My first review of Impro got
I’ll run out a trick I’ve used before in these ‘part twos’ – I’ll present the note as I wrote it down after reading before running the rule over the idea and seeing how it links to my own experiences.
Today’s section is going to focus on teaching.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
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Teachers are thought of as supplying a good called education. A top teacher provides more of this good than a bad one. However, teaching is perhaps more accurately a creative process. A bad teacher then destroys the student. If thought of this way, a good and bad teacher are seen as engaging in opposite activities.TOA: I’m a little unsure how to respond to this one (yes, even though I did write it). I sense its underlying truth but I am struggling to link it to my own experience. It could be true for some subjects more than others.
I’m tempted to make an analogy here to riding a bike. A good teacher may demonstrate the right way to ride a bike and help students work out the flaws in their technique. In the context of teaching being a ‘creative process’, perhaps this teacher will call on many different techniques to get students of varying ability to ride.
On the other hand, a teacher who simply hands everyone a pair of training wheels will get immediate results. This teacher’s students will zip around on their bikes and get around a lot faster than the other teacher’s students, at least at first. But if the training wheels never come off, at some point I suppose the teacher is destroying the student’s capacity to learn how to ride a bike.
A teacher who gets a student to go home and learn to ride a bike on his or her own? Perhaps this would be the accomplishment of a true teacher.
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If someone wants to draw a tree, the first step is to send him outside to look at a tree.TOA: This reminds me of training new hospice volunteers. A lot of them ask if there is a technique or approach to talking with a patient. And I say, well, how do you talk to the people around you? Do you say hello to your neighbors? Have you established personal connections with your colleagues? Do you offer your presence to friends or family who are going through a difficult time? Are you comfortable sitting still for an hour with no promise of outside diversions?
Prospective volunteers who need to learn how to talk to other people aren’t going to learn this from me. They are not going to learn this in training or from anyone else associated with the hospice. They need to do this on their own. They need to go home, talk to the people already in their lives, and willingly be a presence in the lives of those closest to them. They need to go look at trees in their own lives, so to speak, before considering a trip into another forest.
Once this is accomplished, the challenge of entering a hospice environment and interacting with strangers becomes a matter of doing what you know rather than knowing what to do. Be bigger than you feel!
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A creative student is more difficult to control. But this is not a sufficient reason for disliking a student.
A community or organization generally rejects people as soon as their behavior becomes unpredictable.
A good teacher should be able to work with any method, a bad teacher should be able to ruin any method.
A skilled teacher guides students to the point where they are bound to succeed. In a way, this method ensures students do not experience failure.TOA: I thought about sports when I considered these four quotes together. There are some teams who never use a player in a certain position unless he comes straight out of central casting. By this, I refer to how there are general prototypes for most positions based on the characteristics of players who’ve succeeded in the past. A basketball center, for example, is usually at least six feet and ten inches tall while a center fielder in baseball is a fleet-footed athlete with a quick first step toward a hit ball. (1)
The preference for finding the right type, I suppose, comes out of the insight into creativity. Like a student who folds his math test into a paper hat, there is something inherently uncontrollable about a wing player who darts into the center or a quarterback who tucks the ball and runs on every other down. The challenge for these players' coaches is to implement a strategy that allows the player’s unpredictable outbursts of creativity to fit within a detailed plan for winning the game. Fail to do this and the player's improvisations will alienate him or her from teammates because of its corrosive effect on the team's prospects for victory.
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Inexperienced teachers often reveal their lack of time in the classroom through their methods for discipline. To avoid becoming a conventional teacher, pay close attention to the methods of discipline.
Teachers who fear doing a specific technique again often reveal their own insecurity or inexperience.TOA: When I think back on my days in K-12, I remember how the same kids seemed to always get in trouble with the teachers. If I was doing the sort of fancy analysis an academic might do on student behavior, the first thing I would check is whether the best predictor of ending up in detention was whether a student had been in detention in the past.
I think teachers intuitively understood this idea. They would refer to ‘problem kids’ and shake their heads each time someone acted up again. Then they would try the same method of discipline as used in the past - despite its obvious failure!
I’m not sure if inexperience is the world for this. It might be more of a fundamental belief in the unchangeable qualities in a child. If the disciplinary method failed, it was the child’s problem, not the method’s. Discipline was thought of as a litmus test for sorting the good kids from the bad - since the discipline would work on the good kids, the failure of discipline was held up as proof of a bad kid.
It would be unfair of me, though, to not at least mention the possibility that even a teacher with decades of teaching experience might have very little practical experience in working with behavior issues.
On a related note, it would be interesting to see how parents with multiple children change (if they do so at all) their approach to discipline over time. Does experience inform their approach? How many kids does a parent need to raise before it would be fair to describe him or her as ‘experienced’, anyway?
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Teachers who know how to give their students the ‘I am playing’ signal will enjoy their work far more.TOA: In my old job, I was managing a team of around eight people. Anytime someone sneezed, part of my job (seriously) was to say 'God bless you'. If I wanted to play God on a particular day, I might say 'Bless you'. In my early days, I thought this was important because of things like civility and decency and a couple of books I read about what constituted 'management'.
As I picked up experience, I realized two things. One, no one ever cared about what I actually said. Leadership is subtler than phrasing. People remember how leaders made them feel, not the combination of syllables and words they used. The important thing was to pay attention to my team and respond to what they did (2).
Two, I realized that if someone was happy with their job, it wasn’t because I said 'God bless you' (or even 'bless you') when they sneezed. And if someone was disgruntled, my saying 'bless you' (or even 'God bless you') wasn’t going to change the fact. Again, the important thing was to pay attention to my team and respond to what they did.
So, I changed up my approach. For new people and some of the experienced people I understood well, I still said 'bless you'. But for a couple of others, I didn’t bother. With one person, I usually caught his eye after a sneeze and made a mocking expression instead of saying anything polite. Those familiar with some of Robert DeNiro’s recent work might recognize it – bottom lip out, eyebrows raised, a couple of quick nods of the head. He usually responded with the same gesture back at me.
With another, I usually turned to her and said 'shhhh'. Sometimes, I would say 'would you please quiet down?' In rare cases, I might say in an exasperated voice 'WHAT do you WANT!?!' And the response was almost always my comment mirrored back to me – 'you shhh' or 'you quite down'. On really productive days, I would just hear 'SHUT UP!'
I never really understood what I was doing or why it worked until I read this quote. I get it now – I was sending a 'playing' signal. And keeping the mood light is part of the manager’s job. If things were serious or the group needed to focus, I usually resorted to the basic 'bless you'. In this way, perhaps I was sending the reverse - a 'not playing' signal.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. TOA Moneyball reference #36
Moneyball, a book I’ve referenced and written about numerous times on TOA, is a good example of how to avoid this ‘prototype trap’. The critical line for me is an insight from author Michael Lewis – ‘if you systematically rule out a certain type of person for a job, you automatically lower your chances of finding the best person for the job.’
2. The TOA Effect?
Responding with the wrong words was often better than not responding at all - if this isn't the Hawthorne Effect, let's agree to call it the TOA Effect, reader, and move on.
