Working up five presentations for my September trip to Saudi Arabia in a few short weeks posed a challenge both exciting and daunting. In hope of saying somethings other than the usual tired, if valuable, thinking on the topics I?d been given, I started to review material I?d found especially exciting and thought provoking. So, I picked up my copy of Ellen J. Langer?s The Power of Mindful Learning (1997) and thought that skimming through my extensive underlinings would surely guide me toward some fresh ideas about ?critical thinking? and ?effective teaching.?
That didn?t work. Langer writes so fluidly and engagingly
that I couldn?t stick to my underlining. By noon I?d reread half the book and
emailed Langer saying, ?I?m not sure just what the focus might be at the
moment, but I?d like the chance to interview you again. Your books ignite
fireworks in my brain.? I?d interviewed Langer once before in 2003 after first
reading The Power of Mindful Learning and then eagerly reading her earlier
book, Mindfulness (1989). After a couple of email exchanges and one short phone
call, we set a date for a longer conversation after my return from Riyadh.
Langer, the first tenured woman professor of psychology
at Harvard, does a lot of interviews. Her thinking, her research, have more
than begun to reach a popular audience. A movie starring Jennifer Aniston (as
Langer) about some of her most provocative research showing the power of the
mind?s assumptions over the realities we experience is in development. When I
tell her how much I admire her books and how stimulating to my own thinking
they have been, she laughs and thanks me saying, ?flattery is always welcome.?
She?s being what I would call happily ironic. One of what she calls the
?one-liners? through which she encapsulates some aspects of her brand of
?mindfulness? is: ?If you don?t take the compliment, you?re not vulnerable to
the insult.? She does take the compliment of course, but only as something
pleasant, not as proof of anything. That?s what I mean by ?happily? ironic.
Langer?s skeptical detachment from common ways of looking at things has nothing
cynical, nothing negative about
it. She sees?and study after study she and collaborators have conducted
confirms?positive possibility in simply embracing the uncertainty that embraces
us and in continually questioning the implied answers and choices that
automatic (or as she calls it, ?mindless?) thinking commonly pushes us toward.
For good reason many regard her as the mother of the positive psychology
brought to prominence by Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania and author of Learned Optimism and Authentic
Happiness.
So, what?s your bottom line?? Langer asks me as we begin
to talk. I tell her that I suppose if I had to boil it down it would be
something like ?the power of mindful teaching.? Her book on mindful learning
had debunked or at least seriously brought into question the validity of a
number of myths about learning. For example, that
? the basics must be learned so well that they become
second nature
? paying attention means staying focused on one thing at
a time
? delaying gratification is important
? rote memorization is necessary in education
? forgetting is a problem
? intelligence is knowing ?what?s out there,? and
especially that
? there are right and wrong answers
I'd written about this before (NTLF 12/2) and most of the
faculty I knew still bridled at the notion that most of these ideas weren?t
more fact than myth. Still, the conversation about teaching has been changing.
The effectiveness of various pedagogies other than traditional lecture and
fact-focused learning has begun to open up faculty thinking about the
possibilities for increasing student learning. If confronting sacred bovine
commonplaces had bruised faculty thinking, perhaps talking about some
fundamental processes of mindfulness as they might improve teaching could offer
the new health that college teaching is longing for.
The Central Myth in Teaching
Most all of us approach teaching with a variety of
assumptions both about learning and about its compliment, teaching. Some of
these, as experience shows, prove ill-founded, but it?s often hard to resist
commonplace, automatic thinking. In part because it is so commonplace, we see
it as true without thinking about it. I asked Langer which of these common
assumptions looming over teaching she found the most difficult to confront.
I think it?s the simple notion of fact,? she replied,
?for people not to realize that facts are situated understandings that a
particular group of people have at a particular time, and that when you add
back in this person notion, then people recognize that, well, the facts might
have changed, and that at the same time, if other people had been considering
the situation, they might have come up with something quite different.?
Langer likes to illustrate her points with stories from
her personal experience, stories that model mindfulness in operation and show
how homely and yet profoundly liberating this habit of mind, of simply
reflecting on experience rather simply accepting it unthinkingly, can be. To
illustrate her point about ?facts,? she recounts being at a horse event with a
friend who asked her to look after his horse while he went to get the horse a
hot dog. ?Horses don?t eat meat,? she thought, ?period.? The idea ?flew in the
face of the facts,? she thought. But then the owner returned with a hot dog and
the horse ate it eagerly.
And so the ?fact? was wrong at least today in this
context, and that prompted lots of questions in Langer?s mind. ?Which horses
[hadn?t eaten meat]? When? How hungry were the horses? What kind of horses?
[There are] a bunch of questions,? she says, ?that once we ask them, we see
that this information we?ve been given is probably probabilistic. Indeed,
research only gives us probabilities and we transform those probabilities into
absolute facts. When you know something is absolute then there?s no reason to
think about it anymore. But when you know something in this conditional way,
then it almost primes thinking of counter instances. There are hidden decisions
that go into any research program ? What breed of horse? What kind of hot
dog??and once you reveal these hidden decisions, you begin to see how situated
and contextual what we accept as facts actually are. One of the cultural myths
is a belief in the absolute nature of science, but science itself is based on
probability.
Probability, Possibility, and Engagement
It's this quality of engagement from students higher
education has been talking about wanting to cultivate, but has done with mixed
results. Perhaps the primary limiting factors have been attitudes toward certainty
on the one hand and uncertainty on the other. Students often find uncertainty
fearful and threatening. And faculty feel enormous pressure to convey accepted
understandings. Langer believes real learning gets lost somewhere in between.
She sees uncertainty not as fearful, but as an inviting canvas of possibility,
a learning adventure waiting to be had (as well as a fundamentally honest
appraisal of our existential condition). But how might faculty get there
without appearing not to know what students expect them to know and without
frightening students with such fluid notions of how protean knowing and
knowledge can be?
To go back to your original question,? Langer continues,
??How do you get a teacher steeped in these myths to teach more mindfully?? One
way would be for the teacher to begin most of his or her sentences with ?In my
view? or ?From one perspective.? By doing that they make clear to themselves
that this information is situated, which means it?s true sometimes but not in
all contexts and certainly not necessarily over time. And it also sets the
student up with the same understanding.?
In essence a mindful approach invites students to the
party. It tacitly conveys an honest picture of the known and the unknown that
implies respect for students as fellow (if somewhat junior) learners in an
ongoing saga of inquiry. Indeed, real learning is always a shared inquiry, not
a top down delivery of information. The insights often go both ways. While
beginning sentences with a conditional touch fully reflects Langer?s thinking,
she picked up the specific habit from a student:
I actually had a graduate student about 20 years ago
who, in our lab meetings, would begin almost every sentence with ?In my view?
and I thought ?Gee, that?s charming.? And when you do that even if you are
vehemently disagreeing with somebody it doesn?t have any harshness.?
Teaching, mindful or not, will never be easy, and mindful grading may be the most painful part of it. ?For me, from the beginning, it was the most painful thing. I would read their papers and based on information in a sense?that is, a sense that this is an A, this is a B and so on? [I?d come to one assessment], and then I?d read them again and think ?Well, for the student, this is an A,? and then reading them again I would think that this person is going to be devastated and not really helped with this particular grade and so on. I prefer giving qualitative responses rather than grades.
I think that if we change the whole business of the way
we teach, [grading] would be less of an issue. Right now we start off with the
notion of limited resources. If you have limited resources then you have to
figure out how to divvy up the ones you have. Whereas resources really aren?t
limited. Everybody can win. Then with that there?s less need to define people?A
students, B students, and so on.?
In short, mindful teaching engages everybody or at least
invites everybody to become engaged.
Things are always changing, says Langer, and while that means in some ways things are always uncertain, it?s our mindsets, she?s found, that cause us to see this flux at times as fearful. She?s optimistic about the future of education. ?I think that it?s going to evolve in spite of (it would be nice if it were because of) but in spite of the current modes of education because of the computer. Today?s kids are learning and having fun with what they are learning and being creative in ways that they are not getting and never did get from the classroom.?
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