Lizanne Foster

Anger

Anger is an important emotion. It has had critically important functions through our human evolution. Its main purpose is to infuse us with energy so that we can fight for our survival. But the evolutionary development of anger was not without a few flaws. One of them is that the part of the brain that is engaged when we become angry works far more rapidly compared to the part of our brain that weighs and measures and considers alternatives: our prefrontal cortex.

Have you ever done something in anger you have deeply regretted later? An action that leads to regret is one that is done when you were in the middle of an amygdala hijack. The regret comes after the prefrontal lobe has considered other options and realized that you had misinterpreted the situation and over-reacted.

Although anger is an important survival emotion, it’s also a secondary emotion. It is always a cover for one or more of these other emotions: fear, hurt, sadness, loss. Feeling those emotions exposes the deepest core of our being, leaving us vulnerable, so we are not likely to do that as easily as we are to allow ourselves to become angry instead. Anger is a nice comfy blanket that hides our fear or hurt or sadness.

No one can make you feel angry. You alone have access to the switch that triggers the cascade of chemicals that result in the experience of anger.

So, no, that student or colleague did not make you angry when they did what they did. When you saw what they did, you interpreted their behaviour to mean something. That interpretation of their behaviour then led to the pulling of the anger trigger and when you yelled, you were in full amygdala hijack.

But, there are ways to circumvent another hijack.

When you know what kinds of things trigger you, when you know how your body signals that you’re about to be hijacked, you can take a deep breath or two. When you are first learning how to do this, it helps to walk away, out of the room for a bit.

It helps too if you have a regular meditation and exercise routine. You are less likely to be easily triggered if you do.

It also helps if you regularly release the energy that fuels your anger in healthy ways.

Even though you may learn all about anger, and what to do about it, changing the way you have been angry in the past is quite difficult to do. For a while, you’ll forget what to do far more frequently than you’ll remember.

But you need to keep practicing because the only way out is through.

You have to go through the learning curve. The golden prize at the other end is that, when you know how to control your own anger, you will be able to help your students do that too.

You will also understand that when a student is being aggressive or angry it has nothing at all to do with you. They may have had a really bad evening at home and the very last thing they can handle is to produce an error-free paragraph or listen to you explain a poem.

When you learn about your own anger, you will know just how really scared or worried or upset that student is underneath their anger. You will feel empathy.

And when you model empathy in your classroom, you will be well on your way to creating a learning environment that is emotionally safe for your students.

19th century classrooms were ruled by fear and coercion. Students in a 21st century learning environment feel safe to express and experience a range of emotions because their teacher is attuned to students’ emotions and knows, both cognitively and experientially, how to respond accordingly.

Attunement

“The learning professionals within the learning environment are highly attuned to the learners’ motivations and the key role of emotions in achievement” http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/50300814.pdf

I was very excited to see the concept of “attunement” included in the OECD document that currently seems to be guiding the direction of education reforms in countries like Canada. But my excitement was followed by concern that this would be yet another great idea that dies soon after launch because of a lack of practical understanding of it. For those who would prefer an academic analysis of attunement, I recommend this paper by Heesoon Bai. This post will hopefully illuminate the concept in a practical way.

Last year, through circumstances that were both serendipitous and synchronous, I was fortunate to participate in a three-day workshop with Victor Wooten, unquestionably the best bass player in the world right now. No, I don’t play the bass and have not played the piano since I was a teen! I felt quite comfortable in the workshop, not only because Wooten was very welcoming but also because there were a few of us there with no other instrument but our voices.

Wooten is a master teacher and amazing to watch in action. One day during the workshop I watched in awe while he “taught” the concept of attunement without once mentioning the word. At that point he had been talking for a while and I suppose sensed that people were not fully getting what he meant.

He went into the centre of the circle and called up 5 people, 4 who played instruments and one who sang. Without any further instruction, he began to play a bass riff. After about a minute, he nodded to one of the musicians who then began to play his instrument in harmony with the bass riff. After another minute Wooten nodded to yet another musician and then another and then to the singer. Each of the 5 people joined in, adding their instrument to the music, in complete harmony. And right there, before our eyes, an amazing piece of music was performed, a piece that had never existed before that moment. A piece that just emerged from the attunement of one musician with another. No one musician dominated the piece; each listened carefully to the others while creating sound that wove between, above and below each other’s notes.

Teaching in a 21st century classroom is about being attuned to the “music” each of your students brings into the classroom and helping them to play their instrument well while at the same time playing in harmony with everyone else in the classroom.

What is critically important to being able to do this is for the teacher herself to be attuned to her own music. To know herself well, to know her own strengths and to know where she needs help and support.

The singer in that circle with Wooten had no idea what she was being called up to do in the centre of the room. She did however know what she could do. She also knew how what she did could complement what others were doing. She could not provide the same sounds that the bass or the saxophone did but this was true for all the musicians in the centre. Each could use their instruments as individuals but what they could create together, when they listened carefully to each other, was magical and more than any one could do.

A teacher who is attuned to her students sees each of them as individuals and yet also part of a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

Attunement is not about what usually happens when a group of musicians get together and one starts to play a known song and others follow along. It’s also not the same as when one musician dominates an impromptu piece, leading the others.

Attunement requires a dissolution of the sense of separation between yourself and the other. It requires paying attention to something greater than you. Something that has to be felt to be truly known.

Which is why I’m concerned that this concept is going to be ignored or downplayed even though it is so critical in teaching and learning.

Teachers are most comfortable being “in charge” but to be attuned requires teachers to follow more often than to lead.

Teachers who want to be more attuned to their students will need courage to step down from their positions of control and to bravely step away from being at the centre of the classroom, literally and metaphorically.

I know how disquieting this can be and have previously written about my experience in a decentred classroom. But I also know that going through the discomfort is a necessary step to creating a learning environment for the 21st century.

Be the Change

You’ve watched Ken Robinson other education revolutionaries on TED talks. You’ve attended numerous professional development workshops on the “new” way to teach. You know something has to change but when you enter your room each morning, you are overwhelmed by the demands made on you by the students and the system. You don’t know where to start.

Start here.

Realize that this change, this transformation will not happen overnight. It will also not be easy. It will not unfold in simple, linearity from point A to point Z. It will be messy. You will be frequently frustrated. You will want to give up.

Don’t.

Your students need you to not give up. They are desperately waiting for something more than they’re getting. Some of them have given up waiting and have dropped out. Their numbers keep growing. The ones who are still in classrooms are hoping that this year, something will be different.

Take baby steps.

First change the things you can easily change. Notice how you feel when you make those changes. Notice what happens in the classroom when you introduce the changes. Be like a scientist observing an experiment.

Try titration.

Add something to the way you collect data about the students.

Add something to the way students interact with each other.

Add something to the way time is used in your classroom.

Add something to the way you see yourself as teacher.

Then watch what happens.

Make adjustments.

Evolution is a slow process.

Be patient.

There are many of us out here, working like water flowing over rock, changing the system from within.

Soon all our little molecules of change will coalesce into a stream and then into a river and the system will have been transformed, not by political decree but by the work of teachers like you and me.

Learning Environments

The latest buzzword in educational reform is “learning environments”. These are, according to the OECD, places where constructive, self-regulated learning, that is sensitive to context, is fostered. Critical to the success of learning in these spaces is that “learning professionals [should be] highly attuned to the learners’ motivations and the key role of emotions in achievement” and that they should also “encourage well-organized co-operative learning.”

This all sounds really wonderful and very 21st century but as someone who has spent almost 3 decades creating learning environments that are socially inviting, emotionally safe and intellectually stimulating, I can assure you that teachers are going to need much more than a text and a workshop to successfully role- shift from being primarily deliverers of content and dispensers of discipline to being “attuned to learners’ motivations” while they structure learning environments in which learners are at the centre.

It will take much more than just a cognitive decision to change a way of being in the classroom.

If teachers do not spend time getting to know themselves, truly, and if they’re not willing to look deep into the shadows of why they do the things they do, they will be incapable of creating for students an emotionally safe space in which miscommunication and conflict that arises amongst students and between students and the teacher is managed in a way that preserves relationships.

When a classroom becomes de-centred, when a teacher is not in complete control of all interactions, all kinds of wonderful things can and do happen but these can be easily overshadowed if the not-so-wonderful dimensions of relationships within the learning environment are not constructively managed.

Relationships are strengthened when they can withstand, and be strengthened by the fires of conflict. But how is a teacher to know how to deal with conflict when in her traditional role of dispenser of discipline, punishment or banishment was the norm?

Central to the success of learning environments is that teachers should ‘care’ about students’ emotional well-being but caring is not always rainbows or fuzzy Care Bears and Hallmark cards. Caring takes courage and honesty and trust and those are not deliverable by a point and click or an announcement of a policy change.

It is not enough to be an educated adult, motivated to create a caring classroom community/learning environment.

Nothing in my undergraduate studies in Anthropology, Sociology or Psychology or my post-graduate studies in Curriculum and Instruction prepared me to know how to meaningfully manage the dynamics and dimensions of classroom relationships between students and teachers and amongst students.

I am still not aware of any teacher-education programme that directly and specifically teaches teachers, in ways beyond reading and discussing a text, how to develop and maintain and support relationships in the classroom. Please let me know if you do!

In the absence of such a formal program, I have learned, mostly through direct experience, how to create a learning environment in my classroom that supports and encourages relationships between students. It is these relationships that are critical and crucial to the health of a learning environment. They are the lifeblood, the ground, of the learning environment. Just as any biological ecosystem depends on healthy relationships between all components of the ecosystem, social learning environments cannot succeed without healthy relationships among all human beings in that environment.

It is because of this that I structure my classroom/learning environment so that it is socially inviting, emotionally safe and intellectually challenging.

Welcome Space

As each school day begins, my colleague, Christine, stands at the door of her classroom , coffee cup in hand, greeting every student by name as they walk in. Sometimes the greeting includes a query about their well-being or a comment on how well they did on an assignment. Sometimes it’s just a huge smile and a “Good morning”.

When I walk past her classroom before the school day begins, it is always filled with kids. None of them her current students. Most of them had been her students when they were in Grade 8 but even though they’re now in Grades 11 or 12, they still go to her classroom every morning.

At lunch her room is filled with even more kids as she hosts a “movie club” which is really a safe space for kids who do not easily “fit” into any stereotypical group in a high school. What must it mean for those students to have such a space where they can feel at home?

How many classrooms had you been in at the end of your 13 years of schooling? If your experience is typical, that number should be about 48. In how many of those classrooms did you feel welcome and safe? Like you belonged, like you mattered?

Faced with yet another barrage of cuts to our education budget, I’ve wondered why there is no widespread public outrage. Why is there no massive public anger about the lack of resources, the overcrowded classrooms in schools? Why no parents marching in the streets all throughout the province to restore funding for a public education system that everyone agrees is fundamentally important in a democracy?

It is not as if there is no precedent for parent protest if one considers what happens when a beloved local school is threatened with closure.

But why the silence when the public education system as a whole is under enormous threat?

Is it perhaps because, if we think about those 48 classrooms we sat in, most of what we remember is feeling bored or unwelcome or unsafe?

The pupils of today are going to be the voting public of tomorrow. Each school day, we teachers create the ingredients for the memories each student will take with them when they enter adulthood and their roles as voters.

If we create spaces in our classrooms and in our schools that are socially inviting, emotionally safe and intellectually stimulating, not only will our students have better learning experiences (as neuroscience research is proving) but when those students become voters, they will be more likely to fight to defend an education system for which they have fond memories.

And that would also ensure that teachers could keep teaching in public schools.

Everyone would win if more classrooms were more inviting despite egregious cuts to school district budgets during the current political climate.

And yes, this can be done. I will share, in future posts, examples from my time as a teacher in Apartheid -era South Africa as well as in an under-funded school in Canada. I also suggest my post Jugaad Education.

When a local municipality recently threatened to push a road through a popular park, people took to the streets, motivated by all their memories of time spent in the park and wanting to ensure that their children had those memories too. Let’s create classroom spaces that would be as powerful a motivation to defend public education.

The Teacher’s Task in the 21st century

In the 19^th century, the good teacher was primarily a disciplinarian charged with the task of re/forming farm children into factory workers through sanctioned access to a limited set of information. She could perform this task confident that the students she was teaching did not know what she knew since books were scarce and expensive and reading a skill not high on the priority list of farming families.

To teach students then was to instil in them a preference for punctuality and performance. It was to ensure that they were aware that some knowledge and information was of more value than other types. The student in a schoolroom in the 19^th century learned to stay within the lines, to follow instructions and to not question authority. All these skills were necessary for the good factory worker who was responsible for uniformity of the products of the factory.

But now that manufacturing no longer drives the economic engine of many developed countries and creative problem solving is the skill most sought after by corporations who pay decent salaries, teachers who focus on discipline and control of information stunt their students’ growth and development of the kind of thinking that does not fit neatly within the lines of conformity. We are especially at a disadvantage when it comes to information – who can compete with what Google can deliver into the palms of students’ hands?

Although much can be said about the lack of resources in classrooms and in schools, there is still much that can be done despite the current attack on education budgets. We may be limited by what we can do to stem the bleeding of our education budgets but we are not limited by what our imaginations can do in response.

If Nelson Mandela could turn his tiny cell on Robben Island into his personal gym when he went through a rigorous set of exercises every morning, and if all the political prisoners with him on the island could turn their jail into a school as the ‘old guard’ and the ‘young lions’ shared knowledge, then surely we can turn our classrooms into places that students will want to be, despite everything.

Let’s practice creative problem solving ourselves as teachers so that we can model it for our students for surely they are going to need all the problem-solving skills they can master to deal with climate change and recurring economic crises in the world they will inherit from us.

Teacher as Philosopher?

The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers is that schoolteachers think that they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils. Sophie’s World , by Jostein Gaarder, page 70

I wonder if, 2413 years after Socrates, whether the world is yet ready for the philosopher-teacher, a pedagogue whose task is not so much to lead a pupil to a place of knowledge that has been mapped and visited before but instead to help the pupil to prepare for the journey of inquiry and reflection and questioning of all that is accepted as knowledge, and all that is yet unknown.

With oceans of information and knowledge readily accessible to anyone with an Internet connection in even the remotest parts of the planet, the role of teacher as “content deliverer” has become defunct. It’s now time that role is replaced with a new role of teacher as co-pilot, as navigator, as logistician, one who anticipates what might be needed on the journey, and travels part of the learning journey with the student.

A teacher-philosopher/co-pilot would not participate in what Ken Robinson calls the greatest suppression of creativity in human history that occurs in our schools when teachers do what incenses Sophie so much. Instead, teachers would be as curious as her students, wanting to learn and to discover what is not yet known.

But for this paradigm shift in the role of schools and teachers to occur, there would need to be a huge shift in our current socio-cultural “centre of gravity”.

A modern philosopher, Ken Wilber suggests that each society has a centre of gravity around which its morals, ethics and worldviews coalesce. This COG acts like a magnet: if you rise above, the centre of gravity pulls you down, if you are below the centre of gravity, it will pull you up.

A very simple example of this is the widely accepted practice of recycling beverage containers in our society. If you don’t recycle aluminium cans and plastic bottles, you will be “pulled up” to this practice by being admonished and persuaded to change your habits through personal encounters, public service ads and incentives such as being paid to return cans to recycling depots. But if you point out that the manufacture of these bottles and cans is a problem in itself, far greater than recycling can solve, you will be “pulled down”, seen as being “intense” or “extreme”. You would be on the outside of society’s centre of gravity around the idea of recycling.

Socrates was on the outside of the centre of gravity in Athens in 399 B.C.E. By questioning the “wisdom” of the city’s elite, he was undermining the status quo. In order for it to retain its power, he needed to be “pulled down” to the Athenian centre of gravity and its views on “education of the young”, a centre of gravity that held the view that the young should not be taught to question authority or to look too deeply into what was considered “truth”.

Education of the young has long been the site of these gravity tensions since it is seen as the most powerful lever for societal change. But the nature of this change is always contested.

As long as education is performing the function of preparing students to take their place within the status quo, and to accept the current wisdom, then all is well. But should a teacher get the notion that education should be about more than that, there is tension and the COG will “pull down” those attempts in ways both personal and political.

This process of “pulling down” can be like my experience of being accused of “breeding rebels” by colleagues in South Africa during the Apartheid era when I taught my students to ask questions about their learning experiences. Over the past 18 years of teaching in Canada, I have continued to cause “trouble” in my teaching practice when I allow students to nap, when I invite them to dance, when I encourage them to question, to negotiate, and especially when I suggest that they look at textbooks as not holding the “gospel” truth about any subject.

Another example of this “pulling down” process is the recent experiences of the teachers of Ethnic Studies in Arizona state schools where legislation was passed in 2010 to stop them from teaching about the historical and literary contributions made by African-American, Native-American and Hispanic-American people. The centre of gravity of the United States public is not yet ready to accept or to acknowledge the injustices of the past and accuses these teachers of inciting racial hatred. Or perhaps they mean, that those teachers are “corrupting the youth” when they teach them how to reveal the truth.

In the 21^st century, teachers who behave like “gadflies” on the horse of the corporate-state may not share the same fate as Socrates if they are lucky enough to live in judicially strong countries and if they are lucky enough to belong to a strong labour union. However, world history of the recent past is woven with numerous stories of teachers risking their lives (and sometimes losing them) in states where there is no access to a functioning justice system. In some respects we have not moved much further than Athens in 399 B.C.

I hope 21^st century teachers do not have to be prepared to risk their lives before we see a shift in modern western culture’s centre of gravity with regard to the role of teachers in our age of information, a shift that would provide students like Sophie with philosopher-pilots instead of human force-feeding tubes.

Learning to Fly

When I’m not pondering how much knowledge and what kind of knowledge I should have as a teacher in a 21st-century classroom, I’m thinking about what ‘good’ teaching is. Reams have been written over centuries about what makes a teacher ‘good’ but I confess that I find the whole debate utterly exhausting. What is ‘good’? For whom? When? What does it even mean to ‘teach’?

A few summers ago, my friend Skylark and I were on one of our regular walks through a nearby fragment of forest when we noticed a baby bird on the pathway. The bird still had downy feathers and seemed quite content to be just sitting there. But sitting where it was would put it in the direct path of any one of the many dogs that also love to walk the trail. And so we had a dilemma on our hands.

I immediately announced that I did not know how to look after a baby bird but Skylark’s childhood had included experiences with her father rescuing birds and butterflies. She began talking softly to the bird while she thought about what to do. After a few minutes, she gently picked up the bird the way her father had taught her, and placed her/him in her purse. We walked on. When we came to a stream, she dipped her finger into the water and fed the bird droplets of water, all the while patiently talking to the bird. Then she decided we had to find some worms so that we could feed the bird. So there we were, scratching around the dirt looking for worms to feed the baby bird all the while mosquitoes were having quite a midday meal on us. We didn’t find any worms and so continued our walk, wondering all the way if the bird would be okay.

When we got home and Skylark went on the Internet to find out what to do about the bird, she quickly realized that we had done all the wrong things. A bird-rescue website had helped her to identify the bird (a cedar waxwing), corrected her on what the bird actually needed to eat (berries, not worms) and advised that the bird should be returned to the place it was found so that its mother could find it and show it how to get back to the nest.

And so we followed the advice which included setting the bird back in the same area but not the same spot and waiting from a distance for the mother so show up. We did as suggested and after waiting about 20 minutes, we realized that the bird had been safely rescued by its mother.

For me there are so many dimensions of learning and teaching revealed in this incident. There is the learning and teaching between the baby bird and its mother. Apparently baby cedar waxwings learn to fly by first dropping to the ground which is why it was not scared to be where it was. It had not, of course, realized that its forest home also accommodated lots of humans and dogs. Although it had been born with the instinct to fly, it still needed guidance from its mother. The ‘teaching’ by the mother bird and the ‘learning’ by the baby bird were processes that had evolved over millennia so that there are specific skills learned and taught for a specific environment. Baby birds need to learn to fly in order to feed themselves so that they can go on to do more bird-like things: sing, procreate, participate in an ecosystem.

To gather data about the bird as an entity separate from its environment (temperate rain forests) would provide a poor and incomplete picture of the bird, its bird behaviour (eating berries) and bird skills ( flying, nest building). In addition, to gather data about how the bird learns and is taught without looking at the environment would be a ridiculous notion. And yet proponents of standardized teaching and testing use just such a lens when they look at students in classrooms.

What the bird needs to learn is directly connected to specific needs in a specific environment.

And when that environment changes, as it is currently for many Arctic birds, there is a level of change in that learning in order to adapt to the new environment. Many birds have adapted to living and thriving in urban environments. How did they learn how to do this? How long did the learning last? Who/what were the teachers of that learning? How did they realize that their environment was changing and that they would need to adapt?

Ecologists tell us that we humans too are inextricably part of an ecosystem, that without our environments, we would die; spiritual mystics tell us that there is no boundary between what we see as our separate selves and what we call our environment. And yet we persist in seeing teaching/learning as a separate issue, extricated from the multiple places and spaces to which we belong.

Each morning we all awake to different selves (biologically, chronologically, psychologically) in a different world (seasonally, technologically, historically, politically) both outside and inside the classroom. And yet we continue to rely on textbooks that captured what was true in an environment long-changed by new discoveries, and new ways of seeing the world. We continue to focus on the past to prepare students for the future. If birds did this, they’d never survive!

The Information Age has exponentially generated not only vast oceans of information but also a multitude of possible places of belonging and ways of being. What determines what is ‘good’ to learn and teach in an ever-changing world? Is it enough to know how to navigate oceans of information? Should we learn how to live in a world of imminent nuclear devastation? How to live in a world of dramatic weather events and climate change? Should we teach our children how to live in a world of perpetual war? How to make a living during economic recessions and depressions? Should they know how to thrive in whatever economic system is going to replace capitalism?

What do we prepare the next generation for when we are not even certain what the future looks like? Whose agenda do we choose and what are the implications of that for the child, for society, for our collective future?

Next September schools will begin to educate 6 year olds for the world of 2028… who knows what they’ll need to know for the world they will face when they enter adulthood?Will we have prepared them enough so that they know how to fly in the forests of the future?