Reading Minds
Brain
What the heck is going on in our students' heads?
One of the greatest sources of stress for teachers, I have found, is students' faces. Poker faces, bored faces, closed eyes, sidelong glances, frowns, wrinkled brows, sardonic smiles -- these facial expressions are all grist for the teacher's anxiety mill. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just read students' minds? So we could know what the heck was going on in their heads and on their faces? I know: that's impossible.
Except that teachers do it all the time.
At least, that's what Abigail did. (Remember Abigail? That awesome teacher who figured out a great reason why her students didn't do what she had asked them to do?) She saw her students's faces -- their dropped eyes, their frowns and yawns -- and their bodies -- slumped, with jiggling legs -- and heard their silence and knew exactly what was going on inside their heads:
They hated her. They wanted to thwart her. They were leaving her dangling, exercising their power over her by being lazy and refusing to cooperate with her. They were disrespecting and embarrassing her.
As she put it, "I know they know it, so I embarrass them when they don't give me the energy." That is, she gets sarcastic and treats her students with the same disdain her mind-reading abilities suggest they feel for her.
But what if she was wrong?
Psycho Filters (Qu'est-ce que c'est?)
Time out for a psychodynamic moment: Abigail's mind-reading, which happened so automatically she had no conscious awareness of it, was normal and common. She did what all human beings do: She read the students' faces and experienced their silence and drew logical conclusions.
Oh. Did I say "logical"? What I should have said was "psycho."
And what I mean by "psycho" is that our conclusions are colored by our psychic structures, the ways we have constructed ourselves over our lifetimes to manage stress and relationships and to perceive and interpret the world.
The students' silence stressed Abigail out. The deep chasm that opened up between her and her students, the probability that her lesson plan was foundering, and the emotions -- her own and her students' -- that flooded her kicked Abigail into reactive mode.
Did I say "reactive mode"? What I should have said was "psycho mode." By "psycho mode" I mean the state where our psychic structures take over and determine our thoughts and actions based on expectations about the world that are old but are activated by our current circumstances. We can't help it: We see things, they activate us, we believe we know what they mean because our feelings and beliefs and thoughts are all telling us we do. And we act on these "logical" conclusions.
Normal. Common. And, if we don't carefully examine our conclusions, often wrong.
Back to Reading Minds
Another term for "psycho mode" is "reading minds." And, as I said above, teachers (and other people) do it all the time. The news flash is that, while we are often wrong about other people in psycho mode, we are also often right.
How can we tell the difference? The answer depends on when you want to know. If you want to know at the end of the day whether or not your mind-reading was accurate, you can do emotion work. If you want to know right there in the middle of class, in the heat of the moment, you can ask.
Otherwise known as a "reality check," asking people (such as students) what their faces or silence or reactions or statements mean is a great way to collect data about the students' reality. Accurate knowledge of students' reality grounds us when we're in psycho mode. Grounding ourselves in actual knowledge of what's going on in our students' heads means
we suffer less (because we don't torture ourselves with terrible beliefs that just aren't true)
we can more easily adjust to our students' needs (because they've told us what they are) and
we can more readily anticipate and avoid future problems (because we know our students better)
Abigail demonstrated this flip from psycho mode to grounding in her story. When she fell silent and did some emotion work, she "figured something out." She guessed that her students were resistant to her teaching because they were insulted by it. And, once she tried looking at it from their point of view, she couldn't blame them.
Abigail's revised conclusion? As I wrote in that other post, "She strongly felt that, had she described the silence to the students and asked them what it meant, the class would have turned out totally differently."
Brava, Abigail.