CARING MOTIVATION

Carl Rogers on the interpersonal relationship in the facilitation of learning

What are these qualities, these attitudes, that facilitate learning?

Realness in the facilitator of learning. Perhaps the most basic of these essential attitudes is realness or genuineness. When the facilitator is a real person, being what she is, entering into a relationship with the learner without presenting a front or a façade, she is much more likely to be effective. This means that the feelings that she is experiencing are available to her, available to her awareness, that she is able to live these feelings, be them, and able to communicate if appropriate. It means coming into a direct personal encounter with the learner, meeting her on a person-to-person basis. It means that she is being herself, not denying herself.

Prizing, acceptance, trust. There is another attitude that stands out in those who are successful in facilitating learning… I think of it as prizing the learner, prizing her feelings, her opinions, her person. It is a caring for the learner, but a non-possessive caring. It is an acceptance of this other individual as a separate person, having worth in her own right. It is a basic trust - a belief that this other person is somehow fundamentally trustworthy… What we are describing is a prizing of the learner as an imperfect human being with many feelings, many potentialities. The facilitator’s prizing or acceptance of the learner is an operational expression of her essential confidence and trust in the capacity of the human organism.

Empathic understanding. A further element that establishes a climate for self-initiated experiential learning is emphatic understanding. When the teacher has the ability to understand the student’s reactions from the inside, has a sensitive awareness of the way the process of education and learning seems to the student, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased…. [Students feel deeply appreciative] when they are simply understood – not evaluated, not judged, simply understood from their own point of view, not the teacher’s.

Rogers (1967) ‘The interpersonal relationship in the facilitation of learning’ reprinted in H. Kirschenbaum and V. L. Henderson (eds.) (1990) The Carl Rogers Reader, London: Constable, pages 304-311. (The piece also appears in various editions of Rogers Freedom to Learn).

TECHNIQUES FOR ASSISTING HELPLESS STUDENTS - DREIKURS

• Modify Instructional Methods
• Use Concrete Learning Materials and Computer-Assisted Instruction
• Teach One Step at a Time
• Provide Tutoring
• Teach Positive Self-Talk
• Make Mistakes Okay
• Build Confidence
• Focus on Past Success
• Make Learning Tangible
• Recognize Achievement

page 222

Glockler, M., Langhammer, S., & Wiechert, C. (2006).
Education - health for life
education and medicine working together for healthy development. Switzerland:
Anthroposophic medicine foundation and the medical section of the Goetheanum.

" 'Understanding' has become a hackneyed word. Is it not better to 'love' these suffering adolescents? Unobtrusively, but with all the greater intensity in accordance with Steiner's motto which says that the difference between teachers and other people is that teachers can love more?

It is hard to escape the impression that educators (both parents and teachers) often respond to the phase of puberty with a fearful attitude. Fear has always been a bad counselor. How often adults show fearful helplessness which then, without fail, leads to wrong measures being taken.

If the school, parents and teachers manage somehow to keep a young person engaged in the subjects taught of his own volition, that is generally sufficient to get through this period. But such voluntary engagement with school subjects places th greatest demands on teachers specifically at a time when it is commonly said that teaching in the upper school should be more neutral or sober as pupils are now capable of making their own judgments. Precisely the opposite is the case. Lessons do not call for sobriety but the most intensive struggle to keep the interest of pupils. Every teacher knows that precisely these years are a roller-coaster ride.

Rudolf Steiner gives some advice in this respect in the last lecture of The Foundation of human experience ('Study of Man') when he says that specifically the age between 12 and 15 is dependent to a high degree on the imaginative accomadation of the teachers, on the imaginative capacities of teachers. Specifically at this age! We can build on that and say that the whole way in which we deal with this age must be inventive, free and without fear, seeing the pupil as a developing human being and not as someone there merely to supply work. The latter approach would, indeed, be more appropriate for years 5 and 6 since the work performed at that time is still free of the self-referential soul.

A pupil in year 10 smokes (illicitly) in the school. Should we give him the standard punishment or should we be more inventive? Such banal decisions may, under certain circumstances, decide a pupil's future. The standard punishment takes the attitude that you are not actually our pupil but a subject that requires correction. But a teacher who is inventive and requires the pupil to give a botanically exact presentation of the tobacco plant as an exercise addresses the nascent human being in his developmental attitude. Such a 'punishment' will be remembered for the rest of one's life with considerable amusement, whereas we will try to erase the standard punishment from our memory as quickly as possible: somehow the latter fails to take account of the nature of the human being."

OUTCOMES REPORTING & ACCOUNTABLE SCHOOLING

http://www.mceetya.edu.au/mceetya/nationalgoals/kemp.htm

REFLECTIVE THINKING-

from Classroom Discipline & Management- an Australian Perspective
Edwards & Watts
page 40.
FORMULATE PERSONAL TEACHING PRINCIPLES
develop reflective thinking practice - journal

cognitive- how teachers make decisions
content/subject matter and knowledge
pedagogical methods and theory
curriculum-cross curricula
characteristics of learners
teaching contexts
educational purposes , ends and aims
critical- substance that drives the thinking
moral
ethical
narrative
personal context of teaching
insights