Avoiding the Work
Teachers can avoid their work just as masterfully as students can. One of the remarkable benefits of Teacher Support Groups is their power to reveal classroom dynamics through the teachers' own actions in the group. This power is called "parallel process," or the existence in one setting of the very same processes or dynamics that exist in another setting.
This story is a perfect example.
To recap: Long ago and far away, in a Teacher Support Group, Abigail revealed something "dark" about herself. She confessed she can get sarcastic with students when she's frustrated. This move -- the move from generous teaching to frustration to sarcasm in the classroom -- is a fascinating one. And Abigail is not the only teacher who makes it. Right? Not every teacher gets sarcastic when she's frustrated with a student, but plenty do.
In a Teacher Support Group, this is a move I want to look into. I want to try to figure out what the move from generosity to frustration to sarcasm means about the teacher, her students, and the relationships governing this moment in the life of the classroom. I know from experience that looking into such "darkness" inevitably rewards us with insights that can change a teacher's (and hence a student's) life.
But this support group did not want to look into Abigail's darkness. They didn't wonder about Abigail's emotions. They didn't ask about the relationship between frustration and sarcasm. They didn't share similar experiences. What they did was offer advice. They told Abigail what she could do to force the students to talk. They focused on the desired pragmatic outcome -- student compliance -- and avoided the data within Abigail's darkness.
Interestingly, they did everything they could to fill Abigail's silence with ideas about how she could prevent her students' silence.
Intellectualization, a High-Level Defense
I completely understand this phenomenon. Who wants to voluntarily enter into a person's darkness? The teachers were being helpful, generous, and caring toward Abigail, whom they respect and admire. But this urge to talk about teaching rather than dwell in the actual experience of teaching can be a form of avoidance. I would even go so far as to say it can be a high-level defense against anxiety: intellectualization, where words and ideas distance us from unsettling emotions and feelings.
Don't get me wrong: There are many benefits to talking about teaching.Talking about teaching can give us a feeling of control where we actually have none, where emotions arise and drive behaviors we can't help and often don't like. It allows us to flirt with ideals and speculate about what could be, to generate new ideas and get excited about them. These are all good things. I actually love talking about teaching.
But, in a Teacher Support Group, the experience of teaching -- the emotions, the feelings -- is the base metal that group process transforms into gold. And, while most of the group members in this story were most comfortable simply hammering at the metal lump, Abigail went for the gold. "I think I figured something out," she said.
How She Figured It Out
We already know what Abigail figured out -- that the students were probably disgusted by being asked to demonstrate they knew what their teacher already knew they knew -- but I want to take a moment to lay out how Abigail figured it out:
- She considered her own "dark" emotions
- She allowed as how her students might have had the same emotions
- She wondered why her students might have had those emotions
- She made a good guess that resonated with her
She turned her darkness -- her sarcasm, her frustration, her contempt for (and fear of?) her students' silence -- into insight: the very good possibility that her students were telling her through their inaction that they themselves were frustrated and contemptuous of her "ridiculous, time-wasting" assignment. That they expected more of her. That they respected themselves and their time.
Wow. Who knew darkness could carry such useful information?
I didn't mention this parallel process to the teachers in the support group at the time (it can be quite difficult to discern these processes in the moment), but it is one of the reasons I love this story. Teachers can avoid hard work just as their students do. Who can blame them? But noticing one's very human tendency to avoid what is difficult gives teachers first-hand perspective on their own students' resistance. It can help teachers make sense of their students' actions; it can dissolve frustration and sarcasm; it can activate empathy and understanding; and it can lead to the kind of relational alignment that makes teaching and learning most fruitful.
Pure gold.