Changing Our Mind

With Socrates

Dear Rain,

Standing in front of 21 pre-teens, stuttering through some poorly planned phrases, I experience the vulnerability of changing my mind. “Things haven’t been working…” I say. What follows are some brief explanations of the new direction our little class community I have helped build is taking, along with answering a few questions. ‘Was it a failed press conference?’ I might ask myself later. This type of public metanoia - greek for changing of the mind - is honestly embarrassing, but I am willing to go through with it because of the pain of the status quo. This type of pain necessarily leads us to change our minds, but why were we wrong in the first place. Why do we need to change our minds? Cannot reality bend to our perception of it? Since your last message I have been thinking about how our minds change a lot. How can we change our minds as teachers, how can our students change their minds, and how can humans change their mind in general?

Oftentimes we think about changing our mind in terms of coming across a new, mind-altering perspective, but a piece of wisdom from “The Life of Moses” by Gregory of Nyssa from the 4th century that has me thinking differently about it: “In my view the definition of truth is this: not to have a mistaken apprehension of Being. Falsehood is a kind of impression which arises in the understanding about nonbeing: as though what does not exist does, in fact, exist. But truth is the sure apprehension of real Being.” A change of mind, such as being a better referee for our students’ talkative behaviors, is really apprehending Being itself differently. I am serious. Hear me out. Being, whether the creator or existence itself, has a logic to it. Things don’t fall up. Our lives often flow against this Being when we perceive things to be Real that are not. As a first year teacher, I had the mistaken belief that if you show students that you trust them, then they will act as people who are trustworthy. As you can imagine, that classroom was one of chaos. I perceived some principle to exist, to be attached to what is Real, that didn’t exist, and my teaching was horrid as a result. I had good intentions, but good intentions which do not exist - which do not operate on real principles - are literally houses of straw.

The process of changing our minds is ultimately to become aware of what is real in terms of what accords with Being itself. How do we take this abstract idea and turn it to our lives as teachers? Well, if we as teachers slowly but surely get rid of our false beliefs about what works in classroom management and replace it with what does work, we will be off to a great start. However, this doesn’t cohere with something I currently believe to be more “Real” in terms of practices that form a good classroom or room-where-learning-happens: our main goal in classroom management is to teach students to self-regulate. We should actually come up with a term different from classroom management for this. Maybe our main goal is to create a classroom which never needs to be managed, a classroom which never needs to be refereed (Now I know this is an ideal, so we will still need our good referee tactics in the back pocket at all times while students are slowly gaining motivation or while we fail at this task). We need to motivate students to change their own internal motivations which control their classroom behavior. But how do we do this? This is the definitively harder task, so most teachers stay at the level of only changing their own management techniques, as I have done for most of my career.

I don’t have a tried and true answer to this question. When teachers speak of building relationships with students, often the idea is that a student who thinks you care about them will have different motivations inside your class than in a classroom with a teacher who they think doesn’t care about them. Other ways to build internal motivation I have come across are changing students perspective in an Ebeneezer Scrooge sort of way (the teacher as the three ghosts showing the consequences of actions), or to provide perspective by reading about exemplars who are morally serious humans whose righteous and consistent actions have changed history - think of your Abraham Lincoln’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s. Yet, is there a strategy to help students understand where they cling to unreal, untrue beliefs which are honestly, just, simpler? One we can employ in conversation with a student after class?

The strategy/ies comes from the first philosopher himself - Socrates. I have been reading a book called, “How to Think Like Socrates” written by a cognitive behavioralist named Donald J. Robertson. In the intro, Robertson writes about Socrate’s philosophy as being summed up in this question: “How can we distinguish between appearance and reality in our daily lives?” Robertson writes that the creators of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) were inspired by Socrate’s philosophy. CBT’s goal is to replace irrational and unhealthy cognitions with rational and healthy ones. It makes sense that this philosophy was translated into a type of therapy, but should teachers dabble in this? Is it our job to play the counselor? We have too much on our plates already, right?

Well, it is not our job to get into false beliefs our students have about, let’s say their parents’ relationship with them, but it is surely the teachers job to change false beliefs otherwise. Refuting misconceptions about a topic is literally one of the best ways to memorably teach a new concept. One of my favorite science YouTuber, Veritasium, has a lot of pedagogical content whose main goal is to reveal and then dispel a misconception. He actually completed a PhD on the topic of science pedagogy about refuting misconceptions as leading to greater results on assessments. So refuting wrong beliefs is our job within our content area. Great! What about classroom management? I would argue that if a student has a wrong belief about something as simple as talking in class, it is our job as well to reveal it and refute it as best we can, and I think Socrates gives us the tools for this. I have to pull a longer quote from Robertson’s book showing the power of Socratic Questioning, since I am not as well read on Socrate’s as him:

“On one occasion, for instance, Socrate’s teenage son, Lamprocles, was complaining about his notoriously sharp-tongued mother, the philosopher’s fiery young wife, Xanthippe. Socrates, it seemed to me, questioned his son in an incredibly skillful manner. He managed to get Lamprocles to concede that Xanthippe was actually a good mother, who genuinely cared for him. The boy insisted, however, that he still found her nagging completely intolerable. After some discussion, Socrates asked what stuck me as an ingenious therapeutic question: Do actors in tragedies take offense when other characters insult and verbally abuse them? As Socrates remarked, they say things far worse than anything Xanthippe ever did. Lamprocles thought it was a silly question. Of course they don’t take offense, but that’s because they know that despite appearances, the other actors do not, in reality, mean them any harm. It’s just make believe. That’s correct, replied Socrates, but didn’t you admit just a few moments ago that you believe your mother doesn’t mean you any harm either?”

Robertson is showing how Socrates helped his young son gain perspective on his mother through some thoughtful questioning. How can we learn such techniques? Well, first of all, by reading Socrate’s dialogues closely and analyzing how we can emulate him. This is probably the surest and most memorable way of learning to do so. And this is what I aim to do in the future. However, as of yet I have only read Robertson’s book, not the actual authentic dialogue’s… so here are three ways that we can question our students as gleaned by Robertson from Socrates:

1. Robertson says that Socrates often uses something called the double standard strategy, which is a question technique related to the golden rule. Since almost everyone agrees that we should treat others how we want to be treated, this is a good starting place. However, we often are unaware that we do not treat others how we want to be treated. So we need to lead students, through questioning, to reveal their double standard they hold for others, but don’t carry out themselves. We do this by first asking whether it would be reasonable for another person to have the same behavior that the student exhibits. Simply highlighting the difference in what students expect from others vs. what they expect from themselves can help them change their behavior. They are seeing themselves for the first time, in the eyes of another.

2. Another thing we can do is called clarification. Socrate’s used this in a dialogue with Euthydemus, where they were trying to get to an understanding of justice. Socrates had Euthydemus come up with something obviously unjust, to which he came up with “Telling lies and other forms of deceit.” Socrates then comes up with an exception, such as a father hiding medicine in a child’s food who refuses to take it. Euthydemus then realizes that the virtue which he thought was simple, was actually more complicated than he knew. This can work for helping students understand the nuance that exists in rules, and help them get to the value or principle behind the rule. A simple rule such as “No Talking” can be stated by the student. They have been talking too much, and you have helped them realize, through the double standard strategy, that they should not talk so as not to distract others. But can you help them think of exceptions? What about when another student is struggling with a problem? What if you raise your hand and are called on? What if there is a fire alarm? What if a student drops a pencil and they have picked it up to help them? What if the teacher has a way for students to blurt out an answer on a certain command? These are questions which help the student realize the truth behind the rule: the goal is not to never talk, the goal is to help yourself and others learn by being quiet when quiet is needed and by quietly assisting others when that is needed. This clarification assists students in knowing when to break the rules, and helps them internalize the essential principle behind the rule.

3. Finally, and quickly, Robertson mentions a technique that Socrate’s used often - he referred to himself in the third person, and talked to himself. Referring to yourself in the third person is known as illeism, and it helps us gain distance from our emotions and our perspective, to see ourselves from the outside. So instead of a student saying, “I threw the pencil because I was just messing around.” they could say, “Jacob threw the pencil because Jacob was messing around.” Or if having them say that is too therapy-like, we question them to see their actions as if they were watching from a distance: “Imagine you just walked into a new class in a new school, and you saw somebody throw a pencil just as you had. What would you think?” This type of imaginative exercise increases self-awareness - a skill many of our students lack.

So that is how my recent reading, along with my recent conundrum of how people change, connect. Socrates helps us think more clearly and with more awareness about what is real Being and what isn’t. Hope you are doing well over there. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Love,

Rocky