Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Every August teachers get welcome back letters. They’re always larded with rhetoric about how important our work is, how this is going to be a “change” year, and how those changes are all about “what’s good for kids.” It’s all always very upbeat because that’s what teachers are supposed to be as they prepare for the new school year.I enjoy what I do for a living so I usually am fairly upbeat, until I get my letter. I’ve heard too many times about change that’s supposedly good for kids. It usually means a gaggle of administrators somewhere have spent the summer hatching pipedream initiatives.
Several decades ago, before I met my first students, I took a summer education course to renew my unused undergraduate teaching license. Most of my classmates were working teachers. Many were pumped up and gushing with enthusiasm, some were whistling in the dark to dispel their fears, and others were steeling themselves for the classroom ordeals that lay ahead.
I saw the same faces and the same postures at this year’s back-to-school inservice training.
Anyway, 30-odd years ago my summer course was titled “Teacher Effectiveness Training.” It was a spinoff of an equally gimmick-based “conflict resolution” program for parents. “Effectiveness training” seemed to me then, as it does now, one peck common sense and a bushel basket of magical thinking. Consider the model’s unique “four-step” problem-solving process: “recognizing and defining the problem, diagnosing the problem, making the decision, and accepting and carrying out the decision.” If there’s anything earthshaking in any of that, I confess that I don’t see it.
The method features techniques like “active listening,” where the teacher paraphrases the student’s complaint to show empathy, as in, “It sounds to me like you think I’m giving you too much homework,” or “It sounds like you think I’m treating you unfairly.” I’m also supposed to employ “I-Messages,” where I “non-blamefully” explain how a student’s behavior “would impact me.” Instead of telling him to stop disrupting class, I’m supposed to say that when he disrupts class, I have to stop teaching, and “I don’t like that.” That way I’m not saying he’s the problem. I’m the one who’s “owning” the problem.
Bringing these methods to the table allegedly delivers “win-win” solutions where nobody “loses.” Proponents insist that a “win-win” is entirely different from a “compromise,” where neither side gets what it wanted. They ignore the practical reality that problems are more often resolved when one side, or the other, or both give something up, and the ethical reality that sometimes one side is entirely right and the other entirely wrong, in which case one side should lose.
Thirty years in the classroom and 60 years on Earth have taught me these things. I’ve also learned that no patented method infallibly solves problems, especially when one of the parties lacks good will.
I like when the light goes on in my students’ eyes. But while many of us don’t love studying and sometimes even hate it, beautiful learning rarely happens without it.
You can imagine, then, how I felt at this year’s daylong introductory inservice, with my letter in my pocket, when our guest presenter started in on active listening and I-Messages. His product wasn’t effectiveness training, though. He was selling “Collaborative Problem Solving,” a method that rests on the fundamental premise that “all kids do well if they can.” According to this theory, if students aren’t behaving or doing their work, it’s not because they don’t want to, or because they don’t care. It’s always because something other than their effort or intention is standing in their way. It’s the teacher’s job to figure out what that something is and fix it.
Advocates contend that bad behavior is a learning disability. The signal difference, of course, is that if I can’t do math, my problem affects only me. If I’m disrupting class or pounding on the child in the next seat, my problem affects other people.
You don’t have to believe in original sin to recognize that some students and adults don’t care, and that some people of all ages actively and deliberately contrive to do evil. This is a classroom and real world fact of life.
Some children bear unspeakable burdens and surely deserve our compassion. Some students, though, like some adults, simply aren’t interested in or willing to collaborate, and sometimes they’re so wrong, it’s wrong to collaborate with them. Taking class time to collaborate also steals from the 20 other students in my class. Either way, the student in question, regardless of whether he can’t or he won’t, isn’t the only person in the room.
Six hours of this training by itself would have been enough to leave me alternately stewing and writhing in my auditorium seat. There were, however, two special moments when my hosts particularly missed the point they were actually making, lapses that might alarm you as much as they alarmed me.
First, there was a cartoon they showed us where a mother and child are standing beside a ball and the wreckage of a living room lamp. The mother is visibly annoyed, but her son in the caption suggests that this might be an opportune “teachable moment.” While the boy is obviously trying to avoid the consequences of his behavior by gulling his mother with psychobabble, and the butt of the cartoonist’s joke is clearly the gullible mother, our presenter used the cartoon to remind us of our priorities, that we should always take advantage of the teachable moments our students induce, even when they divert us from academic learning.
The second telling moment came when the giant PowerPoint screen displayed the education philosophy of actor Natalie Portman: “I don’t love studying. I hate studying. I like learning. Learning is beautiful.” The point was to remind us that we need to make learning fun and a pleasure for our students. That’s why schools are currently once again eliminating homework, practice, facts and content.
I like when the light goes on in my students’ eyes. But while many of us don’t love studying and sometimes even hate it, beautiful learning rarely happens without it.
I’m guessing actors realize this when it comes to acting. It’s too bad the people who run our schools don’t know as much when it comes to teaching and learning.
Fortunately, inservice training meetings are just pointless, periodic torments. Tomorrow I’ll be back in class with my students. And those are the meetings where effectiveness really matters.
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