On Becoming an Effective Teacher

Person-centered teaching, psychology, philosophy, and dialogues with Carl R. Rogers and Harold Lyon

Carl Rogers, Harold Lyon, Reinhard Tausch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135005504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

On Becoming an Effective Teacher describes exemplary practices like Teach For America, which highlight the power of person-centered teaching to bring about higher student achievement and emotional intelligence. Lyon situates the classic with the cutting-edge, integrating wisdom with research, anecdote with practical advice, to find truths that reveal paths toward effective teaching.

Jeffrey Cornelius-White, Psy.D., LPC, Professor of Counseling, Missouri State University, USA, Author of Learner Centered Instruction: Building Relationships for Student Success

This fascinating book reveals through current research and contemporary applications that Carl Rogers' pioneering and radical approach to education is as relevant today as it was in the 1970s and '80s.

Brian Thorne, University of East Anglia, UK

Carl Rogers is one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. His influence is similarly outstanding in the fields of education, counselling, psychotherapy, conflict resolution, and peace.

On Becoming an Effective Teacher presents the final unpublished writings of Rogers and as such has, not only unique historical value, but also a vital message for today's educational crises, and can be read as a prescription against violence in our schools. It documents the research results of four highly relevant, related but independent studies which comprise the biggest collection of data ever accumulated to test a person-centred theory in the field of education. This body of comprehensive research on effective teaching was accomplished over a twenty-year period in 42 U.S. States and in six other countries including the UK, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Israel, and Mexico and is highly relevant to the concerns of teachers, psychologists, students, and parents.

The principal findings of the research in this book show that teachers and schools can significantly improve their effectiveness through programs focusing on facilitative interpersonal relationships. Teachers who either naturally have, or are trained to have empathy, genuineness (congruence), and who prize their students (positive regard) create an important level of trust in the classroom and exert significant positive effects on student outcomes including achievement scores, interpersonal functioning, self-concept, attendance, and violence.

The dialogues between Rogers and Lyon offer a unique and timeless perspective on teaching, counselling and learning. The work of Reinhard Tausch on person-centered teaching for counselors, parents, athletics, and even textbook materials, and the empathic interactions of teachers and students, is among the most thorough and rigorous research ever accomplished on the significance and potential of a person-centered approach to teaching and learning.

This pioneering textbook is highly relevant to educational psychologists and researchers, as well as those in undergraduate and graduate university courses in education, teacher training, counseling, psychology and educational psychology.

Part I Person-centered freedom

1 A Dialogue Between Carl Rogers and Harold Lyon

DOI: 10.4324/9780203725672-3

CARL Schools can, if they wish, deal with students in ways that stimulate and facilitate significant and self-reliant learning. This approach is based on person-centered freedom — to learn and to live. It eliminates every one of the elements of conventional education. It does not rely on a carefully prescribed curriculum, but rather on one that is largely self-chosen; instead of standard assignments for all, each student sets his own assignment; lectures constitute the most infrequent mode of instruction; standardized tests lose their sanctified place; grades are either self-determined or become a relatively unimportant index of learning.

HAL Your statement supports what we found about maximizing the potential of exceptional children — those with special needs as well as the gifted and talented child. We found that the classroom, which is geared to the average child, is not suitable for many children. Both gifted children, who wish to go faster or learn in depth, and special needs children who should approach learning in a unique way, need education tailored to the individual person. Federal legislation prescribed that these needs point schools toward mainstreaming children: providing special needs or gifted children special programs with special services, but placing the child, for at least part of each day, in a classroom that has diverse children. There are some concerns about this. Studies show gifted children tend to drop out of school, as they are often bored and not challenged, and they will sometime rebel from the educational system which moves at the pace of the average child, or even slower. In a national study, over 30% of dropouts were found to be gifted and talented children, turned off and bored by the traditional lock-step classroom.¹ Special needs children also have some problems when you mainstream them. They tend to have better peer associations and friendships when they're in small groups for at least a few hours a day with their own peers. They tend not to make friendships as well in the normal classroom and need time with their own peers and then they often blossom. But they also have much to gain from their average classmates and vice versa. I am not in favor of segregating the gifted in special private or public schools, separate from other youngsters. They also need to have a few hours a day with other gifted children to go deeply in a richer curriculum, to have more creative opportunities, to have more independent study, to be free to learn and grow at their own pace and in their own direction.

CARL Well, this is not a field of expertise for me. My one comment is of a general nature: I do see one positive opportunity in bringing together all these different kinds of children. I think they do need to be in the kinds of small groups that you mentioned, but I also see another opportunity. If teachers and parents of these special needs children and normally functioning children could meet in small groups with a competent facilitator, important changes would follow. We know that from our experience. There could be open expression of the feelings of each group — an open facing of the fear or prejudice most of us feel in dealing with the disabled, and the jealousy that many people feel in dealing with the gifted or unusually talented child. And so, facing of those prejudices and fears would mean growth for all concerned. I know from my experience in workshops for handicapped persons that they hold the possibility of the handicapped individual being treated as a person; not always supported; not always treated gingerly; but sometimes being confronted honestly, instead of with deference. I've seen individuals confronted — people in wheelchairs — who were told that they're taking up too much time, or ‘You're using your handicap as a lever to manipulate us.’ And that honesty has been a very constructive experience for those people. They need that kind of solid confrontation as well as the more usual sympathy and understanding of their condition. This has been a lesson personally for me because I've had this same discomfort of dealing with a handicapped individual as just a person, but one can overcome that. When I've been able personally to overcome that, it's a freeing thing to all concerned. So the mixing of different kinds of children in the same classroom does have an opportunity for growth if we can take the initiative and have the imagination and the skill to use that opportunity.

HAL I'm reminded of a friend who is blind and who shared with me about going to a program with you at La Jolla many years ago. After he emerged from this program, he said that for the first time in his life he had received honest feedback from sighted people about himself. He had always been treated with deference because he was blind. It was the first time he had any sense of his own being as a solid person because he knew what he was getting in the way of feedback was honest, even though it wasn't always complimentary. It was the first time that he really emerged with a sense of who he was as a person. Before he went to the program, he was having a lot of difficulties, had taken drugs, and was very depressed. Since then, he has completed his Ph.D. and now he is leading a national program of cross-country skiing for blind people, including an international competition for cross-country skiing on established trails. It's interesting how that one intense experience was pivotal in his life: being integrated with sighted people and having that workshop experience without being treated as a special disabled individual but, instead, being treated as a person.

CARL That's a beautiful illustration and it's the kind of thing I would hope might occur in the schools. Education that centers on the individual as a person can have a really freeing impact. I believe that any factor that helps the young, growing child to realize that learning is important is bound to have a lasting effect on his or her life. I'm really not surprised at the findings of an organization called the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies which indicated that the positive effects on children of early intervention projects, such as Sesame Street, a program I know you helped in its early stages, are showing up later as greater social and intellectual maturity as those students reach adolescence. The fact that the original effects of these interventions seemed to have been washed out by third grade may have been because the impact was something that goes deeper than the qualities which are tapped by third grade achievement tests. I think, for many children, it's a significant experience to receive special attention at an early age. It helps to build self-esteem and self-esteem makes for greater maturity in the child. I am excited and pleased to know that the kind of attention they receive, this kind of building of their self-confidence, does show up in later years, even if it doesn't show up in the very early years of school. I might add that even elderly people show very positive changes from an hour or two a week in which they are the focus of caring and attention. This statement is based on a thorough research study made by Reinhard and Anne-Marie Tausch in Germany. They demonstrated that, at any age, when special attention is given to a group of people, positive and constructive effects result. I think whether the early learning programs are ideal from the point of view of instruction or not, the basic element of attention and of making the child feel important, helping the child feel confident — those elements are bound to last.

HAL As we do more research, I think we'll find even more significant results accruing from the earliest interventions. And I'm not just talking about the first couple years at school. I'm talking about from conception on. Even the first nine months in utero, the nutrition of the mother and her personal experiences make a difference: whether she smokes or not; whatever she takes into her body — all this has an effect on that child's early development. And the birth process itself makes a difference. I was intrigued by the follow-up research done by the French Association for Psychology on the Leboyer children who are now much older. The initial sample of 126 of these children were birthed in a tender candlelit environment without an anesthetic — being handed to the mother, in a natural way, caressed and massaged immediately after birth; the umbilical was kept intact for ten minutes or so as a supplementary oxygen source, and then the children were immersed in warm water to simulate being in utero. This is in contrast to the traumatic experiences of our modern technological birth process, where the mother often gets a saddle block anesthetic, which goes straight to the child's lungs when it needs to breathe for that first moment, where the child gets a sudden spank on the rear end and then placed in a crib to bond with a plastic bottle. These Leboyer children were largely free of most of the early childhood diseases and problems. They're very happy. They held up their heads and smiled significantly sooner than children whose mothers had an anesthetic and they are exceptionally bright. Out of 126 of them, 100 seemed to be ambidextrous, which says something about the damage that we may be doing to one-half of the brain in our modern, technological birth process.

Some years ago Burton White at Harvard showed that, between 8 and 22 months, a child is literally consumed by curiosity. This is a vital period when creativity is formulated. Yet, it's the same period when the child is reaching for every breakable object in the household, and mother is saying, ‘No, no, no, no!’ punctuated by a slap on the hand, which tends to stifle that creative development at this important formative time. Burton White showed that you can train mothers to set up stimulating ‘childproof’ environments during that crucial period. So, before the child ever gets to school, parents have a special opportunity to nourish creativity.

I think parents are the most important teachers and, for this reason, this book is written for parents as well as classroom teachers. Parents are the most important influence during the years where much of growth, learning, attitudes and directionality are established for later growth and development in school.

And let me say something about Sesame Street, for which I take no credit. I was fortunate to be there with a great man, Harold Howe II, then the US Commissioner of Education, and a small group of other very creative divergent thinkers when we brainstormed how we might create one program which would survive, reach young inner-city children and build long-term success. The TV antennas on each roof seemed the best route to get into inner-city homes and we had to reach them before school began. But how to start one major initiative that would survive the current administration and continue beyond that, was the real challenge. Howe and Lloyd Morrisett, his friend from the Carnegie Foundation, who got the idea for a TV show for teaching children by watching his own children remembering TV ads, went out to foundations and told of their vision of something unique which would survive beyond the Johnson Administration and keep being well funded. We needed long-term private, as well as short-term federal, money to insure its success. The foundations responded.

We were also lucky to find the most creative and motivated people in Joan Ganz Cooney and her Children's Television Workshop (CTW). As the federal project officer for these efforts, I was honored to sit with the CTW Research Advisory Board and was a witness to one of the most amazing and successful examples of ‘person-centered’ education ever created. Every show involved constructive ‘arm wrestling’ between the technical video people and the educators. We had cognitive objectives for each show (e.g. learn the numbers 1 and 2), plus affective objectives (e.g. honesty, caring about others, respecting the elderly, ‘the Golden Rule’, etc.). Before a show was aired, CTW tested the tapes with children in day-care centers along with very interesting toys and the show had to hold the attention of the children, in spite of the competing toys, while, at the same time, achieving the educational objectives. I loved it that every show had affective as well as cognitive objectives, which was the theme of a book of mine.²

My favorite has always been the show where the little boy has lost his mother, whom he describes as ‘the most beautiful woman in the whole world’. The villagers and the chief do a big search and no one can find her. After a day of searching, an ugly-appearing old hag comes limping down the street. The little boy runs up shouting, ‘Mother!’ They embrace and the village chief scratches his head and mumbles, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

CARL I would like to add my hearty endorsement to what you said. I've been fascinated, also, by the Leboyer birth process. One of my colleagues has said, ‘That makes the birth process a really person-centered thing,’ and I believe that's true. It treats the newborn infant with the real respect which is his due and it does make a tremendous difference in their development, their early start on becoming fully functioning persons. And Sesame Street is truly one of the most indelible examples of ‘person-centered’ teaching that has caught on internationally. Children all over the world benefit from it and you were, indeed, fortunate to have been a part of its beginning.

HAL I was interested in what you said about positive changes for elderly people resulting from focused, caring attention for an hour or two a week. That seems important to me — the idea that we are never too old to benefit from person-centered interaction. We are an aging population, while the proportion of young people in the population is getting smaller. We older people are finding that we can do things that we didn't expect to do later in life, and continuing education about what it means to be old is of growing importance. Our expectations about what it means to be old are being knocked down. For example, sexuality for older people is something that is quite common up through the eighties and later, but young people don't realize or appreciate that. Often in nursing homes older people are treated like children and they are deprived of their privacy and opportunities to experience their sexuality — to keep growing. I was delighted to learn in a visit to a retirement village that the older people are speaking out about their right to have their own sexuality. Ongoing educational opportunities for the elderly are essential. We need to have teachers who are responsive and sensitive to the needs of the elderly, who still have an incredible amount to contribute from their experience.

The elderly also make excellent teachers at times. We've lost so much of our family continuity, such as grandparents teaching grandchildren traditions. We can reinstitute it by mentor-type programs where retired older people can work with younger people, which can be a growth experience for both ages.

Older people tend to be ‘out of touch’, literally and figuratively. They are not touched very much. A program of massage therapy was introduced in a community's nursing homes in California and the results were astounding. Seniors involved in the massage program who had not been able to get out of bed for several years began walking, and morbidity and mortality among those being touched dropped significantly. The power of such a natural and normal person-centered act such as touching is amazing.

CARL I would con...