From the Stick Motivation Department, Part Two: Class Participation

In last month’s post I discussed the coercive parenting technique of assigning chores to children. The alleged lesson of such coercion is to teach children the value of work, though it likely teaches them to hate it.

Coercive teaching contributes a number of techniques to the stick motivation department. Let’s take a look at class participation.

For middle and high schoolers, and even college students, teachers feel obliged—and claim the unquestioned right—to coerce quiet members of the classroom to “come out of their shells” lest they fail to succeed in life or live up to their potential; grades based on class participation, by as much as fifty percent, I have heard, is the brass knuckle approach to teaching this lesson.

Five to ten percent, perhaps as extra credit, may have some instructional value. But fifty percent? These classes of twenty to forty students are not courses in public speaking.

And grades, after all, are the carrots and sticks by which teachers maintain control of their charges. I’m not the first to suggest that grades be dumped from the classroom entirely.

In the old days, the traditional (and coercive) recitation technique of class participation required students to summarize the content of their reading assignment, or, frequently, to recite something from memory. If not accomplished to the liking of the teacher, the kids would have their knuckles rapped with a ruler, or worse. In ancient Rome, they were beaten with a stick.

The modern version is a mixture of old-style recitation and analysis. The former, as the new schoolmarms are wont to say, should be kept to a minimum, because “we have all read the assignment.” Memorization, of course, is scorned as authoritarian and having no place in school. The latter, analysis, can include putting the reading material into different words, evaluation, and, too often, the spewing of undefended opinion.

According to ed school edubabble, such discussions will help teach students how to think. It usually degenerates quickly into BS sessions. And some of the more talkative students have mastered the technique of impressing teachers by their glibness; the quiet ones are then marked down.*

In recent years, some class participation teachers have discovered—and have experienced revelations when discovering—that their heavy-handed approach to getting those pesky and resistant-to-talking quiet kids to speak up in class may not be the best thing for them.

This has come about largely due to Susan Cain’s 2013 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking and her subsequently established website Quiet Revolution.  (See my related posts here and here.)

Jessica Lahey is one such reformed class-participation tyrant. Writing in The Atlantic, she firmly defended her conviction that quiet kids must be forced to speak up. When she received an “avalanche of angry comments,” many of which, to put it mildly, declared her “uninformed,” she wrote a softened article on Cain’s website. Lahey acknowledges that she was influenced to alter her teaching by Cain’s book and other articles on the topic (See especially Schultz and Cain for examples of teaching quiet kids without putting them on the spot.)

The upshot of “class participation reform” is that introversion and shyness are not the same and that any behavior can be motivated by multiple causes, not just what the extroverted teacher assumes is operating in the quiet kid.

“Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating” (Cain, p. 12). A room filled with twenty to forty classmates can produce considerable overstimulation for an introvert. Extroverts prefer the stimulation.

And most extroverted teachers assume shyness and introversion are identical. They also do not recognize that quiet kids may be actively listening to the other talkers, waiting for the moment to speak up when they have formulated what they would like to say. They also might be taking notes, say, for a subsequently required paper. Or, something extroverted teachers usually do not want to hear or acknowledge, the student may not like the teacher or the class, or both.** Certainly, there are other motivations.

But just as not voting in an election is participation in the political process, so also is not speaking up in class a form of participation. Teachers need to respond to, and find techniques of, reaching all personality types sitting in their desks.

A “one size fits all” approach to teaching, such as the assumption that speaking up in class is good for everyone, invariably brings out the specter of stick motivation.



* I must point out one more time that John Dewey, the alleged father of progressive education—“alleged” because he gave the epithet to Francis W. Parker—lectured when he taught, expected excellent memorization from his students, and wrote a book in 1938 to repudiate many progressive techniques used in his name, such as the necessity of class discussion to teach students how to think. For Dewey, subject matter was fundamental, because it is the “working capital” of thought.

The premise of many teachers today, as one colleague said to me years ago, is that “we teachers talk too much as it is. We have to get the kids talking.” I took that to mean less work for the teacher, something that was explicitly stated by my grad school classmates as justification for group projects: one paper to grade instead of four or five.

** Yes, I know there are teachers who brag about how they don’t care whether or not students like them or their courses. But they should.

Introversion, Quiet Persistence, and the Tortoise

For much of my adult life I have thought of myself as the tortoise in the Aesop fable of “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Many “hares” at various times have run circles around me—secured promotions before me in business, published articles or books before me in academia, and, of course, given me all kinds of advice about how I needed to speak up and become more gregarious if I wanted to survive in this world. Labeled as shy by those hares, I nevertheless felt that if I kept plugging away at what I was doing, success would follow. As it has turned out, I have beaten a few of those hares, not that I viewed my life as a contest against them, but my quiet persistence has won the day.

And quiet persistence is precisely what Susan Cain describes in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (1, 2, 3) as key to the introvert’s success in today’s extrovert-driven world. An introvert herself and former Wall Street attorney and negotiator, Cain reviews the considerable research on introversion and extroversion and provides in the process a liberating manifesto for introverts everywhere.

Careful to distinguish shyness from introversion—“shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating” (p. 12)—Cain refutes the claim of the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) that fear of public speaking is pathological. Citing the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas Gandhi, among many other famous introverts who were terrified of speaking up in a crowd, she goes on to report the research that shows introverts to be more creative, artistic, empathic and better at problem-solving than extroverts.

Introverts are more cautious, that is, we look before leaping, or rather, think before acting, and they crave solitude: rather than go to a party on a Saturday night, we often prefer to spend the time alone reading a book. Deep discussion one on one is the desired method of socializing by an introvert; small talk may then occur after the two have gotten to know each other, but not before.

Crowds are generally avoided because they are a main source of the overstimulation Cain is talking about. Groupthink and group projects of the type that are required so routinely on college campuses today produce conventionality and suppress imagination. It humiliates members of the Asian culture who, by western standards, are unfortunately viewed as shy by nature; the irony is that Asian culture views fast-talking extroverts as weak and insecure.

Solitary persistence is our source of innovation. “It’s not that I’m so smart,” as Albert Einstein, a tortoise-introvert and not-very-good student in our conventional schools, put it. “It’s that I stay with problems longer” (quoted in Cain, p. 169).

It is the din of crowds that shuts down the minds of introverts. At crowded dinner tables where three or more conversations may be going on at once, I confess, if someone is trying to talk to me, to pretending to hear what they say, guessing at their words. Usually, I prefer to remain silent.

So how is it that introverts can become great speakers, actors, comedians . . . or college professors? This of course is a question only an extrovert could ask! Cain says that a certain amount of “pseudo-extroversion” can be developed, but I think of it, assuming extensive preparation has been completed, as being in control when I am in front of a class. The fear is then minimized, not that I wasn’t terrified the first time I did it or that I don’t still feel an edge thirty years later. Spontaneous or extemporaneous speaking by introverts is not likely to happen many times or be performed very well.

To the surprise of the hares of the world, quiet persistence is the path to success, not just in the performing arts but also, as Cain illustrates, in personal selling and entrepreneurship. For thirty years I have been telling my students that they do not have to be a back-slapping, plaid-wearing Herb Tarlek in order to become a successful salesperson or entrepreneur. Both can be and at times are introverted. Persistence, the confidence to pursue one’s goals in the face of opposition and discouragement, eventually wins.

To close this post, I think it is only fitting to cite a familiar text to demonstrate Susan Cain’s accomplishment. Paraphrasing the text:

Introverts of the world, read this book!
You have nothing to lose but your chains.

The chains of guilt and humiliation that there is something wrong with you because you would rather not speak up in front of a crowd or would rather read a book than go to a party. Let the extroverts of the world find some other way to entertain themselves than by telling you what they think you should be doing!

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Follow-up:

Nutrition and the Argument from Uncertainty. In this post on nutrition I argued that according to the latest, cumulative scientific evidence, we should minimize sugar and starch intake. Political rumblings, of course, are now stirring to regulate or ban sugar. Scott Dailey in The Wall Street Journal parodies this sugar-police mentality with a variety of stories. Here’s one: “Excuse me, sir, could you buy me an Orange Crush?” “Sorry, kid. I could go to jail for that.”