Mysterium Tremendum #1: Should everyone be expected to innovate?

Just so you know, I do not have an answer to my own question.  This is my current  mysterium tremendum.

Context

I spoke with a teacher the other day who told me:

"I am a worker bee.  You give me the work, and I will be one of the best teachers you have seen."

My first inclination, as an administrator, was to say, "Well, our job as instructional leaders is to innovate."  But then I thought, while I believe in the growth mindset, while I believe in everyone's capacity to excel, I cannot force others to believe themselves capable of creativity.

I know they are capable or innovation.

I know that in spite of their insecurities, they can create.

But can I really expect, as an instructional leader, everyone to add "curriculum creator" to their plates?

Of Resource Teachers and Curriculum Leads

At my school, we have teachers on special assignment, called resource teachers, or TOSAs, or curriculum leads.  Their job is to act as a liaison between admin and teachers.  But more importantly, they have an extra period to digest and understand new research.  They can create, coach, and do whatever they want related to the curriculum,

Is this where I should expect the innovation?

I was thinking of asking these leaders to create the baseline curriculum for their respective departments.

Note: The following two sections are a logical meditation/exercise that may only give you insight into my thought process...feel free to skip them.

Encouraging Creativity
At the heart of the question behind whether or not we have an obligation to innovate, or a moral imperative to create as part of our educational vocation, is the question of the growth mindset, and even more specifically, what I call the pacing of the practices of growth and innovation.  In that realm we find that apart from encouraging the individual to remain mentally fresh, and encouraging the habits that preserve such a growth mindset, we also should look, with patience, toward the future of the individual innovator.   The pace of the individual can only work if the individual is moving, but it is also limited to his or her insights, which necessitates feedback and modeling.  

Growth and Innovation on the Time Continuum
The ancient stoics knew that we can only control our reactions, which is an exercise in living in the present.The growth mindset itself is living in the present.  Those in the throes of the habit of mind understand the present with the verb I can.  They do not say, I will be able to, nor do they say, I was once able to, but they look at what they can do now.  And what each of us, in the least, can do, right now, is train our mindset.
Our future, however, and our true innovation, comes from an creating new skills, not from nothing, but from the tradition and innovation at present and in the past.  We don't create from scratch; we innovate with combinations.  We participate in an alchemy, an amalgamation of ideas past and present that, having combined themselves in a fresh way, fulfill and designate our future.

So...should everyone be expected to innovate?

I really don't know.  I do expect teachers to at least innovate at the micro-level.  They should be able to observe and create modifications and innovations to suit student needs.  Should they all be expected to create a full curriculum?  I am not sure, but in the very least, a teacher should be able to respond to student needs; yes, in the very least.

The question turns into another...how can we teach observation?  And given that observation always raises a question begging innovative, unique answers, how do we teach a response to observations?  How do we teach innovation?

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