Educators are Psychologists After All

I posted the following on Facebook, but I thought to give it a substantial edit and to place it on the blog as a preface to a little something I recently wrote on self-governance in formal education for a friend and colleague interested in the concept.  The piece on self-governance will be posted here in a few days.

This reflection was penned and displayed on Facebook in a teacher’s group page and on my timeline over the 2017 Presidential Inaugural weekend.  So, it was not an ordinary weekend.  Yet, I thought that maybe someone might say something in response, but no one did suggesting that what I had to say had no resonance within those caring to read it. It is carless to draw conclusions from this situation; still, it goes along with thinking already established:  One of the disturbing factors of the education profession, to me, is that while an overwhelming majority in it are hardworking, selfless and deeply caring, the narrow focus on instruction and detailed requirements of what folks in education have to do daily crowds out any deep systems' level self-examination of structure and process and their affects on student and professional mental health, although there is an acknowledgement of the great stress teaching occurs. Further complicating all is a great self-powerlessness to effect change in personal professional thinking.  Indeed, educators are captured by what a long time education researcher calls the Myths foundational to professional routines and obligations. Nevertheless, I try to suggest other ways of thinking with this as one example:

As a pre-service high school Social Studies teacher back in the olden days of the very early 1990's, I was told that I was not a psychologist, rather I was a teacher responsible for moving content from my lesson plans into the minds of my students with its measure of success being the degree of ready recall students achieved on the tests I administered in class and the school administered as required by the State of New York. However, I learned on the job that at heart teaching is the art and science of Psychology, individual and group.

I was taught to and did as routine to begin each lesson with a "Do Now", a very short reading/writing assignment with the purpose of "settling down" the class, of preparing the group to accept instruction-certainly a psych thing-while I took attendance and concentrated on other immediate clerical tasks.   Then I was taught to place the "Motivation" on the board, usually in the form of a question which would prompt a class discussion getting students interested in the lesson topic and in the process eliciting from them the focus or “Aim” of the day’s lesson.  Again something very much tied to the psyche of both teacher and students.  Unfortunately, both the individual and group dynamics of the students assigned to me wholly resisted this mind technique to the point that I had for then and forever to reverse the position of Motivation and Aim, placing Aim on the top of the board and Motivation underneath as two of the other immediate clerical tasks during the Do Now and drop any class discussion of Motivation for a swift monologue.  Indeed, a mental Jujitsu move by the collective class on the teacher.. 

However, the largest part of the teaching experience for me was in the minute to minute ordering of student interpersonal and group behavior. I mean, I was told by nearly everyone, pre-service professors, in-service administrators/supervisors and other teachers that effective instruction cannot happen unless the classroom has order. And order is, frankly, the application of various discipline rubrics and practices. And they are definitely founded in a certain view of human psychology.

What all of this is about is to point to the plain but intentionally obscured fact that formal education is tightly bound within the practice of Psychology and that educators are psychologists but are neither trained as such or do they, as a rule, understand the psychology of what they do or how, especially, the structures within which they and their students must live and grow affect the mental health of all involved!   Thus, it is not to how children learn or to the operational definition of a well-rounded education or to college/career readiness or to the best understanding of cultural literacy or to the most efficient and effective instructional and classroom management techniques which should be of greatest import for the profession or for those who order it in the public and private realm, but how youth and adults, students and educators mentally develop within the multiple social contexts including the learning within which they must live and grow and how to provide the immediate school environment developing mental wellness of adult and child together.

Yes, there are required courses in Ed Psych or Child Development, etc., but like the rest of schooling, the integration of information into practice is somehow magically assumed by having scored sufficiently on the tests necessary to pass the courses. And, of course, student and regular teaching, even with professional development, near universally focus on defining subject content to be taught and the instructional techniques necessary for the most efficient immediate transfer of content and on the techniques of classroom management.  The process of it all removes from the human endeavor the first need of all students and of all professionals, their mental states of wellbeing,

Therefore, since formal education is the practice of Psychology and educators are psychologists, then formal education’s First Principle ought to be the development of mental wellness in students and in educators, not the transfer of content.  And that means a massive re-ordering of the ethos of the profession and of the organization of teaching and learning as well as the preparation and continued professional development of those within the field.