Keeping it all Together: Emotional Intelligence in
the Classroom
by Miriam
Jaffe
Download an MSWord version
of this article
|
| "No
matter how much you rehearse, there will be times when negotiating
your role as an instructor will feel like playing the lead part in
an improvisational performance." |
My friends, the scene: Students sit anxiously in their seats, as
if in roller coaster cars, suspended in that second just before
a sudden sweep of momentum will propel them through the remainder
of the ride. They are expecting something great, some whirlwind
action that will release the tension. Enter instructor, the force
they have been waiting for, and… and… CUT!
No matter how much you rehearse, there will be times when negotiating
your role as an instructor will feel like playing the lead part
in an improvisational performance. And when you are at a loss to
decide your next move, there isn't usually a director waiting in
the wings to feed you the lines or restart the scene. As we imagine
good teaching, we might think of the instructor who seems to work
from an endless bag of tricks, who can reveal the rabbit in the
hat at the most crucial moment. But most of us don't enter our classrooms
as actors or magicians, nor do we strive to educate in illusions.
Nonetheless, the nature of our profession is that we must juggle
current events and the emotions they trigger. We need to organize
the realities of uncertainty into some kind of interactive presentation
for our classes. So, how do we deal with circumstances for which
we cannot be prepared? Within these circumstances, how do we manage
our own emotions and opinions responsibly, without negatively impacting
our students?
The New Humanities Reader purposely offers little escape
from the problematic world around us. After all, as we transition
students from high school level thinking into the development of
a mature approach to written expression, we are empowering them
with the means to be the future leaders of our country. It would
be naïve to for us to believe that our encouragement of connective
thinking, responsible literacy, and active self-expression is not
meant to carry over into the formation of our students' adult identities.
The pressure to provide a safe space for students to achieve these
specific goals is both driving and daunting when the curriculum
consists of biogenetic technology, gender, and culture conflict,
especially in a global context where war comes across as the easy
fix for socio-politically charged issues. The pressure mounts as
we realize that we don't fully understand these issues ourselves,
or as we realize that our personal investments in specific issues
fail to allow for the critical distance required for fair classroom
discussion. I encountered these challenges to the extreme while
teaching during the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but through my
experiences I recognized the need to work out a set of guidelines
that would help protect against the pitfalls of teaching in an emotionally
fraught environment without sacrificing the high energy that risky
topics elicit.
When you feel like you don't know enough about a given essay or
topic, it sometimes feels easiest to shy away from it. Current issues
push and pull at our sense of political correctness, and we become
afraid of crossing the "fine lines" on which the New Humanities
Reader balances. I empathized to hear that many of my fellow writing
instructors avoided making connections between the events of 9/11
and their sequence topics altogether. Some teachers felt that they
might betray a sense of their own fear and were wary of risking
their authority by revealing weakness. Others decided that the issues
in the reader were controversial enough, and that their students'
papers would become too personal. But in my classroom, I began to
worry about a lack of critical distance from the other side of the
problem. Without connecting the issues in our reader to current
events, students would complain that the readings had nothing to
do with their lives.
|
| "One
way to get students thinking on their own is to attempt to learn with
them about an issue." |
One of the moments which most influenced my class dynamic
occurred when I decided to listen to my students' voices without having
a sense of my own opinions firmly established. Too often, I think,
we get caught in the trap of expecting a mirror of our own viewpoints
from our students. Yet when we receive a batch of papers that perfectly
echo the "answers" or threads we provide in class, we feel
frustrated. In the end, one way to get students thinking on their
own is to attempt to learn with them about an issue. That way, what
you are teaching is enthusiasm for the search of information and the
process of testing, discarding, or proving an opinion. Most importantly,
students begin to trust that they don't have to simply agree with
their instructor in order to get a good grade. You can use an atmosphere
of uncertainty to give the writing process the potential for exploration
rather than a recitation of accepted ideas.
The next step in creating the kind of classroom dynamic that benefits
from rather than suffers under the weight of serious topics is to
establish what it means to be prone to gut reactions. Beginning attempts
at argument tend to sound like emphatic rampages. Class discussion
becomes an emotional debate that maintains high levels of participation
but neglects to get students thinking critically beyond basic prompts.
Using Tannen's essay about the importance of dialogue over debate
is a valuable way to overcome this obstacle. In my own classroom,
I split up my students into two groups. I assigned the first group
to conduct a dialogue about the War on Terrorism while the second
group observed. Next, the second group engaged in a mock debate about
the same topic. (You can use any topic from the reader or current
events to make this work).
Our discussion after these activities focused on the strengths and
weaknesses of each style of communication. While the dialogue group
included an equality of member participation and remained calm, students
admitted that they did not feel satisfied after the dialogue was finished
because no one came away feeling any differently than they had going
into it. They re-defined Tannen's definition of dialogue as a polite,
non-efficient way of having a debate. The result was that students
searched for a combination of debate and dialogue in their papers,
thereby developing more complex arguments that resisted the tendency
to rant. The debate group also played out in really interesting ways.
Students found themselves having to argue positions based on debate
identities in which they did not actually believe, which caused them
to understand issues from a new perspective. We took on Tannen's discussion
of gender roles and debate by recognizing why certain group members
felt uncomfortable in a debate setting. Our "experiment"
challenged Tannen's assertions without missing some of her best points.
With this exercise, you run the risk of the debate getting emotional
and personal very quickly. In order to protect the culture of respect
in your classroom, an essential step in closing the debate is to acknowledge
the ways that more overzealous reactions impede the debate's progress.
It may be more difficult to have open class discussion when an instructor's
agenda is to persuade students to agree with the "message"
of an essay or topic. During the preliminary stages of my sequence
design, I naturally concentrated on a set of readings that interested
me most, namely those that take up religion as a theme. Essays like
"Does God Have a Future?" and "Waiting for a Jew"
asked questions I was already thinking about a great deal as an Orthodox
Jew. But it occurred to me as I was rescheduling class meeting times
to avoid conflicts with Jewish High Holy Days that my identity was
obvious to my students, that it was their own identities I wanted
my students to find in class. Ultimately, I redesigned my sequence
so that I wouldn't run the risk of teaching my well-developed opinions.
This way, I steered clear of falling into what Daniel Goleman cites
as the "Michael Jordan effect": "He's a brilliant basketball
player, of course, but the game comes so naturally to him that he
may not be very good at coaching other players." In an extension
of this metaphor into the teaching arena, if you present an issue
when you have it all figured out, then you either won't leave students
any room to find their own voices, or you may skip over the adequate
treatment of serious ideological roadblocks that seem obvious to you
but obscured from your class. I'm not advising that you stay away
from topics that have emotional resonance for you or your students;
however, it is imperative that you keep the complications that stem
from a lack of critical distance close in mind in order to model open-minded
thinking and promote explorative writing. |
| "There
is no formula that good teachers use to harness the potential energy
that is born within the pages of a textbook and then apply it to the
realities of everyday experiences." |
No matter what you decide to teach, when the emotion
quotient runs too high, it can be detrimental to your sense of classroom
control. After 9/11, I thought it would be impossible to expect anything
rational from myself or my students. But I found that most students
looked to me to provide a sense of order, to coach them while they
learned methods of working through problems. Through a troubling experience
with the one student who took advantage of my emotional empathy by
making excuses for late papers (which actually never materialized),
I learned that keeping up a sturdy foundation of expectations can
reinforce the hope for normalcy and progress in the face of an emotional
crisis. Of course, extending a paper deadline for anguished students
may be the right move in certain or uncertain situations-as long as
the exception doesn't become the rule. This aspect of keeping my classroom
functional was often the most awkward for me. When one student's outside
emotions affected her in-class growth, my instinct was to coddle her
so that she could stay in school. I was ready to meet this student
outside of class so that she could make up missed work, and I even
suggested that we adjust an assignment so that she would feel less
overwhelmed. When she told me she had obtained the dean's permission
to drop the class, a part of me felt utterly defeated. It hurt me
that she and all my students had to confront a world with so many
problems. I constantly wondered what I would have felt like as a college
freshman forced to contend with the issues in our reader. Looking
back, I realize that the key is to demonstrate the therapeutic and
constructive power of writing. Students feel less beleaguered by their
emotions when they have the tools to explore and organize them.
But what about those occasions when it seems impossible to lead through
the heaviness of your own emotions, even if you've made every effort
to circumvent dealing with them in front of your class? In the event
that I am at a loss for the next move, I give my students the opportunity
to be leaders. You might try delegating responsibility to top students
by asking them to develop useful class activities. (The dialogue/debate
exercise I described before was thought up by my student.) Additionally,
I don't think it is wrong to rely on the empathetic community you've
been working toward. Since my students are aware that I don't have
all the answers, and because I haven't pretended to be a magician,
I feel confident that students will relate to me. Every once in a
while, whether I need a break or not, I test the fruits of my labor
by putting students in charge and then watching how students employ
the open-mindedness they've learned.
The personal nature of writing already positions the instructor's
task on emotionally shaky ground, even without the inclusion of sensitive
topics. Unlike the handing in of the average math homework, when students
submit a paper, they usually feel that they have put their hearts
in a boxing ring with the instructor's proverbial red pen. As teachers,
we need to recognize this inherent vulnerability in beginning writers
and depict ourselves as fellow writers rather than expert judges.
Throughout the semester, I often talked about my own struggles in
composition and described my susceptibility to disappointment when
I just couldn't express myself clearly, or when I felt alone with
my ideas. In fact, this was the one area where I let myself get really
personal with my students, perhaps with the secret hope that they
could conceive of themselves as budding teachers of the craft they
were learning.
There is no formula that good teachers use to harness the potential
energy that is born within the pages of a textbook and then apply
it to the realities of everyday experiences. The only thing that is
certain is that the writing classroom especially possesses the possibility
to propel each student through the ride of his or her life. Your mission
is to make the journey as safe as possible without surrendering to
the emotional complexities that keep us searching. The beauty lies
in figuring it all out as you go. |
|
|
|
