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.