ENCOURAGEMENT OF PERSONAL LEARNING BY THE TEACHER - A NECESSITY FOR PERSONAL AND SUBJECT LEARNING BY THE PUPIL
For some ten years now I have become increasingly conscious of the importance of personal learning, the development of the personality, by teachers in schools and universities. The position I have reached, through numerous experiences and as the result of investigations, is now as follows:
Teachers who are personally developed and inwardly free, and to a high degree psychologically viable, facilitate in large measure both the personal and the subject learning of their pupils in the classroom. They are self-determined in instruction and appropriately active in various ways; they evaluate their experiences and are able to help themselves, and are usualy not dependent on detailed regulations and instructions. Psychologically mamre persons are the condition for the psychological maturity of the pupils
Another experience which has survived testing is the following: development of personality, personal learning by teachers in important psychological areas can be appreciably encouraged in person-centred group encounters and by person-centred living together in subject seminars during training and socalled in-service training. By these means the personal and subject learning of teachers or smdent-teachers is encouraged in a way similar to that of pupils by teachers in the classroom
How did 1 reach this conclusion? I should like to enumerate some experiences and observations, together with results of investigations, from which I have learnt a good deal
- Expen knowledge as to what behaviour by teachers is beneficial for the pupils is not without importance. I myself, in association with my wife Anne-Marie, contributed to this in many research investigations. This expert knowledge, however, is inadequate even when teachers seriously desire to act accordingly in the classroom. We have experienced this frequently and have found it confirmed by investigation: teachers who strongly wish to direct the pupils less by means of questions and commands, in the wish to feel more respect and concern for their pupils and to feel themselves in sympathy with their psychological world, could not "realise" this in the classroom. Or, to put it in another way: they did not have the corresponding attitudes and could not live them in the teaching situation. The obstacle lay in their personalities. Expert knowledge, if it has been tested and is appropriate, can show us a way. But it does not absolve us from taking this way
- For some years we had directed our attention and our investigations towards an improvement of the organisation of instruction. We were able (0 demonstrate how working in small groups on the same topic for at least 5 minutes each lesson is much more beneficial than lecturing by the teacher. Work in small groups (instead of instruction by lecturing) proved to be highly profitable for subject learning by the pupils and to some extent also for their personal learning, and was more satisfying for the teachers concerned. In the small group work situation the teachers could empathise more, direct less and be more helpful. Nevenheless, in spite of these convincing scholarly findings, most teachers ceased to carry out work in small groups in their classes. We discovered that something inside them prevented them from doing so
- Together with my colleagues Langer and Schulz von Thun (1981) I spent some years assisting teachers and other persons (0 express themselves more intelligibly. We also developed a training programme which could be shown to make them capable of greater intelligiblity, greater simplicity and ability to organise their use of language. However, these improvements were only temporary and remained superficial. I realise now that it depends to a large extent on personal attitudes whether we express ourselves simply and intelligibly or contonedly and unintelligibly. If these personal attitudes are not present in the teacher or professor, then either he does not concern himself with the training programme or the effects achieved are superficial and temporary.
-I feel little interest in "training seminars" or courses in behaviour modification, either about behaviour in class or about the personality of the teacher
This disquiet remains, too, when I assume that many of these courses are "effective". The reasons for my disinclination are, in particular
I myself do not like to allow myself to be "trained" or modified. I do not like to have othet people telling me what I should do, what is right, what exercises I have to do. What I like is to be in an informal group with several other people near me, in which I can experience myself and develop myself, in the way in which I determine myself how and what I would like, in a way which is helpful to me and which I consider good. Therefore I do not force on teachers and other people "training seminars" which I do not consider helpful for myself or have experiencedIt is probable that so-called training courses chiefly influence the surface behaviour of teachers. I have sometimes observed that teachers have trained themselves to present the facade of a friendly, co-operative educator. But the personality of the adult, with all its potential, does not meet the young person in this way. Admittedly, feelings of hostility are usually suppressed by teachers. But the necessary activities of encouragement are too few, (00 unspontaneous and too schematic. Thus a teacher remarked to me: "I believed for years that I had to learn something in the courses in order to produce something else in the classroom. Now I know that my personaliry in the classroom is decisive, and my behaviour is necessarily determined by this"
- Some years ago I showed teachers and students a film of myself in a lesson in a class of technical-school pupils, who (in accordance with the instructions of the film-director) drank beer, smoked and "sabotaged" the lesson. After the film a young woman teacher asked 'Where on earth do I get the psych';,logical strength to be like that in the lesson?". It became clear to me there and then that this question touched upon something basic. The teacher did not, as usual, say "That's impossible for us to do". She saw that this kind of instruction is clearly connected with psychological strength, which she lacked. It became plain to me that the obstacles to less direction, to greater respect for the pupils by the teachers, for the performance of work in small groups and so on, lay in the personal attitudes and standpoints of the teachers
- The results of investigations, by which personal characteristics of teachers in their classrooms also exist in their private lives, impressed me deeply.
Teachers who were uneasy, restless, nervous, pedantic, insufficiently wann and creative in the classroom - whether admitting themselves to be so, or judged to be so by observers or by the pupils - were similarly affected outside the school also, in their private lives. These investigations, by the German psychologists Kretschmann, Popp and by American psychologists, we consider to be highly significant (see Tausch & Tausch 1979). We do not as teachers leave the attributes of our personalities, such as anxiousness, willingness to take risks, patience, tension or whatever, outside the classroom door. Indeed, in the thousand daily contact situations with other
human beings and in certain tensions in the class, many of our personal idiosyncrasies become even more obvious than in a more relaxed private situation. A teacher who says of himself in contact with other human beings "1 am extremely inhibited; it is difficult for me to talk about myself to other people" will naturally also have greater difficulties in the classroom. Only when teachers, when dealing with young people, conceal their personalities behind a facade - only then do troublesome personality traits fail to become apparent. But then the young persons encounter the teacher not as a person but as a facade. In another investigation it was shown (Wi!!ern & Tausch 1980) many teachers had difficulties in their personal life, in their marriages, their family, in ge!!ing along with themselves and other people. It was obvious that their psychological potential- also in the school- was affected by these personal difficulties. Findings of this kind reinforced my view that so-called "problems" such as teachers in schools have, or such as 1 myself have as a university teacher, are part of my personal way of being. And a "solution" to the problems, to the extent that they are of a serious nature, can only be lasting if 1 undergo a personal change and thus experience and react to everything differently.
- Through an investigation which is still proceeding, I discovered that some teachers had undergone considerable personal change, either as a result of illness or through crises in their marriages. They took up a new a!!itude to themselves. They also got along much more satisfactorily with the pupils in the classroom, even when, for example, their life was severely threatened by cancer
- 1 received considerable support for my view from new investigations among several hundred teachers in the United States and here in the Federal Republic of Germany. According to these, three personal qualities on the part of the teachers are necessary and sufficient for the pupils' personal and subject learning in the classroom. These are: sympathetic listening to the psychological reality of the pupils, respect for this realiry and sinceriry.
These investigations are presented subsequently in greater detail. We also found that these three personal qualities are not something that everyone can "do" but that they ate something that is lived. They cannot be learnt with the brain and they cannot be acquired by training. These three personal qualities also proved to be of extreme significance in other human relationships: in marriage, in the family or in psychotherapy between patient and psychiatric counsellor.
- In person-centred group-encounters (Carl Rogers 1970) these three essential qualities in teachers can be greatly facilitated. Such petsonallearning affects both school (according to estimates by observers and the teachers' own pupils) and the teachers' private lives. When a larget proportion of the teaching staff took part in group encountets of this kind, the atmosphere among the teachers, hitherto often less than satisfactory, would change
To sum up: These experiences and results of research have made clear to me the importance of the personal learning of teachers, educators, psychologists and psychotherapists. One result has been that I lay considerable emphasis on personal learning in my own teaching, for candidates for first and higher degrees in psychology and fot trainee-teachers and teachers. And to my own surprise, this has had a highly beneficial effect on the subject-learning and on the quality of subject-work of candidates for first and higher degrees, although the time for this has become shortet. I know today that a person who is psychologically well-equipped for life researches differently from a person whose learning at the university extends only through the mental area, with regard to the employment of knowledge, without undertaking a personal evaluation of how relevant the individual knowledge and scientific procedures are.
