discussion 7.1
Chapter 18 Teacher as Consultant
WARD MAILLIARD IS A HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER who is exploring a different way of teaching in service of producing a different kind of learning. His pursuit of a more powerful way of teaching was inspired, in part, by reading Flawless Consulting. He decided that if he wanted to make more of an impact on student learning, something more dramatic or radical was required than trying harder with the traditional conversations about teacher performance, curriculum, consequences, or measurements. He determined that he needed to look at himself and reexamine the nature of the contract between him and his students. Using the approach and terminology from this book, he experimented with giving up the expert role of the teacher and moving toward a more consultative learning stance.
This journey took him beyond recontracting with the students. He embraced many of the practices explored in this book. He adopted a discovery and inquiry way of viewing student performance questions. He began to see difficult student behavior as a form of resistance, not rebellion or dysfunction. The class learning agenda shifted from a focus on deficiencies to a focus on gifts. The class meetings began to be structured in alignment with many of the whole-system principles. Every meeting of the class was designed for engagement as much as curricular content. He also rearranged the room.
This is why telling his story, mostly in his own words, seems like a good way to tie the ideas in this book together. Ward never called himself a consultant. He operates in the fire of the educational marketplace, in an arena where much of the conventional wisdom is not working for too many children. As a result of applying many of the “flawless” ideas, he got new, improved outcomes and did not have to spend more money to get them.
The Story
Ward's story is about how a deep commitment to authenticity and the contracting, and discovery processes discussed here are making a difference in unexpected places. This example is not just about producing exceptional learning in a high school classroom. It is about a deep-seated shift in the way we educate children.
Like health care reform, the debate about education reform has been argued long and hard. The conversation has focused on class size, teacher performance, a variety of curriculum questions. On testing and measurement of student performance. As a nation, we have tried a variety of innovations like charter schools, private sector management of public schools, quality improvement methods, site-based management, high community control, hiring former military as superintendents, and more. It doesn't matter if you are not familiar with these approaches because they have not improved the overall learning of young people.
This chapter describes the process Ward used to radicalize education. He has chosen to bring a consultative stance, everything this book is about, into the classroom. This story of what one teacher created gives a clue as to what true reform may entail.
In a letter to me, he described his own thinking process and how he became committed to consultative learning. Here are his words.
If we want to reform education, at the heart of the matter is a shift in thinking about teaching and learning. When we traditionally think of a teacher we conjure up someone who knows. Someone who
will impart knowledge. Conversely, when we think of a student, we think of someone who does not know and who needs to acquire knowledge.
We have active teacher and receptive student. The directional flow of information and decision making is from teacher to student.
In this context, the teacher is given a stage and assigned an audience. The teacher often works from a prepared lesson plan: clear teaching points, a sequence of activities, content and expected outcomes. We expect the students to grasp and often memorize that content, by a certain date, and we measure to assess performance. Teacher improvement usually means giving the teacher better tools and techniques to deliver the content and win on the measures.
Assumptions About Motivating Students
The arrangement Ward is describing puts the challenge of motivating students in the hands of the teacher. Grades, a major tool for motivating students, are designed to maintain some control over an increasingly difficult and distracted student audience. Grades determine movement up and down the performance-and-achievement ladder. They control entrance to college, which, according to the conventional storyline, leads to well-paying jobs that provide security and purchasing power. The equation is simple: grades equal performance, which guarantees advancement, which delivers wealth, which offers security and is the key to happiness.
This is a reasonable theory of motivation; unfortunately it applies only to a minority of students. And if it does not work, it is viewed as the student's fault, or the family's, or the educator's. Why is it only partially successful? In Ward's words:
There are very few levers of control for today's adolescents. They have money, mobility, and distractions galore: sex, drugs, entertainment, subcultures and sufficient freedom to sample everything out there. This is as true for suburbs and small towns as for urban centers.
Young people also have a superb capacity for networking including text messaging, internet, live chat, socializing tools like Facebook,
MySpace and Twitter. Teenagers are organized, independent, creative and resourceful. They have their own culture and a code of ethics. You might say that school is where they meet to organize their weekends, afternoons and evenings. The cell phone is a major tool for this organizing task and is in use 24/7, especially where forbidden.
The result is that teachers don't have the attention or obedience necessary for the standard teaching and motivation model to work. The way the system tries to cope with this is to make grades the point and high performance on grades the bottom-line measure. This creates in the classroom essentially a power relationship between teacher and student based on fear. The teacher is left to cling to the last vestiges of authority: grades, threats, and the cultural shame of underperforming. It is all based on a value system that says education is about security and material success.
The Reality
This equation creates a world where performance has replaced learning as the dominant purpose of education. To achieve the performance, as Ward tells it, teachers become entertainers, disciplinarians, alien beings, or overseers, or they begin to lower expectations, avoid
conflict, and surrender to grade creep, giving higher grades for lower learning. Says Ward:
There is a price to pay for the context that the teacher manages the future of the student through the grade equals performance equals success equation. The price is the humanity of the student as well as our own. What is lost is the pleasure of learning for the student and the joy of teaching for the educator. At the end of the day we are exhausted by the struggle. Teachers commiserate with each other, recounting the stories which have at the center the student as identified patient whom we are unable to heal.
There are exceptions, but in fact most every teacher tries hard to get it right. I would posit most every teacher can relate to these forces that shape our daily experience and end up looking for a reason or to find someone, including ourselves, to blame.
What Ward began to search for and found was a shift in the context of his thinking about the classroom. For example, he wondered, What if we shifted the stance of teacher as knower to teacher as learner? The questions might be: “What could I learn from my students that would allow me to be more effective in the learning environment? What if I stopped thinking of myself as a teacher and started thinking of myself as a consultant to learning?”
Ward says he was inspired by the definition of a consultant in Chapter One of this book: “In its most general use, consultation describes any action you take with a system of which you are not part.” He observed, “I hope that none of us as teachers are under the illusion that we are part of the system that is thriving below us and remains distinct from our plans and curriculum. As we all know, the youth culture is a separate system with its own associations, rules, intentions, language, entertainments, and purpose.”
Taking a Consultant's Stance
Ward decided to become a consultant to his students: he would stop controlling them and reach a point where they get some privacy and relief from the relentless pressure that they need to perform because
it is useful and good for them. He saw this as a form of colonization from the adult world:
This is a colonization, which like all colonial efforts, has little to do with what really matters to the colonized and does not consider their world as a viable, even competent, system.
When we show up to “teach” them, we see them in terms of their future utility, not their present capacities. We have something in mind for them that is our notion of the good, much like the missionaries whose intention was to save the savages from ignorance, dismantle their culture, extract their resources, and use their labor for the sake of the dominant culture.
If we just hold the notion we are not part of the students' social system, we can ask what we need to be a successful consultant to learning. Give up the idea of teacher as the driver or producer of learning. This helps us escape or extricate us from the question, “how do I teach my students?” At the very least it might make us curious about the student culture with which we are engaged.
Context of Humanity and Abundance
His first step to implement these ideas was to work out of a new context. The essence of a new context was to see a class as a group of human beings, each with gifts in abundance, rather than as students with deficiencies or needs. Even in the face of real challenges, like dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders, disabilities, behavior problems, or low motivation, students are learning, alive human beings, not, in Ward's terms, “identified patients.”
Even when it seems that they are not learning, or not present, or unsupportive of what we adults have to offer, when we give priority to the restoration of their humanity, we will discover that they will learn what matters; we will see that given a chance, found on their own, they discover a pathway into their own future that neither we nor they could have imagined.
Given this context, when Ward took on a consultant role, he could not walk into a classroom and start telling students what to do without first taking the temperature of the room. Ward said:
Teachers need to do the discovery work as described in Flawless Consulting. Inquire, interview, map, understand the dynamics, see how students are “managing the problem” of learning. Ask students about their intentions, goals, and challenges. We put what we do know, our expertise, at the service of the system by first learning everything we can about the system.
As Ward sees it, consultative teachers engage the three skills every consultant needs to get the job done: technical skills, interpersonal skills, and consulting skills. There is nothing about the consultative stance that denies the expertise of the teacher. We can assume that most teachers have the technical skills (they know their subject), and we also assume that most teachers have the basic interpersonal skills. Our focus is on the consulting skills that are key in this example.
Renegotiating the Social Contract
The shared project or business objective of the classroom is exceptional learning for each person. The consulting challenge teachers
confront is how to create a practice where learning occurs. This begins with contracting. The struggle that many students have with learning in the classroom might be best understood by considering that the learning project was faulty in the initial contracting stage.
In truth, the contracting stage in traditional teaching is pretty nonexistent or at most implicit, fear based, and by no means mutual. This is so for many good reasons, the most prominent being that many students are not at school by choice. Where there is no choice, accountability and enthusiasm are hard to come by.
Focusing on Trust Between Students
With a contract where power remains in the hands of the teacher and compliance is the response of the student, it creates a culture where there is little trust among the students. Often the most alienated, outlier students who are most disconnected become the most powerful. Within this dominant culture of compliance and resistance, there is a cost to the students who, for whatever the reason, show up to really learn. A sad truth is that students who show real caring about learning usually pay a high social price in their social realm. They are labeled
and even ostracized. The dominant group has a stake in keeping expectations low. The question, says Ward,
is about the relationship I want them to have with each other. How to contract for this? These are consultative questions. It takes time since they are so wounded by the traditional learning process that it takes half the semester to achieve some reconditioning. This has to be adapted to each group, to create a social system that values peer relationships and knows this is central to learning.
Consultant Building Trust
The intent, then, is to consult with the youth in the room to help them build trust with each other. The teacher acts as a third party in a discovery mode. Not expert or even arbitrator. Here is one form that it took in Ward's experience:
One kid was hurt by negative comments that were made about her in class. When it happened, I stopped the class and asked her for permission to use what happened as a learning. She gave a tentative yes. Then I asked her how she felt about the comment. She reported that it had hurt; it shut her down, made her feel like she was not liked. The offending students were asked to just listen. Not to defend themselves. When they just listened, something shifted at that moment in the class. Both sides eventually got to talk. It re-humanized the culture of the classroom.
Conserving Trust and Relatedness
If the teacher chooses to act as a consultant to students' relationship with each other, the challenge, said Ward, is to create safety in the room:
The question is, How do I get in the door when I am not welcome? I have to be willing to sacrifice covering content for the sake of the relationship. So what does my contract with the students entail?
First of all I have to get interested in the lives of students. If a student shows up without her book, I have a choice to make. I can see a student who has not followed instructions, maybe for the fourth time and therefore is “student without a book.” Or, instead of seeing a “student without a book,” I see a person with a “story waiting to be told.”
Margaret is a case in point. I called her over and asked what is going on. She said she is in the midst of her parents' difficult divorce. She was staying with her dad, it did not go well, so she ran out of her dad's house in anger and left her book there. When she got home there was no way she was going to call her dad and ask him to bring the book over.
When I got that, I let it go. Gave up punishment for the sake of connection.
In a very important way, the teacher gains power by choosing to act like a consultant, not a parent. Getting interested instead of making the student wrong. Ward continued:
The point is that if we engage as consultative partners we find a way for them to learn from their own experience. They will get something special out of this. If we focus only on the content of a class, or an assignment, or bringing in the book, then the student or the client will never understand the power of functioning like a partner and experience the engagement this produces.
What the consulting stance offers to teachers is a way of dealing with the fact that many students are not in school by choice. In the absence of choice, teachers get resistance in the form of students' saying, in essence, “Tell me what minimum I need to do to get what I want.” Students become obedient and act as if they care because they think that obedience is worth at least a grade point. The compliance response works because teachers are seduced by interest and positive reinforcement like anyone else.
What Ward embarked on was an effort to renegotiate the contracting in the early phase of the class. It was not easy, he said:
If we do not have freedom of choice about being here, how do we claim our freedom or create in students a sense of real accountability?
There might be some possibilities that we as consultants might gain by creating a classroom that shares power and values learning over performing. For example, what if instead of arriving at the beginning of the year with a plan that we had prepared for our class, we instead made a plan with our class and took some time to explore the contracting questions first?
Ward began to have honest conversations with the students about these and other topics to begin to make the shift from, “How do I have power over my students?” to, “How do I have power with my students?” They actually opened up a conversation about trust. When he took the time to inquire about what might work differently, he was surprised to find caring under the mask of indifference.
The New Contract
Here are some elements of the new contract he developed.
Conserving Honesty Versus Defense
Ward had to ask himself what the cost is of telling the truth in his classroom:
If you ask how many read the homework, what kind of an answer will you get? If 60 percent have not, do you want to hear it? When students tell you something you do not want to hear, how do you react? With criticism or curiosity? Are there subtle ways we teach them to lie? What do we do when they are not paying attention? Tell them to pay attention, or try to understand where their attention has gone? Lying is what they have learned, it is expected in traditional classroom.
Failure is an Option; Gifts are the Point
One of the rules that emerged in his classroom is that failure is okay. Resistance is okay, and so is being wrong. Wherever they are is okay, because that is where they are starting from. As Ward recalled from reading Flawless Consulting, resistance is a sign that something important is going on. It is not a problem to be solved or overcome.
Agreeing not to have reprisals helped change the context of the classroom. There was no judgment for what others were doing, only on what students were choosing. Ward told them: “If you are tired, take a nap. When you are done with a task, go do something else. If we are doing a task as a group and what you are doing is not useful, find something else that is useful to do.”