Sorting Out The Problematic
[ Journal Entry ]
The point
of teacher action research is to help us sort out what’s
problematic in what we’re doing. We’re involved
in this learning enterprise to understand better what our work
involves.
Last time I kept asking you “What surprised
you about…?” I did that because I wanted you to
begin noticing moments that surprise you—both in school,
and in your out-of-school lives. It’s the moment of surprise,
of being perplexed, that alerts us to something interesting
and provides an opportunity to make our assumptions visible. “What
was I expecting?” you need to ask yourself. “Why
was I expecting that?”
Let me illustrate with a freewrite
I did a while ago.
One of the most difficult transitions I personally
have had to make has been dealing with kids’ resistance,
their not-learning behaviour. Just when I think I have
some control over my responses I run into a kid who pushes
me back into my instinctual, authoritarian way of responding.
There’s
one like that in one of the third grade classes I’ve
been visiting.
In my experience when kids are resisting
or avoiding engaging, offering some support brings about
a small shift in attitude. Usually I can get a kid to ‘just
try’. Based on
past experience I’ve
learned that helping kids to be successful allows them
to overcome a lot of their resistance. But I can’t even
get near this one—Brent,
I’ll call him. He cuts me off before I can offer help
of any kind. His body language is real clear—stay away.
If I offer any help he rejects it—he makes it plain
he isn’t going
to think about whatever it is the other kids are doing
and he has been asked to try.
Now part of Brent’s problem
is that he doesn’t read or
write very well. At age nine, that’s now starting to be
serious. He’s bright, that’s obvious, so he knows
what the others can do and he can’t. His behaviour is
considerably more aggressive than the others and he keeps
the others, boys and girls, at bay by being disdainful or by
pinching, hitting, or jabbing them with a pencil. They don’t
want anything to do with him—his behaviour
gets what he wants, distance from the rest; but at a cost—he
does, at some level, want friendship which he can’t get
the way he’s going about it.
So I’m perplexed. At
some level I agree with Brent that the tasks he’s being
asked to tackle are meaningless, certainly unconnected
to who he is. His resistance is very like that described by
Herb Kohl in “I won’t learn from you!”—Brent
is saying quite loudly he won’t learn from me. And each
time I attempt to engage him I seem to be digging the hole
deeper.
Brent evokes the ‘witch’ in me in
the same way the junior high kids did. While I understand
his resistance, I react to it in a way that doesn’t
help. Jake on the other hand, who drives the teacher crazy,
I can manage to maneuver. He doesn’t make
me bristle the way Brent does. The question is what about
their behaviour gets to me in the one case and not in the
other. What in my own history is being triggered in the one
case and not in the other? I don’t
have an answer for that at the moment.
Maybe it’s the
way Brent is firmly taking control, but in a way that in
the long run means he defeats himself. When he evokes the witch
I walk away. There’s no point in attempting to cajole
him and I have no authority to insist on him doing anything
which the teacher can do and has from time to time done.
But I’m not
happy just walking away. I keep wondering what I’m doing
that evokes his resistance and what I could do that would
permit us to work out a different kind of relationship.
What
I realized is that Brent and I were engaged in a power/control
struggle. If I approached him by asking if he needed help,
he could refuse legitimately. In fact, he didn’t. That
surprised me, actually. Instead, by asking him if he needed
help, he could let me know what kind of help he needed and then
he’d engage.
His teacher
and I had a conversation this afternoon in which she described
how she learned to accept his clear signals that he wouldn’t
comply. Rather than forcing him to do anything, she learned
how to negotiate with him. Her important insight was that Brent
was always in control and that she would never get anywhere
trying to force him to do anything. Because she has become adept
at reading his signals, he’s become
much more involved and proficient at reading and writing
and his behaviour is considerably less resistant.
The freewrite
helped me understand what was causing our struggle and what
I could do about it.
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