Group Study for Teachers

Elizabeth Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367028299
• eBook ISBN: 9780429673665
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Original blurb (1967): We are coming nowadays to think of education increasingly in terms of a prolonged transaction between the generations. The psychology of this transaction is largely concerned with learning as it is mediated by the relations between teachers and pupils. Thus the social psychology of the classroom and the school is a growing study which brings into focus the relations of adults and young persons in groups. There are a variety of approaches to the study of behaviour and experience in groups and to attempt to survey these would be a formidable task. Miss Richardson, herself a pioneer in this field, has attempted a more modest and practicable and in many ways a more useful task. She has set out to describe and illustrate a particular approach to the study of experience in groups. Based on her own work with groups of students in training as teachers, her book is a valuable introduction to one of the main streams of development in this field. The wealth of the illustrative material she provides should give students and experienced teachers deeper insight into many familiar situations in education.

1

Introduction: personal interaction and the role of the teacher

Teaching as a boundary function

When the intending teacher arrives in a college or department of education, he brings with him a rich store of memories about the men and women who have taught him during his childhood and adolescence. Among them will be, very probably, idealized portraits of ‘good’ teachers and caricature-like portraits of ‘bad’ teachers. When he begins to teach, his first concern will be to convince himself that he has a sort of working competence in the classroom—that he is more like the idealized portraits than the caricatures. But before long he will find that ‘being a good teacher’ is not a question of ‘being like Mr X’, but rather a question of finding ways of taking the teacher’s role without ceasing to be himself. And this will force upon him the necessity of examining his own feelings and thoughts about what kind of relationship he wants to have with his classes and what sort of assumptions about the nature of leadership and authority he is prepared to accept and live with.

It is frequently said that the effectiveness of a teaching-learning situation ‘depends entirely on the personality of the teacher’. There is some truth in this statement: yet it can be very misleading. The speaker may be wishing to imply that all or most of the dynamism in the classroom has to come from the adult who is teaching rather than from the group that is being taught. The good teacher, it may appear, is the one who is able to project his personality, who can impress his class as a talented individualist, who is able to take the centre of the stage effortlessly and tirelessly —someone, in short, who can captivate his pupils, even perhaps enslave them.

We can all think of people like this. They are often good entertainers but they are not necessarily good teachers. Unfortunately, the image of the ‘vivid personality’ remembered from school-days can overshadow a young teacher to such an extent that he perceives himself by contrast as pale and lifeless and therefore doomed to be ineffectual in his professional role. Yet it sometimes happens that such a student is far from pale and lifeless and indeed turns out to have a more intuitive understanding of the interplay of personal feeling in the classroom than some of those very teachers whose abundant confidence and vitality he so envies.

The truth is that we have to be careful how we use the word ‘personality’ in the context of educational thought. Certainly every teacher must learn to use himself as an instrument for understanding the processes that go on in his classroom.¹ Only through himself will he be able to relate to his pupils; and only if he can relate to them will they be able to learn from him. This implies that his pupils need him to ‘be himself’ rather than to project into the classroom a sort of enlarged super-self. Ironically, how ever, it may seem to him at first sight that ‘being a teacher’ precludes the possibility of ‘being one-self’: for when he first tries his hand at teaching he may feel that his pupils, from the moment they receive him, force him to conform to their expectations of how a teacher should behave, force him to act as though he were omnipotent, force him to manipulate them rather than enter into a genuine relationship with them. And all this at the very moment when he is trying to adjust himself to the reality of his new position in the classroom.

This return to the classroom as a teacher is in itself a step of some emotional magnitude. From being one of the class that receives and reacts to a teacher, the student has suddenly become the teacher who must approach and interact with a class. This is a formidable demand: for whereas, in the role of pupil, he was (however tenuously) a part of the classroom group, now, in the role of teacher, he has to accept the necessity of remaining on its boundary. As the teacher he is both inside and outside the classroom group, and must be able to relate to his class without either dominating it or submitting to it. As the work leader he is a member of the class; yet his special role as a staff member in the context of the school’s responsibilities must, on other occasions, set him apart from it. Only by being prepared to stay in the boundary region of the classroom group will he become an effective teacher. If he chooses to operate from too remote and dictatorial a position (or if his pupils succeed in pushing him out beyond the boundary) there can be no shared enterprise between himself and them. If, on the other hand, he seeks popularity at the expense of being an effective leader (or if the class succeeds in pulling him right inside the boundary), he will lay himself open to being exploited by the class members. He is as much a leader operating on the boundary between the class and the school as his headmaster is a leader operating on the boundary between the school and the local community. (See Rice, 1963, pp 15-16; and Rice, 1965, pp 20-3.)

Now the young teacher cannot understand the nature of this boundary function by thinking only of what he is setting out to teach the class and of the readiness of individual pupils for the tasks he has in mind for them. There is a third dimension to which he must pay attention: the emotional life of the classroom group, including its personal relationship to himself. Here is a dynamic inner world of fluctuating moods and hidden motivations, often frustrating the intentions of individual children, but sometimes providing a powerful driving force that can be harnessed to those intentions. How can the teacher be helped to understand the nature of this inner world of the group?

It is not for nothing that education courses today devote a considerable proportion of time to working in small groups, in tutorial and seminar situations, where staff leadership can be kept flexible, group autonomy and individual initiative encouraged, and theoretical ideas tested against personal experiences and empirical observations. But the small group can become something more than the forum in which opinions and ideas about educational practice are exchanged and scrutinized: it can become the crucible in which a sample of educational experience can be studied while it is actually taking place, in which feelings about being a group member can be exposed and used as the materials of learning.

The student has been accustomed to look across at the teacher from the pupil’s side of the table. For many years he has been carrying into the classroom his own built-in attitudes to persons in authority, some of these attitudes springing unconsciously from his earliest feelings towards his own parents and operating in the classroom through what Freud called the ‘transference’. Now he is about to be a teacher himself: he has to discover what it is like to be on the other side of the table. Because of this imminent switch of roles he is likely to scrutinize his own teachers in the college or department—his tutors and seminar leaders in particular—with a new kind of interest. If he can also be helped to examine his own feelings towards one of them in a group situation that he shares with other students, he and they, and indeed the staff member, may learn much about the emotional bonds and conflicts that lie at the heart of all personal relationships—in the schoolroom and the university tutorial room no less than in the home.

Bion’s theory of group behaviour

Sanction for this kind of work, where professional supervision and training are built in, has been growing steadily during the past twenty years. In England it has stemmed from Dr W. R. Bion’s pioneer work with small groups at the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations after World War II (Bion, 1961). Some of these were groups of patients who had agreed to be treated in a group instead of individually; others (including some of Bion’s own colleagues at the Clinic and Institute) were people in positions of leadership in education, social work and industry, who were willing to accept membership of a small group in order to learn about the dynamics of group behaviour from direct personal experience. These non-patient groups later came to be known as ‘study groups’. In both the therapy-group and the study-group situations Dr. Bion acted as a consultant. That is, he did not offer topics for discussion; but he did offer leadership in the task of studying the group processes by commenting on the discussions that arose by spontaneous interaction of the members. In the early phases the feelings he became aware of in the other members seemed always to be focused on himself, on his way of ‘taking’ the group and on their dissatisfaction with this. His comments would therefore appear to them to be concerned with nobody but himself. Over and over again he would be made to feel that his interpretations were not welcome, that they were being taken as evidence of a ‘warped outlook’ in himself, and that he was felt to have excluded himself from the group and to be making things difficult by not participating. Attempts on the part of members to swing back to a more friendly attitude would not, however, be reassuring to him, since they would merely be attempts to revert to their original blind faith in him as someone with ‘a reputation for knowing a lot about groups’—that is, to a belief based on hearsay rather than on experience. Reading his own account of these events, we sense not only the discomfort of the members, and of himself, but also his own recognition of the inevitability of this discomfort, and indeed of the members’ ‘right’ to be annoyed. ‘It is perfectly clear,’ he says, ‘that nobody ever explained to them what it meant to be in a group in which I was present. For that matter, nobody ever explained to me what it was like to be in a group in which all the individual members of this group were present.’¹

Bion found that shifts were always occurring in the emotional attitudes of any group regarded as an entity. At times the group appeared to be looking to him for nourishment and protection, as though expecting to be maintained in a state of immaturity. At other times, the group would appear to be intent on preserving itself, regardless of the safety or well-being of individuals, by fighting or running away from something. At yet other times, the group would behave indulgently towards two of its members, as though in the hope that out of the relationship between these two a solution to its problems might come. From his observations of these alternating phases, Bion concluded that there were three ‘basic assumptions’ (dependence, fight-flight and pairing) on which groups operated unconsciously, and that whenever one of these was uppermost, the emotions appropriate to the other two had to be suppressed.

But this is only part of the picture. The essence of Bion’s theory is that the group, like the person, is always functioning at two levels: at the level of its primitive emotions, or basic assumptions, and at the level of work, or learning by experience. The work group is continually struggling to preserve a structure that will make growth and learning possible, whereas the basic-assumption group is continually trying to escape from the obligation of learning by experience. We can put it in another way by saying that the work group is striving always to come to terms with reality, whereas the basic-assumption group is always looking for the easy, painless way out of difficulties by living in a fantasy world. Looking at it in terms of the school classroom, we can put it like this. Children, as individuals, want to learn. They want to master reality, to make discoveries about how things work, to learn adult skills and to acquire adult values. But the behaviour of these same children may, in the group, frustrate these very intentions, as though, once they are members of the group, they have to contribute anonymously to what is going on, in the mistaken belief that only thus will they ensure the group’s survival.

The dependent group demands, at the fantasy level, the presence of a leader who, like the hypothetical perfect parent is omniscient, infallible and capable of magical solutions in time of difficulty. The pairing group supports the activities of a pair, as though in the hope that these two members will, between them, produce a new leader: this unborn ‘leader’ the group is looking for may be an idea, perhaps, a plan, or a book—something that will save the group from the painful necessity of doing its own learning. But for hope to remain, this leader must not be born. The dependent group, then, is associated with the wish for an easy, comfortable security, and demands a leader so far above human error and weakness that no human being can possibly live up to the group’s expectations; and the pairing group is associated with feelings of hope in the nonexistent leader of the future. The leader of the dependent group has to be metaphorically killed off because he fails to be omniscient; the leader of the pairing group is never born.

The fight-flight group, in contrast to the other two, is associated with feelings of anger, fear and hostility. It has been likened to a tram: it looks the same at both ends and you don’t know which direction it is going in until it begins to move; all you know is that it is mobilized either to fight something or to run away from it. The object of its attack or the object from which it is fleeing may be the official leader of the group; or it may be another member; or it may be another group; or it may just be the task. If the leader of the dependent group is expected to be omnisscient, the leader of the fight-flight group has to be invincible in attack or uncatchable in retreat. And just as the leader of the pairing group turns out to be non-existent and the leader of the dependent group to have feet of clay, so the leader of the fight-flight group proves to be far from invincible in battle.

Is it enough, then, for the teacher to study Bion’s theory and to work out for himself at an intellectual level what sort of problems he is likely to encounter as the leader of the children’s work group in the classroom? Well, something can undoubtedly be learned from reading. Studying Bion’s theory, we may come to feel that it helps us to put some of our old questions in a new way and perhaps even to suggest some answers to them. It seems that we have to ask ourselves first how a teacher can contrive to be dependable, without setting up a dependent situation in which the capacity of the children to cooperate intelligently is impaired by their jealous need to compete with each other for his exclusive attention; secondly, how he can accept aggressive, questioning attitudes, without getting trapped in a fight-flight situation in which they set up one child as their leader in opposition to him and to the work that he wants them to do; and thirdly, how he can encourage pairing relationships, both between himself and individual pupils and between the pupils, without fostering false hopes that the learning can be left to two people in the classroom while the rest sit back. It is the teacher’s job, it seems, to mobilize the appropriate basic assumption for the specific task in hand and to make children aware of what they are doing when they force one another into stereotyped roles and of what they are doing when they try to get him fixed in their fantasy role of what a teacher ought to be.

At the intellectual level it may be possible for the teacher to see, in the light of Bion’s theories about dependence, pairing and fight-flight, why the same class will sometimes show keen resentment against any member who appears to relate easily to himself, while at other times they will allow the teacher to set up a pairing relationship with one child as though content that he and this one child should do the work for all of them. He may learn to recognize his own tendency to go into collusion with the basic assumptions rather than accept leadership of the work group—by pampering the class or by fighting it or by exploiting his own need for specially favoured pupils. It is often said that Bion’s writings are meaningless except to readers who have experienced membership of a study group or therapy group of the kind that Bion himself took. I do not subscribe to this view. I believe that teachers can learn much about their own situation from reading his papers, and that the parallels between the emotional situations in the adult groups that he has described and those that teachers observe in their own classrooms are recognizable to anyone who reads him with imagination. But an intellectual recognition of the existence of a problem, without the emotional experience of the problem, is only a limited recognition.

The teacher who goes beyond this and accepts membership of a study group commits himself to something more than a search for intellectual understanding. He lays himself open to an emotional experience which may, as time goes on, enrich and personalize this intellectual understanding. For in the study group he has the opportunity to act out some of his own primitive feelings and to engage in the struggle to find ways of using those feelings in an increasingly mature and sophisticated way. He also has the chance to discover what it means to enter into a genuine relationship with a teacher instead of merely fluctuating between submission to him and conflict with him. It helps him to come to terms with the reality of the ambivalence that is present in all human relationships.

The study of group behaviour in a university department of education

The notion that a group can examine its own behaviour in a tutorial or seminar situation is not one that students— or indeed teachers—can easily accept. To many people such self-scrutiny appears to be a slightly unhealthy, even dangerous pursuit. A tutor who embarks on such an exercise with his tutorial group may be regarded by some of his colleagues (not to mention his students) as slightly mad. Many are incredulous when told of the things that happen when there is sanction in the group for the expression of feelings, including hostile feelings, about the tutor. It is suspected that the tutor is deliberately provoking these feelings. Yet in the course of the struggle to illuminate what lies below the surface of words and actions, the foundation can be laid for a less authoritarian and less mutually dependent relationship between students and teacher than might otherwise exist. The group can be helped to grow up.

In a one-year post-graduate course in education, the tutorial situation may be assumed to have three main purposes: first to help the students to relate their own experience (as pupils and as teachers) to the theories being studied in the course; secondly, to help them to examine how children are influenced by their relationships in the peer group and with adults in authority over them; and thirdly, to help them to develop a greater understanding of themselves as persons interacting with other persons. Yet there is no blueprint for tutorial work. Two university departments may have common aims in training teachers, yet have entirely different tutorial systems. In one, a tutorial group may scarcely ever meet as a group at all, the tutorial relationship being mainly an individual one; in another, the individual relationship may be subservient to the weekly group discussion, any one member having only occasional private interviews with his tutor; in a third, the group meetings and the individual interviews may be regarded as equally important. Again, in one department, tutorial groups may be homogeneous, students being allocated as far as possible to tutors who share the same special subject and who will visit them when they are doing their teaching practice in schools. In another department, the groups may be heterogeneous, as many subjects as possible being represented, and a tutor may not see any members of his group teaching at all. Even within the same department no two tutorial groups will function exactly alike. Tutors are different human beings with different talents and different ways of doing their jobs. Indeed, any one tutor will find himself introducing modifications into his work as year succeeds year, and he may at some stage radically alter his approach as new influences and new experiences affect his thinking.

In the Bristol Department, at the time of which I am writing, the tutorial group was considered to be (and still is) the heart of the education course. Students were allocated to tutors in groups of not more than twelve, in such a way that each contained a fair distribution of men and women, of special subject interests, of degree classes and of previous universities. Each tutor would meet his students both individually and as a group throughout the autumn and summer terms. In the middle term all students were out on school practice and it was unusual, though not unknown, for a student to be supervised by his tutor during that time. Group meetings in the Department in the first and third terms were held once a week and usually lasted an hour and a half. Students wrote essays for their tutors, including two in the autu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: personal interaction and the role of the teacher
• 2 The professional framework: personal relations and formal assessment
• 3 The research component: relationships in an experimental situation
• 4 The physical setting for meetings: furniture, functions and roles
• 5 The time dimension: lateness, absence and withdrawal
• 6 Endings and beginnings: the group and its relevance
• Selected bibliography