Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. I am here with our host, Sucheta Kamath,
Good morning, Sucheta, good to be with you for yet another mind-blowing conversation, I have no doubt, but you’re going to lead us off this morning by talking about kaizen and a retired teacher from Chino Valley, California. Tell us more.
Sucheta: Good morning to you, Todd. It’s great to be with you, and yes, one of my favorite words in Japanese is called ‘kaizen.’ It means constant and never-ending improvement. That is a mindset of highly-driven and self-motivated individuals. Won’t it be fun to teach a student with kaizen at the heart of his being? Mahatma Gandhi once said that ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow and learn as if you were to live forever,’ and of course, leave it to Mahatma, which means ‘greatest man.’ Mahatma Gandhi was certainly highly-motivate to learn; he cared about his learning, he tried, he never gave up. It’s said that high-class achievers all around the world share some common traits. They include things like they’re highly self-motivated, their inside transformation is not dependent on outside factors, they are committed to continual self-improvement, and most importantly, they acknowledge to themselves that learning and evolving never stops.
So, imagine having a student with kaizen who then becomes this high-class world achiever, but that will be too good to be true, right? Not every teacher is blessed to have a student or a group of students in the class like that, and that’s why it brings me to the story Robert Bremer. I recently read an article about him. The article was about his retirement, announcing his retirement. He taught Social Studies and Physical Education for 34 years in Buena Vista Continuation High in Chino Valley, California. He managed to motivate thousands of students, and the newspaper article that I read said that ‘under less than perfect conditions.’ He was teaching in the area that was not very endowed and the students he had came from all walks of life, mostly who have endured or who had endured lots of difficulties. So, lots of colleagues came forward and contributed to the story that I read, but he was said to bring a shovel to school to fill holes that golfers would take on the school field. He wanted to do that, so the students would be safe. The school had no gym or pool, and imagine, he was a Physio teacher, so he, like many teachers I know do, he would put his own money to buy volleyball nets, softball, baseball, clubs, etc., all the materials that you need, then he had to be quite innovative and ingenious to engage the kids. Imagine motivating kids to take part on gym activities without a gym. So, he would tailor his offerings to excite students about sports. He would offer cash prizes for homeruns. The only requirement he had of his students, that they had to wear appropriate footwear because it was P.E. Also, he taught History, so he was not easy on kids in terms of he didn’t have a lower standard; he just said that they had to produce a decent piece of writing and they had to do the research if they wanted to pass his class.
What struck me about Robert Bremer’s story, that he managed to get the kids to care and he did that by caring so deeply for these kids and their welfare. So, why should we talk about Mr. Bremer and kaizen? There’s a unique individual human cost to not educating a child that is less self-motivated and one who lacks the wisdom about schoolwork and how it matters. The system is set up such that children may actually get typecast and left behind, and so we need somebody to change their ways and create an opportunity for our students and not the students who are fully equipped and best prepared for learning, and that’s what brings me to our speaker who’s an amazing, I would say motivational speaker but she is also a highly-celebrated educator.
So, today, we have MaryAnn Brittingham. She has master’s degree in Family Counseling and bachelor’s degree with a dual certification in both Special and General Education. She is the author of Respectful Discipline, Motivating the Unmotivated, Dealing with Difficult Parents, and co-author of Transformative Teaching: Changing Today’s Classroom Culturally, Academically, & Emotionally. It’s a great resource. I will plug something about this on our website, so people should check it out.
Throughout her 35 years of education, she has worked as a special education teacher, adjunct instructor at the graduate level. She has been a teacher consultant, and she has provided counseling services to children and families for all these years. MaryAnn is a behavioral consultant and a well-known international speaker who focuses on social-emotional skill development, effective classroom management, discipline and self-regulation, and mindful practices.
MaryAnn is wholeheartedly committed to helping teachers reflect on, and then transforming their own behaviors in order to better serve their students, and I love this part of her work because we are so focused on education children, the premise of that is the child should change his ways because he has difficulties in learning, but what about taking a minute and saying what can teachers change about themselves? And not so much tactically what can they do so that the class is more organized, it runs smoothly, but also, internally, what can they change? So, I’m so excited to have her and her wisdom really, really gives us a great set of tools to handle difficult children.
Producer: Well, it promises to be a great conversation as most of your conversations are, and yeah, I appreciate the story of Mr. Bremer. I’m always inspired by a teacher who goes above and beyond, so great, great stuff.
Alright, well, let’s get to it, here is Sucheta’s conversation with MaryAnn Brittingham.
Sucheta: MaryAnn Brittingham, welcome to the Full PreFrontal podcast. I’m so delighted to have you. So, as an educator, you are interested in finding out how kids stay motivated or are motivated when they are learning. So, how do you define motivation? What is the root of motivation in the way you see it, and what’s the mechanism behind it? Can you help us distinguish between internal and external motivation?
Dr. Brittingham: Hi, Sucheta, so happy to be here with you. Sure, I believe the root of motivation comes from motive and that which inwardly moves a person to behave in a certain way, and motivation is definitely an internal, not an external thing, motivation is something you do with people, not to people, and we were often told that it’s our job to motivate students, and if it’s my job to motivate you, that all the energy comes from me and you don’t have to do anything but sit there, so what I think our job is when we want to help motivate students is help them discover their own motivation and challenge them to act on it, and that way, the energy is coming from them. Have you ever attended a motivational seminar yourself and leaving, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m going to change my life, I’m going to exercise, I’m going to get organized,” and then in two weeks, where are we? Where we started from, right? So, what’s the job of the motivational speaker is really to light a fire, it’s to inspire you to break down the steps so that they are doable, but who has to go home and do it is you. So, I as an educator or as a parent can inspire but I can’t motivate you to do that. That’s something that’s much more internal. So, I always believe that our job in education is to set a fertile ground for learning where learning can occur, where it’s a safe environment, free from ridicule, and where the curriculum and skills are broken down into doable steps. So, I like to think of it as a ladder with rungs that they are far enough apart that I have to stretch and grow but not so far that I can’t reach them.
Sucheta: Wow, I love the way you’re describing it and I can feel the passion in you as you talk about motivation and really distinguish for people that if you go into educating children, the premise is that you will bring that out of them, not expect that so that you can teach. So, can you talk a little bit about how do these unmotivated, disengaged children, come across to an educator? Because it can take a shape in different forms. Some may be very passive and quiet, but some may be aggressive, but that the all be signs of being motivated to be learning what is being put in front of them, right?
Dr. Brittingham: Absolutely, yeah, there’s so many things that could be behind that, like lack of trust in the person that they’re working with and it could be you are a trustworthy person but the people prior to you haven’t been trustworthy, so they don’t trust adults. It could be they have this fear, and so it comes out in different ways, and then teachers interpret that and take it personally, and so I take it personally, then I react with lots of emotion instead of responding with skill, and the other thing I do when I take it personally is as an educator, is I might start blaming other people for it, blaming the student, blaming the parents. We love to blame high school teachers, blame elementary teachers, elementary, junior, blame the parents, the parents blame the school system. There is a wonderful quote by Thich Nhat Hanh who says this: “When you plant lettuce, if the lettuce doesn’t grow, well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look into the reasons it’s not doing well. It may need fertilizer or water, or less sun, but you never blame the lettuce,” and what we often do is blame the student for not doing it and we say, “Oh, well, they are in high school,” or “They are a fifth grader, they know better,” but nine times out of 10, if you know the story behind the apathy or the misbehavior, it wouldn’t make you angry. It would probably break your heart, and so we are always thinking that it’s not them, but we have no control over how they were fertilized when they were growing up, and so if you have parents that don’t value education, and that’s not in their realm to do it. We get upset with kids when they don’t use manners. Well, if that’s not the way they’ve been exposed to, it’s not what they know, and then we keep blaming them, and my issue with blame, it’s really that it’s a waste of time. It doesn’t change the problem. It gives you an excuse not to try different ways, it takes the focus off of you, but you still get to play a victim. “I can’t do this because…” I always feel like with teachers, you do the best you can with what you’ve been given, that’s all anybody can ask of us.
Sucheta: Yeah, you make several important points and I would love to revisit a couple of them. One thing I love with your lettuce analogy, my husband and I are quite amused, we’ve never had a dog before and we kind of feel, why aren’t you listening? So, we brought a dog trainer and she kind of reminded that dog’s behavior is pretty much a reflection of your behavior. It was kind of a hurtful thing to hear but it was the honest truth, that if he is jumping, if we just used a loud voice, he’s barking.
Dr. Brittingham: That’s a perfect example, yeah.
Sucheta: So, you are talking about something important called ‘agency.’ So, lettuce, if it doesn’t grow the way we want, we can’t blame the lettuce. We actually cognitively understand it because lettuce doesn’t have agency. So many people struggle with that because the child who appears willful and does so the capacity to do something opposite than what you want which is also motivation. So, it creates a very conflicting message for the observer. So, you are talking about how to kind of take yourself back to that notion of why you got into education and not bring your response to the child’s difficult presentation, isn’t it?
Dr. Brittingham: It is, but just to go back to what you said, so the lettuce doesn’t have the agency, it doesn’t have the will to change, but the way that you have brought up is who you are, so for you to say to me you should be motivated, that’s not what I’ve been witnessing. If that’s not what I’ve been practicing, just because I have the power of thought, doesn’t mean I can change it right away, and that’s our job as vindicator, is to have a little bit more patience in helping – and first of all, you don’t change a behavior until you are aware of the behavior, so to be aware of what I’m doing, and then to, in a support of caring way, guide me to where you want me rather than judge me because if you judge me for not being motivated, I’m probably just going to dissent in my position, so when we are judged, that’s what we do. We do two things when we are judged: we either dissent or deny what we do, and so very often, students are being attacked for the way they are behaving and I’m a product of all my environment. You want me to change, show me a different environment where I can grow and blossom. Does that make sense?
Sucheta: Yes, yes. No, that makes perfect sense. Thank you for elaborating on that. So, the second question I have about this is, which teacher doesn’t want to be effective? Every teacher wants to show up and she’s done a lot of preparation, she has great desire to be impactful, and she has some ideas behind that lesson plan, and sometimes, that either the idea is lost, or the method is not effective, or the child’s responses not as expected as it is, and it’s such a chemistry between the two parties, isn’t it? What you’re saying is to be more patient, but what if you are patient and the child still continues to not respond? Is that an issue about not understanding the bigger picture of learning and education? What kind of barriers do you think that come from the child’s side other than bringing or not understanding importance of learning?
Dr. Brittingham: From the child’s side?
Sucheta: Yeah, from the child’s side, yeah.
Dr. Brittingham: Right, meaning what value do they see in it? So, what value has this to me in my life and how it’s going to help me? In almost every book I read, it says there has to be relevance to the child in order for them to embrace it, and I also understand the struggle of the teacher to always show the relevance to the student, because they’re [0:14:11] live in the moment, so it’s hard to see how this is going to help them later on when all they are thinking about is who they’re going to sit with that lunchtime? Who are they going to play with? So, what do I care about this math lesson? So one teacher’s response to when a student said was, “When am I ever going to use this?” She said, “Tell me every single thing you’re going to do in your life, that I’ll tell you where this lesson would apply.”
Sucheta: Oh, I love that.
Dr. Brittingham: Right? Isn’t that because you have no idea what you’re going to be doing when you’re going to be using it, an you’re only thinking about, well, going to be an accountant, so I don’t really need to know the history of this. So, it’s really getting kids to see the relevance and the struggle for teachers not to be so vested in their, it’s really hard because of the demands being put on us to cover certain lessons, and we have them laid out and we’re vested in covering the lesson, you can cover it, or you could teach it. So, be willing to modify what you’re doing, and the patience is a big thing that I think is a really hard idea to embrace in education because everybody wants a quick fix to behavior problems, to motivational problems: how do I get the motivator to change their behavior or to get engaged in the lesson? And I know for a fact is there are no quick fixes to behavior problems or to motivational problems, and the reason why is it takes time to change human behavior, and in education, everything is about hurry up cover this, so we can get ready for the test. Well, we have to have more patience if it takes time. If you have a student who disrupts, let’s say calls out 27 times and you do a wonderful intervention, and now, they are calling out 22 times, would you say that that intervention is working?
Sucheta: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think it is working because it’s less.
Dr. Brittingham: Exactly, but as an educator who has demands or a parent with demands for this child to accomplish this, you’re not going to think it’s working. So, you will jump ship and look for another strategy. Well, the fact is, 22 is less than 27. It’s going in the right direction. It’s working, but we want to see it go from 27 to 0 disruption, and that’s not realistic. If I have a habit, I’m not going to change it if that’s again where judgments come back in, the behavior didn’t change quickly enough so we make these assumptions – they don’t care, they’re not motivated, they don’t want to change. Well, Sucheta, I am really motivated to not eat so much junk food, and yet I still do it. I know all the horrible things it does, and yet, and I tried different things and it doesn’t work right away, but am I getting better at decreasing the amount? Yeah, but for how many years was I on automatic pilot to just reach for the junk food, right? And so, if we could just do one thing as adults which is to consider how hard it is for us to change our own behaviors, then maybe we would be a little bit more understanding of how long it takes for students to change their behavior. We have all had, right, something we’ve been working on, every year, we say we’re going to change it and we don’t? And look at all of the resources that as an adult that we have at our fingertips. I could go to a different weight loss program, I can go get hypnotized, I could go exercise. Kids don’t even have all those resources and we do, and we’re still struggling to change, and we expect a student to change just because we did a different strategy or put them on a behavior chart.
Sucheta: I love what you’re talking about here, is the teacher’s executive function. Their capacity to take a perspective that’s other than their own, changing the plan that they have in mind or modifying the plan slightly more or adapting to the new challenge in teaching and not being so rigid or being so resistant to having to do it a certain way because a kid may do it. It sounds like that’s what you’re calling for. Do you see that teacher’s own executive function challenges come in the way of them being effective in being very prompt or efficient, or effective in this process? Do they have an awareness?
Dr. Brittingham: No, I don’t know that we all have the awareness, but just like executive functioning affects a student and their ability to follow a plan, it’s the same with teachers. I think our executive functioning plays a large part in this and the lack of awareness is what hurts us, which then causes us to judge, like we don’t self-reflect, we project it outside ourselves, it’s the kid’s fault rather than looking at what we might need to do, it may be having a little more compassion for ourselves and for our students. When you have more compassion and less a judgment, you’re going to make more gains than ever before, because when you have compassion for yourself, you have more patience for yourself, more love for yourself, you will make bigger changes. When you keep these in yourself with a stick, you just keep doing what you’ve been doing. I’m bad, I’m no good, and it’s the same when we treat students that way. That’s why I like us to focus more on our progress, not our perfection. Look at how much progress the student is making rather than how this is where he’s supposed to be and the same with yourself: look at how much progress, how far you’ve come, how much more patience you have now, instead of looking how far you have to go because [0:19:08] how far you have to go, don’t get overwhelmed, like “Oh, I’m never going to be able to do this,” right? But if you’re like, “Wow, look, I’ve done this whole part. That’s great. Okay, let me keep that momentum going. We get much further that way.”
Sucheta: You know, this reminded me that my training – I’m a speech and language pathologist and you by training, you’re an educator and I talked to my psychologist friends also, but rarely we receive any training in managing emotions of other people or let alone managing our own emotions before we got into the profession of helping people. The psychologists particularly who do counseling or therapy have to have an experience as a “patient” but you and I have not received any training how to deal with difficult student or somebody who’s resisting therapy or somebody who is resisting any suggestion that you are making, so we are plowing through with our own wisdom and sometimes, our wisdom may be antigravity, so to speak, I may not be walking, and so I love that a lot of your strategies and recommendations have psychological bend to it. How do teachers, when you do workshops and all, respond to this suggestion about patients? What are some key ingredients to foster patience in oneself?
Dr. Brittingham: When I’m presenting, my teachers are actually – it’s a good aha for them, the patience thing, and I think they get that based story to get something to the vortex of negativity of the demands being put on them, and they forgot that patience is a key part for that. So, if we were to look at a baby, when they’re crying, we will try so many different things, right? Rock them, we will feed them, we’ll change their diaper, we will try many things to help them. Well, students, when they are acting out, they are crying for help too. When their head is down and they are demotivated, they are crying for help, it’s just in a different way, it’s one way to help teachers have more patience is to really start to create empathy to get to what’s really behind the behavior instead of just addressing the tip of the iceberg which is the head down or that not doing the work. That’s just the tip of the iceberg and if you could create empathy to see more of what’s behind it, it helps to have a little bit more patience with the students.
Sucheta: Beautiful. I have done many training workshops and trained a curriculum in one of the schools over three years, and one of the interesting things that I found that you know how we have this counting 1 to 5 before you say something or how you put your own email in the draft of box rather than send? So, I created a system where the student held a sign, a number – it had a number on it, and so the teacher was instructed to teach the students to hold up a sign and the teacher had to count 1001, 1002, 1003, so if the number three came up, and just so just to teach, as the teacher is teaching how to possibly for responding, the students were taught to nudge the teacher or give them a little bit power but that was one of the strategies that I found was very effective. Very unusual.
Dr. Brittingham: I love that, but it’s so great because what we have to do, we call them esteem bumps is like, teachers have to learn into build an esteem bump, and what you just shared with me is a perfect example of a student helping the teacher build an esteem bump and wouldn’t that be great if we could do the same for students to teach them to build an esteem bump, and for a lot of that, we do a lot of mindfulness and taking a mindful moment, and teaching students about that, to do certain breathing. Even for teachers, I ask them, before you go in response to a student, just go over to your desk and take a sip of something that looks like water – no, take a glass of water, and just two sips because to do that, you have to breathe in, breathe out, right? So, you will do four breaths and then walk over and approach that student, or pretend you are somebody else before – somebody who is calm and before you go back to reach that student because we are on automatic and as soon as the head is down, we walk over there and we are on autopilot, and then reacting instead of responding with a skill, and when you react, we usually react with emotions rather than responding with a scale such as a redirection, questioning, a skill that would help the student.
Sucheta: Wonderful. So, the next question I had was about dealing with peers. Let’s say if you see that you are a special ed teacher and you are dealing with a lot of educators or a lot of teachers who come to you and say Johnny is being difficult or Johnny is hard to teach, and they almost look at you to fix Johnny somehow, and then the special ed teachers I find that they’re in this sandwich where they’re trying to advocate the student who fails to advocate for himself or herself, and then the teacher is expecting a change which may not be visible or tangible right away, because as you mentioned, behaviors take a long time before a change is evident. What kind of strategies do you recommend for those special ed teachers who are at triaging the care for the least motivated or difficult children – or children who are going through difficulties, rather?
Dr. Brittingham: Right, and that is a challenge because the special educator teacher is supposed to have all the answers for the gen ed teacher and for the students, and that’s really a challenge, so my first thing when a teacher approaches me as a special educator is just to hear the teacher and their frustration. What I would do first, when I first was in education, I would be like, I have to fix it. The teacher wants to fix it, and sometimes, the general ed teacher just wants to vent and to be heard, right? And for their feelings to be acknowledged that it’s so frustrating, I’ve tried pleasing strategies and I can’t get this kid to do it. So, my first thing is just to hear them and to validate how overwhelmed they feel in dealing with it, how this kid can be a challenge, how it’s frustrating when you had all these great strategies that work for other kids and it doesn’t work for this student, and then my next most important suggestion is to ask if they want help. Like, you’re going to assume because you came to me that you want an idea from me, but really, that’s not always the case, isn’t that true? Like, isn’t it sometimes, you go home and your spouse, you’re like, “You wouldn’t believe what happened today. They did and this,” and your spouse is right away saying, “Well, did you try this? Did you try this?” And really, all you want them to say is, “Wow, it sounds like it was a rough day.” Right? You don’t really want answers. You just want somebody to say, “Wow, that was awful.” But I wouldn’t know that necessarily, so I always feel like after somebody vents, is to ask, “So, did you want ideas on how to work with Tommy?” And Sucheta, you wouldn’t believe how many times people say, “No, I don’t have time right now, I got to get to my next class.” So, but that student is my responsibility to help them so it’s my responsibility to help that teacher. So, later on, I’ll go back and say, and I think it’s also the way you help teachers is the way you pose the help, because if you come in and you say, “Here’s what you should do with Susan when she has this trouble.” Instead, say, “I’ve read some ideas that I think might work. I’ve seen it work in other classrooms. Can I share an idea that might work with you?” So, exposing it as a question instead of, “Years what you should do,” because right away, I’ll close down, “Who are you to tell me that?” Right?
Sucheta: Exactly, exactly, and I have found this very difficult challenge myself, I am asked to come in as a consultant, and so a special ed teacher comes to me, so now, I am tackling the emotions of a special person, general ed teacher, parents in the mix or administrator, and part of my job is they do want suggestions, but if the suggestions remotely suggest a lack of caring or callousness on their part, they are defensive, but part of, as you mentioned, not being patient is being callous, so it’s kind of a very tricky situation for me and what I have learned to say just as you mentioned is, “I’m so sorry, that must be so difficult to be with Johnny or deal with Johnny. He really has a lot of challenges, and they don’t go away even when we change our ways. Have you considered this way?” And then of course, I have a whole repertoire of what they have done, but you can easily tell that the patience is not top of their list when they are dealing with this because they are dealing with 19 other children who may have similar challenges.
Dr. Brittingham: Yeah, I agree, and that is a challenge, their defensiveness, so I very often might just validate or, “You know what, I see why you are so frustrated. You put in all of this time, you tried these different strategies, and in doing all of that in your enthusiasm to help the student, you might not have realized that you overlooked one of the most essential things which is patience, and that’s really hard to hear because you are making all of the effort but what’s happened is, because you put all of this in, you’ve expected to see results, forgetting about the research that says it takes two months to one year to change a behavior. Two months to one year to change one behavior. So, how long have you been working on it?” And so, to give them that reference point, so you’ve been doing it for three months? Well, some kids, it all depends and the research shows, it depends on the behavior and the person how long that timeframe takes to change it, so it’s a dance that we do to not get their hackles up or get while trying to help them, and sometimes, that’s where as much as we all hate documentation, it’s the documentation that helps you see you’re moving in the right direction. So, if you were working with a kid and he only went from 27 to 22 callouts, if you weren’t keeping track, you’re going to say, “This isn’t working,” but the documentation shows yeah, it did decrease just not as fast as you would like it, and I always use the example because so many people are familiar with Weight Watchers and we use a scale. They use a scale as documentation. They don’t expect you to come back 10 pounds lighter in one week. We are expecting 2 to 3 pounds less each week, right? Well, that’s what we’re expecting for kids, to participate two or three minutes more in a lesson, to have two or three less callouts. But see, we want and what I do, if I go on a weight loss program, I want to lose 30 pounds in one week and if I don’t, it’s the stupidest program I have ever been on, and that’s ridiculous, right? But I put in all that effort for the week, I want to see a result, and it didn’t take one week to put it on, it’s not coming off in one week.
Sucheta: Well, MaryAnn, you’ve been a phenomenal inspiration and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast today in explaining to us the whole structure of motivation and particularly kind of taking this perspective on educators and how they can rethink and it sounds to me like some of the golden rules of leading a meaningful life which is patience, I mean, that won’t hurt in any parts of life if you demonstrate more patience, so I can’t wait to bring you back and for us to talk more about strategies that you have recommended and implemented for so many years. So, once again, thank you for being on the podcast.
Dr. Brittingham: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Producer: Alright, so that was MaryAnn Brittingham. Great conversation, Sucheta, as usual, lots to ponder and think about, and process. To kick it off though, I mean, obviously, learning is hard and that can lead to fear and anxiety which obviously affects motivation and commitment to learning. So, any initial thoughts on that?
Sucheta: Yeah, we’ve been asking this question about my guests how they define, particularly educators, how do they define learning and I love what MaryAnn said here that it’s something to do with people, not to people, and now this is the second time I’ve heard an educator talk like this. So, it’s not exchange of information where one knowledgeable person comes to an ignorant and passes on information. It has to be a social engagement. It has to be something where the party who may be ignorant or less knowledgeable but needs to feel the commitment to learning as the teacher feels. So, one of the jobs that I think that we all want our teachers to imbibe is the teacher, an inspired teacher ignites the love for learning and subdues the angst that comes from a deep sense of inadequacies, and so such teacher is the most effective teacher in my mind. I love the image of learning as a ladder with many rungs and the student is letting go one leg as he firmly plants the other, and this temporary fear that you have when you’re unsupported or you experience imbalance when your one foot is hanging loose in the air, that’s the kind of state that the student is in, and if the teacher sees this and feels the fears that the student fears, then actually, there may be greater compassion for that student, and finally, I think the thought about learning is the teacher can demystify the very unsteady process involving learning that something unknown to the student, and how do we do that? It’s only when the teacher becomes transparent, a carrier of knowledge, that knowledge that she has is not a secret or the process that she’s trying to teach should not be left to discovery, and I think that can lead to great learning exchanges, doesn’t it?
Producer: Yeah, no doubt about that, but it goes without saying, having a bored or an unmotivated child in the classroom, yeah, it’s no fun and it’s difficult, yeah?
Sucheta: Yes, well, dealing with difficult people can be a challenge and an emotional drain. It always brings into focus the issue of agency: does the person have control over his or her own actions? So, agency is a term psychologists use often, so handling unmotivated children in the classroom is a problem for a novice as well as experienced teacher, and often, the teacher’s mind might drag her thought process to this nagging fear or the question about child’s intention that is he challenging my authority? Is he intentionally sabotaging my effort to teach the whole class? So, that agency is where the teacher’s mind goes, and that agency in question can be source of irritation. That’s why I loved what MaryAnn made a reference to this parable of don’t blame the lettuce Thich Naht Hanh often uses. He says, “No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding.” How zen is that? Thich Naht Hanh says, he has that parable by saying that if you understand and you show that you understand, you can love and the situation will change. So, I think that sometimes, the gap may happen for a teacher that she may understand but she may not show that she understands. So, if the lettuce that we have planted doesn’t grow well, it may be wiser to look closely at the reasons. Maybe there are various factors that have contributed to the lack of growth, maybe it needs more water or may be a different type of fertilizer, or maybe it has too much sun, that reasoning and problem-solving, and I think one of the reasons we can do that to lettuce is because lettuce doesn’t seem to have agency. That’s when I started my talk about this point that I’m making about agency, but people can be viewed and treated from that point of view just the way Thick Naht Hanh in wanting us to look at the lettuce or the compassion we have for lettuce. So, teachers have to work hard on eliminating the nagging inner voice of questionable intentionality in the student, and direct that energy towards deepening the understanding of that child. So, when a teacher shifts her mental state from understanding to judgment, the child moves to defending the behaviors or denying that his behaviors are erroneous. So, that’s a true powerful way of not just surviving the classroom learning but blossoming into one’s fullest potential, and the teacher can make that happen.
Producer: Well, I’m not an educator, Sucheta, as you know. Just thinking about that mindset shift to coming from the base of understanding, it just seems game changing to me. So, fascinating stuff.
So, moving on, walk us through your thoughts on motivation and learning disabilities. Obviously, these kinds of challenges can be very, very discouraging, and that it goes without saying again, discouraged people are very challenging themselves, so walk us through your thoughts there.
Sucheta: Yes, I think that’s at the heart of my thought process, when we blame difficult people. So, everybody and anybody wants their job to be [0:35:36], less roadblocks, and we would love to come to work and not have a problem, but when educators – I mean, I salute them for what they have committed themselves to and when they show up, they do want to do a good job and they do want to have smooth sailing but that’s not the case. As you mentioned, challenges can be discouraging, and discouraged people can be challenging. In 2006, Timothy Lackaye and Malka Margalit, I think, did a study where they compared achievement, effort, and self-perception amongst students with learning disabilities and to that of their peers, and their results were pretty compelling. What they found was that students with learning disability conveyed a sense of decreased academic self-efficacy. They had less positive mood than their peers and they felt a certain reduced hope about themselves. In addition, the study also showed a very important aspect of their being which was social emotional welfare of the inner life of the student. They had self-reported that they had an elevated sense of loneliness and they have very high levels of negative affect. So, their results highlight the unique contribution of hopeful thinking. A student with learning disability is certainly not having access to that hopeful thinking and that can really impact his or her performance. So, we need programs that empower students that strategically target the questionable and self-destructive self-beliefs. We need to sensitize teachers regarding the inner life of a student that she’s dealing with and impact of that self-perception has on self-efficacy. I’ve already interviewed but we haven’t published his podcast, Dr. Robert Brooks, he talks about that we need to provide assistance to these children such that we help them change their self-perception. We need to help them develop hopeful thinking through training and by helping them identify appropriate goals and even alternative goals. We need effective strategies and alternative strategies, and finally, we need to help these children to learn skills and negate the negative mood and those in a negative affect that could completely deplete their mental resources. So, these programs are not an integral part of classroom education. We do something called pull-out or we send that child to a counselor or a learning specialist, and that may be not the only way to do it. So, I’m happy that we had a discussion with MaryAnn because I think she was quite emphatically clear that we need to work on teachers and the teachers need to work on themselves.
Producer: Yeah, no doubt about that. Boy, and I could speak from personal experience. We are our harshest critics, our own harsh critic, and so hopeful thinking, boy, that too is a game changer, great stuff.
All right, well, we are coming near the end, Sucheta. Any final thoughts you want to share?
Sucheta: Absolutely, Todd. As I conclude this podcast, a few things that deeply touch my heart is one, teachers must slow down and this applies to parents as well but we need to check with their inner GPS, this global positioning device that guides you and gives you a sense of your sense in space but also, its relationship to your goals, and so the teacher needs to ask herself, why did I get into education? I had some good reasons. Do I remember them? Second is, what am I doing? How does this help the student with the greatest struggles and one more powerful question can be, why am I doing the things this way and not in any other way? Are my reasons valid or I haven’t thought about it lately? So, this self-check process can really be helpful. At heart, one must have the courage to be wrong and courage to give up something that is well thought out but ineffective. The teachers need to think that, am I ready to share my failures with others or my bad outcomes? Am I ready to reveal them to my peers? Can I remove the shame I feel for failing to teach the most challenging student? I think there such a humanity in engaging with the world that the teachers have nothing to judge themselves with. In fact, their humility can provide great compassion for student to have that same humility for self, and finally, I think teachers need to let go the feeling of insult or a sense of disrespect that they feel when they deal with children who push back or children who don’t reciprocate, children who keeps mum, or children who even back mouth sometimes or act out. I like to think that the children with challenges of inflexibility and rigidity come from ignorance rather than malice, and if the teacher kind of reminds herself of that, there is so much greater good to be accomplished.
Producer: Yeah. Well, Sucheta, it’s becoming a very common tale with our conversations, is that I’m always left with so many things to think about and ponder. It’s all amazing stuff.
Alright, well, that’s it for today. On behalf of our host Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today and we look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.