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