (e.g. reading, listening to lectures, etc.) Very quickly, of course, I realized that reading gives content to our writing, which gives shape to our experience.  While it is possible to write experience without reading about a subject, it is likewise impossible to interact with others, in the lexicon of the various people and opinions, if we do not read different styles of writing, different ideas, different words.  When we read, we are enabled to communicate with others because we are exposed to different structures of language and different points of view.  Happiness, as psychological wholeness being my goal, I know studying new topics with new vocabularies and studying interactions with differing opinions is one of the essential tools to attain wholeness.  And at the same time, when I study something interesting or hear a new idea, I am satisfied most when I write it down, think about it, and watch and hear  it chime against my psyche.  Thus, reading is essential, but more importantly, reading exists as a metaphor for understanding others, and my library in my classroom, as a student of the mind and as an effective teacher, is the students themselves and their outward projections as displayed in emotions, classwork, tones of interaction and engagement.

Observation in Practice

This brings us to our present topic, observation.  In this essay, I mean observation of the condition of the student psyche.  While the teacher will never have the access that a student has to a student’s psyche in esse, the teacher can attempt to piece together a picture of the student’s psychological demeanor through the senses and intuition.  We can hear the student, the tone of voice, the words being used, the subtle or unconscious reactions to interaction and through his or her ideas.  We can see the student, the posture, the style of dress, the looks on the face, the gestures and through his or her classwork and engagement. We can intuit the student’s attitude through our own feeling “that something isn’t right”, although we have to be sure to have a clear understanding of the differences between how a student actually is and how we assume or project the student to be.  The skill of closing the gap between perception and reality is one that may never be mastered, but it can be honed through constant and honest reflection.

As a teacher, my main job, on the surface, is to teach a subject.  Thus, I think it at least professionally or politically expedient to start with some sort of academic work that the students can begin with while I sort out my other beginning-of-the-period duties.  It is important that this “bell work” does not depend on my presence as a speaker or instructor, rather, it should be an independent or group activity that can be started quickly and with little explanation.  While this may seem obvious (almost all teachers use some sort of bell work to complete initial administrative duties), the second task of the day, observation, is far more important and is not considered a common best practice.  Many teachers who care do this observation semi-unconsciously and in an incomplete manner, checking on students who are severely upset and getting rid of discipline issues as quickly as possible.  Active observation, however, watches the entire class, looking for some sort of sign (through perception and intuition) that an individual or group of students is not in the midst of some sort of psychological disruption.  

For at least five minutes, the teacher looks on, student by student, either randomly or purposefully. The random approach gives us an effect similar to dowsing for water.  We are naturally pulled to our own intuited area of focus. Purposeful active observation happens when someone chooses a student based on previous concern or obvious distress at the moment of entering the classroom.  Maybe we have noticed a student’s grades dropping, or maybe when the student came in, he or she gave a loud sigh and through his or her books on the ground.  In any case, we continue this looking on the students until finding those of interest.  They are the starting point for the day’s attempt at resonance in the classroom.  While throughout the period, we may find other subjects of interest, but this initial observation acts as a good start to the process and a safe workspace for honing our skills of psychological development.

When one notices these students, one begins interacting through gestures or dialogue, in a way that attempts to give an open opportunity for the student to step forward with his or her claim and conflict.  Observation in this manner is parallel to choosing focus-students for remediation and intervention, selecting four or five students who will receive extra academic attention.  As we become better and noticing and interacting with the students, the process becomes more acute, and resonance is almost consistently trying to cycle through the relationship atmospheres we encounter.

The Psychological Background of a Classroom

Imagine you are a psychologist.  You are trained to judge others, and hopefully you are trained to judge yourself.  You see an adolescent one hour a week, maybe five or so of them a day, and over time you begin to be able to describe what may or may not be happening with the young adult.  Now, take a step back.  You are now seeing 35 or 40 adolescents every hour, and even more frighteningly, you are asked to see them every day.  In addition to that you must teach them about a subject that may or may not interest them on any given day.  And you are asked to do this five or six times a day for three quarters of a year.  If middle and high school teaching has become difficult, it is because of inattention to the relationship atmosphere inside of the classroom.  The gods have fallen in our society, church gone by the wayside, and in the search for new authority, the hierarchical authority structure of our institutions only reflects a stale church, something familiar to us adults and our parents, but a strange environment to the new generations.

We educators, especially the classroom teachers, are privy to an exposed and expansive array of psychologies that dizzy us to the point of forcing most of us to overgeneralize and misunderstand the occurrences we observe in the classroom.  Some argue it is not our job to become psychologists; it is our job to teach, it is suggested, and society has a compartment for psychology, and if the kid gets bad enough we can send him to the counselor or assistant principal, then beyond that a process can develop that will eventually, often after months, get some attention in a clinical session.  In the poorer communities, these sessions are not always necessarily a good fit for the student, and he bides his time until something bigger happens, something more engaging, often more threatening to his normalcy.  

The role of the psychologist as a clinical therapist is great and not to be undermined.  But I would like to point out that when looking at the developments between the initial discomfort or “acting out” and the final submission to the therapist, an enormous opportunity exists in the realm of the classroom.  It may not be possible to always stave off the inevitable.  Some paths require a deeper and more focused knowledge-set, a sherpa in the mountains, an able and trained therapist.  But we teachers also have the chance to deal with the negative behaviors in a way that deflates many issues before they are turned into complexes, neuroses or delinquent habits.  

One of the obstacles we face are a result the necessary and ever-present standards.  We are teachers, after all, and that means we are teaching a subject.  This requires the ability to structure effective and engaging lessons and activities, assess learning, grade papers, fill out forms, and deal with any amount of numerous interruptions including call slips, bathroom breaks, fire drills, ad nauseum.  

Another trial of the teacher is that we weren't trained in psychology.  Most of our educational psychology training is in learning theories.  Again, this is necessary because we are teachers, after all.  We learn about optimal learning environments, classroom management, hormones, engaging practices, multiple intelligences and more, all with the intent of making us better teachers. Furthermore, if we don’t understand these things going into the profession,  we are left only with our most vivid memories of good and bad teachers.  We remember the “cool” teachers who were kind to us, and we remember those who cruelly convinced us to produce sisyphean loads of work, humiliating our spirits by ridicule or boredom.  And often, when we realize that our students aren't as engaged with us as we were with our “cool” teachers, we resort to the methods of the sarcastic or monotone dictator.  If our students are lucky, we are the benevolent dictator.  If they catch us in the wrong mood or wrong phase of life or profession, we are emotionally violent and volatile oppressors. 

So facing the two posed hurdles, the task of teaching content and the task of understanding a class as a place of learning and a place of psychological life, I once asked myself: Where can I find the time during the course of the class to jump these hurdles?  Where can I find the psychological energy to stabilize my classroom?  How can I manage all of my duties while attending to almost two hundred psychologies every day?

In my personal findings, the time was there.  I found it in two places: my reflective moments during class (and these moments, although plentiful, are very brief), and my moments that were normally dedicated to classroom management.  I have always reflected, and this may just be a habit I developed over time.  But I also took the risk, a long time ago, to do away with stencil-cut classroom management ideas and to give way to a different approach.  I started with the assumption that most students know the rules of classroom behavior, but typically they either act out against them out of bad habits, or they rebel against a psychological situation through which they are passing.   

Mine was not an easy journey.  At times I made huge mistakes in judgment about how to deal with situations in my class.  But now I am understanding that there is a dynamic at play in the classroom that we were not taught and that we are not encouraged to investigate.  We have not looked at our understanding of the adolescent psyche, and in ignoring such an important factor, I might say the most important factor, we have left out a discussion about those transformative opportunities in the classroom.  That being said, “it takes two to tango”, and we must also look at our own psychological constellation.   I reiterate, this is not part of the equation in teacher education, nor does it seem to be the focus of much serious research.  

We and the students are constantly at the crux and whim of our given stage of personal development, and I emphasize that this affects education to such a degree that if we do not give the relationship atmosphere its due attention, we might as well turn future classrooms into asylums, with one ward for students, and the other for teachers.

Introduction to Resonance and Education

*This was written a few months prior to becoming an assistant principal.  I currently no longer have a classroom.

Introduction

The current blog represents my initial exploration into the psychological nature of the classroom.  Most of my experience comes from the high school.  Coincidentally, most educational research either describes an elementary school, middle school, or college class as the laboratory, and far less is available for high school teachers.  Furthermore, the majority of research attends to academic performance, and the little psychological work that has been completed is highly quantitative and thus overgeneralized and limited in its application.  It also focuses on the regularization of the mind, the standardization of the student experience, rather than seeking to capitalize on the multitude of opportunities for maturation both in the student and the teacher.  I don’t wish to diminish the importance of the work done by academics and researchers.  Their work guides our practices in a common language with measures to back the results.  With a little tweaking, their observations can help to shore up any school or district’s loose ends, and help to end the chaos low-skilled educators.  But I want to add to the conversation to attempt to discuss the elusive factor, the missing piece of the puzzle, in school success: the psyche.  

Here I develop some key ideas that are, in my experience, new to the discussion on education, especially secondary education.  The reader will be exposed to such terms as resonance, observation, interaction and relationship atmosphere, which I coined to be able to discuss my observations.  I hope they do not limit us too much, and hope they can develop over time into more precise representations of the imaginal abyss we are looking into.

My approach stems from a personal interest in depth psychology but also from a disdain for the amount of problems we still have in the classroom in spite of the wealth of research that exists.  I wanted to be able to describe what I saw and share that as a value, but the language of academic research was too short-sighted, and as I mentioned above, too generalized.  I hold many quantitative researchers in high esteem, especially Vigotsky and Krashen, but others as well such as Marzano and Walqui.  They gave us student-centered practice and the insights to trace the trends in successful education.  But I have been just as disappointed in educational psychology.  It seems that the attempt to measure the psychological nature of the classroom experience or the student mind has become a stale laboratory that in only a few variables and relatively few constants resembles the actual psychology of secondary education.  As Heraclitus imparts still to this day, the only constant here is change, and it behooves us to watch the change rather than trace the fleeting image of a statistic.

My approach also has another personal source.  Recently I noticed that my job was becoming a huge experiment in psychology.  I am not talking about social experimentation.  I mean literally that I realized that the best lab for observing education is in the classroom, the best scientist for recording observations is the teacher, and the optimal conditions for an accurate experiment is in the flow of an everyday class, during which the observer is present and has a transformational effect on the observed.  In any laboratory experiment, we are charged with interfering as little as possible in the outcome so as to secure an isolated observation.  But in the classroom-as-lab and with the teacher-as-scientist, the teacher is an actually necessary component, and thus, adds to the validity of the experiment.  The experiment, the observation, seeks to cause a change rather than only describe an incidental moment.  Thus, participation from the observer is the vantage point in causing the change and making happen what is proposed, student success and teacher fulfillment. Teacher fulfillment is another topic I will discuss here; for just as the psychology of the student is in play here, so we find that most teachers seek to help students, often at the cost of their own fulfillment because of a disappointment in the result.  We will look at the real world, the expectations of college, and even an attempt to map the psychological development of the human.

I am not a scientist, rather, I am an amateur psychologist, and a novice philosopher.  I do not wish for this collection of texts to be applied as a mold to be reproduced.  My hope is that this text will work toward an emphasis in the educational system on the depth of the psyche and the depth of the relationship dynamic at hand in education, and the connection of these to the world beyond school.  I also hope to be set aside by those seeking quantitative research.  There is enough out there that can be manipulated and disseminated.  Hopefully, this will be picked up, read and tested by those who know that what works works, and what doesn’t.  They will see that these observations resonate with their experiences, and they will push them further, learn to observe, learn to reflect, and begin to share in the discourse I have taken up and applied to education.  Sometimes our assessment of what works comes from the five senses, testing and experimenting, while more often than not we have a hunch, an intuitive perception that what is proposed works.  When this is the case, we enter into the dialectic of the psychologist, and we begin our task of refuting, extending or maintaining the views proposed.  

Aaron Magnan

May 2015

Chula Vista, California