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.