What's the line between guiding and manipulation?
What teachers' efforts to foster discovery show about constructive leadership.
Meg, one of my first and dearest mentors in teaching, once described one of the deeply pleasurable moments of teaching like this:
“My favorite moment [in a class discussion] is when they’re talking to each other and building on each other’s ideas, and then somebody drops some text in there. Being a little further down the road in literature than they are, when I’m tempted to drop it in, and then a student does it instead — that’s so wonderful.”
Like me, Meg is an English teacher. Unlike me, she is decades down the road from me in the work we do. She’s far down many of life’s roads, actually: the road of teaching, the road of literature, the road of caring, the road of seeking. Meg has navigated the these journeys with intention, and she’s generously shared the best views (and the paths through the prickliest portions) with other teachers around her.
What I like best about this quote, looking back on it, is the way that Meg includes in it the temptation to drop into a student’s own exploration and demystify everything. When you’re a teacher, and you (ideally) have a profound knowledge of the material that you teach, it’s often easy to see the keystone: the information, the skill, or the connection that will suddenly bring the whole piece together. Most movies about teaching highlight what I think of as “keystone” moments – moments when teachers suddenly give a speech that electrifies the room and illuminates the world for their students. But as another late mentor of mine, whose death has been lingering in my mind, often repeated, in school “the one who does the work does the learning.”
Despite what we often assume, the best way to help others pursue wisdom or knowledge is to resist the temptation to tell them how to get there.
In an ideal learning environment, learning feels like discovery. Discovering new truths and connections doesn’t just build confidence, but it also helps to foster a sense of agency, which (I’ve recently started to see) is distinct from control. Teachers are often deeply tempted to hand over the information in our minds or on the page in front of us: it’s so exciting to know some of what we know, and we can’t wait to give it to students. At other times, we don’t feel that same kind of excitement, and we’re instead tired, so students catch us at those vulnerable moments and take advantage of a chance to receive the information with little effort on their part. And finally, parents and politicians – especially the ones who aren’t interested in fostering divergent thinking in new generations – insist that it is, in fact, a teacher’s responsibility to hand along a single set of knowledge so quickly and clearly that (to use the roads metaphor), no student can stop long enough to look around and notice that the road they’ve sped down lacks the scenery and challenge that builds toughness and expands horizons.
When I read Robert Caro’s The Path to Power last spring (okay, I’ve only read the first installment so far), I started to recognize how easily this process – of knowing where people need to be, but needing to cultivate ways to get them there – applies in other fields. When I think about politics, I think of this convincing as manipulation, and I really don’t like manipulation. I’ve always felt that teaching wasn’t manipulative, though, and I’ve long become frustrated with people who say that it is. I’ve built my teaching strategies in response to this fear of manipulation, and I work hard to show my students that I’m not trying to manipulate them to see the world, or the information before them, my way.
I’m starting to see, the more teachers that I talk to, that I’m not alone: especially in the past five or six of years, it seems that a growing number of teachers are principally concerned with teaching students how to think differently, with critical skills of analysis and reason to support what they’re doing. Part of this is the brain science that tells us that students are engaged and motivated by a sense of discovery. Some of it, though, is civic duty, or a teacher’s sense that our country requires capable thinkers. To do our jobs, we have to resist the temptation to make the road too smooth. Creating circumstances for discovery without giving away that discovery isn’t just a way of winning people over to your side or making them feel special – that’s a lot like manipulation. Focusing on creating circumstances for discover is also a really great way to make sure that other people can act upon their individual intelligence and agency. And sometimes – though Lyndon B. Johnson (subject of The Path to Power) never thought this – giving people the space to think differently from me, even when I’m down the road and have thought about everything a whole lot more and learned a whole lot more than the others have, leaves room for me to discover, perhaps to my surprise, that I could’ve tied it all together a different way. That’s the fun of teaching, and it’s a feeling that’s available in all kinds of other situations.
I’ve been thinking about this idea of guiding or leading or helping along the road not only in my classrooms but also in my work with other adults, both in the school at which I teach and beyond. Sometimes, as I think many people probably do, I find that there are problems that it seems I’ve thought about more than others. Many of my friends and family members might say that I’m frustratingly obsessed with solving problems and building strategies about the most pointless of issues within my own head. With subordinates – in my case, with students – it’s easy to contextualize what they should and should not know, to restrain my impatience that they haven’t arrived where I am on the path and to position myself to dribble in the right next clue. With fellow adults, though, I quickly grow impatient that they haven’t thought about the same problems as much as I think that I have, because I assume that they are just as intelligent and thoughtful as I am (forgetting, of course, that not everyone thinks about exactly what I think about). Ultimately, because I don’t have implied power and authority over others, I’m less comfortable leaving the breadcrumbs; I know that my peers could get along, so if I try to guide them to where I am, aren’t I insulting their intelligence?
Well, no. LBJ taught me better than that. What I’m starting to recognize, as I think about the temptation to simplify the path, is that all of our journeys matter, and every time I get to revisit the journey – of a part of my life, or a path of logic – with others who see it from a different perspective, I get the opportunity to see everything I missed or misconstrued. I also get an opportunity to recognize that whatever power I have in being where I am really only matters if I get to share it, and I might as well share it with the curious, resilient, thoughtful people who come my way, rather than a bunch of people who never invested much in that path in the first place.
More than anything, leaving space to explore is a sign of trust. It’s trust that teachers know they have to give if they want to see learning; it’s trust that, beyond the trappings of manipulation that it’s often framed as, is actually real, not just a political tool but an established contract that makes it possible for us to share our work, and our world, with others, regardless of our age and experience differences. We’re all, always – Meg, one of the wisest teachers I know – still working on it.