Leading Mindful Change in Your Classroom

This is the second essay in a three part series about leading educational change. Part one in this series introduced ways of becoming the change you wish to see and leading change from within. This is the first “way of seeing” as described in Theory U, where we download past assumptions and prepare ourselves to see the world differently. This second essay addresses how we can continue to move through the U as a practice of leading change within our classroom spaces.

In the same way that we practice expanding our awareness of ourselves, we expand this awareness to include others. This means suspending judgment about other people, and seeing them as the infinitely complex beings that they are. Parker Palmer says that “we teach who we are,” but I would extend this to also add, we teach to the students we were. I remember in my first year of teaching, I had a student who would always ask me, “How long does this assignment have to be?” and I would respond, “As long as it needs to be!” and he would walk away, confused and frustrated. I gave him the response that I would have wanted if I were doing the assignment, but it was not the response that he wanted. I have realized that we tend to see others as we see ourselves, so we just apply these kind of old assumptions onto the people around us, disregarding who they are and how they move through the world.

Approaching our classroom with mindfulness

This reminds me of the work of Dr. Ellen J Langer, a professor at Harvard University who has done a lot of research and writing about mindfulness. The premise of a great talk she did at PopTech Conference in 2013 was that “Most of us our mindless virtually all the time,” and that by intentionally paying attention, “we can begin to change the ingrained behaviors that sap creativity, health, optimism and vitality from our lives.”

In her talk, she describes mindlessness as an inactive state of mind that is characterized by reliance on categories drawn from the past. This relates to the idea of downloading past assumptions, which is the first step in Theory U. The response to mindlessness is mindfulness, which Langer describes as, “the very simple process of actively noticing new things.”

She says the point of mindfulness is that, as we notice new things, “we become aware of the inherent uncertainty.” Uncertainty can feel very threatening for educators, and especially policymakers, but it’s the truest thing we know about living, particularly now as technology has dramatically changed our access to information and one another. In the United States, our classrooms are undergoing rapid changes in demographics, becoming increasingly more diverse, and what we know about the demands of the 21st century economy are changing too. Nevertheless, most of our classrooms look no different today than they did 100 years ago.

In an excerpt from the introduction of The Power of Mindful Learning, Langer highlights the particular danger of approaching our students with mindlessness. She writes,

“Shakespeare warned us against being judgmental when he wrote, ‘Things are neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so.’ I would add that behavior makes sense from the actor’s perspective or else s/he wouldn’t have done it. When we evaluate someone negatively — he’s lazy, stubborn, gullible — we’re evaluating the person from our observer’s perspective. It doesn’t even occur to us that the person may instead by insufficiently motivated, steadfast, or trusting…

Teachers are some of the most caring people among us. They are recruited, however, into a system that, in part, is mindless. Tests, grades, and labels are part of the judgmental culture of schools. A child is seen as distracted, for example, rather than as otherwise attracted. From the observer’s point of view, the problem is always seen to lie in the child” (pp. xv-xvi).

This quotation is salient to the idea of expanding your sphere of awareness because there are as many perspectives as there are actors in the room. We have to stretch our awareness to see things from the simultaneous multiple perspectives in the classroom.

Action research and Theory U

One of the tools that I have used to practice this is classroom action research. I have been engaged in action research for almost as many years as I have been working in the classroom. My Master’s of Education program through High Tech High was founded on the principles of action research, and I took deep solace in them as I strove to address my “fierce wonderings” that were the drive of every day teaching and learning.

One of the most meaningful conversations I had about my action research project was with my advisor, Rob Riordan. I told him about how I struggled to align my practices to the research question that I had designed. As I continued to detail my dilemma and the frustrations I had with my students, he listened patiently and replied, “That’s your research.” I was taken aback, and he continued, “Your research is what’s happening; it’s not what you wish were happening. Start there.”

After this meeting, nothing changed in my classroom, except my own perspective. Rather than seeing my students as opposed to the research goals, I saw them as simply being, and that my task was to dig into their beingness to understand more deeply. This is when the research became more fueled by their stories with their unique fears, challenges, and joys. Just because my interventions weren’t “working” in the way that I had imagined didn’t mean that my research wasn’t working, because my research was about my students, and eventually, I learned, it was also about me.

The origins of action research are generally credited to Kurt Lewin, a German-American psychologist. He wrote that “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice” for the research needed for social practice.

While Lewin’s structure is more like a spiral, I like to approach research through the lens of Theory U, which has a stronger emphasis on the need for mindful, contemplative action as we go through the fact-finding step.

Using Theory U as a guide, the first step is to download past patterns and suspend them to engage in opening your eyes to see what is really happening. I encourage my M.Ed. students to use ethnographic observations, student conversations or reflections, and close examination of student work as ways to begin assessing both the strengths and needs of their classrooms. According to Carolyn Frank, the purpose of using an ethnographic frame is to “generate more questions that require interviews or more observations to explore” (p. 10). As we move through the U, we move to a space of presencing, which can be thought of as “deep listening, of being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense… the importance of letting go of old identities and the need to control and… making choices to serve the evolution of life” (Presence, Kindle Locations 230–233).

Teachers as empowered change-makers

The action research process is about shining light on the hard to understand realities in your classroom and about being a more responsive teacher. Too often, we frame teaching as trying to solve very simple problems. One of the frameworks I’ve found helpful in thinking about the way we think about problems is called the Cynefin framework, which is a framework devised by Dave Snowden for diagnosing problems and assessing appropriate responses.

Cynefin is a Welsh word that means “habitat,” which is a way of suggesting that we really need to take on a more ecological understanding of systems rather than this sort of simple lab understanding. Issues that arise in the classroom are rarely simple problems that we can just reference in a manual, like, when X happens, do Y, and you get Z. Rather, problems that arise in classrooms need to be seen as complicated or complex, and sometimes even chaotic.

When we recognize that many sorts of problems exist, we also understand that we need to utilize many kinds of solutions. It also means we can’t always outsource the problem-solving to researchers or to school leaders. With complex and complicated problems in particular, teachers need to be empowered to lead the change. Almost a hundred years ago, John Dewey says exactly this about classroom teachers. He wrote, “It seems to me that the contributions that might come from classroom teachers are a comparatively neglected field; or, to change the metaphor, an almost unworked mine…. There are undoubted obstacles in the way. It is often assumed…that classroom teachers have not themselves the training which will enable them to give effective intelligent cooperation…[but] these teachers are the ones in direct contact with pupils and hence the ones through whom the results of scientific findings finally reach students. They are the channels through which the consequences of educational theory come into the lives of those at school” (The Sources of a Science of Education, 1926).

Even in the first quarter of the 20th century, Dewey recognized something that is all too often overlooked today: As a teacher, you are the real agent of educational change, because it is through your work that educational theories come into the lives of your students. In a powerful essay written in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Henry Giroux warns of school reforms that treat teachers as “high-level technicians carrying out dictates and objectives decided by experts far removed from the everyday realities of classroom life.” Instead, he argues that teachers should be viewed as public intellectuals, as critical agents of democracy in dark times. Although he wrote this in 2012, his sentiment seems even more potent in the political climate of 2018.

In summary, mindfulness through active engagement and action research through the lens of Theory U is simply a process of expanding awareness, allowing data to challenge prior beliefs, and letting go of those beliefs when you realize that they no longer serve the students, or the school. This is a process that dares to lead from unknown spaces, trusting that as you move into action, you can continue testing ideas and gathering data to learn more along the way. I think that the scariest thing about “leading from the future” in the classroom is that you don’t know what’s going to happen, and sometimes the unknown seems like too big of a risk when it comes to the education of your students. This is an easier process to engage in with the support of a community, which is what I will address in the final essay of this series.

Further Exploration:

“Participatory Research Methods: A Methodological Approach in Action” by Jarg Berghold & Stefan Thomas

Public Sociology Toolkit by Meredith Conover-Williams and Janae Teal

“The War against Teachers as Public Intellectuals in Dark Times” by Henry Giroux

“Participatory Action Research” by Stephen Kemmis & Robin McTaggart

“Mindfulness over Matter,” short talk by Ellen Langer

“Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness,” Ellen Langer on OnBeing with Krista Tippett

The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer

“Complex Acts of Knowing — Paradox and Descriptive Self-Awareness” by Dave Snowden