Reviews for The Social Psychology of the Classroom

The average rating for The Social Psychology of the Classroom based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-27 00:00:00 Cheryl Hendry I really can’t remember why I read this book – I mean, I generally avoid books on psychology, so, it must have been recommended to me in some way. But that has gone into the mists of my all too fallible memory. The point is that this is a seriously good book and not just for teachers – although, that is obviously the point. I was worried when I started this one as he says he doesn’t have an ideological axe to grind – and if that doesn’t send off warning alarms, it is hard to know what would. But if he does have a great big ideological axe, it must be more or less similar to the one I carry around with me, as I didn’t find any of this all that objectionable. I knew I was going to like this quite early on. He says that one of the most important thing to know about teaching is that the kids don’t want to be there. They are not there because they have nothing better to do with their time, they are there because they have no other option. This is a seriously important point and one that is often missed along the way. And it is something that impacts the best of all intentions for teachers. For instance, it really would be nice for classrooms to be much more democratic – but given they are based on compulsion at the most fundamental level, democracy is hard to achieve. That isn’t to say that therefore schools ought to be iron-fisted authoritarian prisons – but ignoring the obvious doesn’t make it go away. And this has consequences. The discussion around student motivation and the various types of motivations that teachers should have access to in their toolkit is seriously interesting, not least since it doesn’t say only one form of motivation is valid or worthy. In fact, the author makes the point that although he is not a Behaviourist and even though Behaviourism has a bad name now – to reject out-of-hand using its methods of maintaining classroom order or of motivating students is a kind of crazy ideological blindness. There is a lovely discussion of the problem of teacher burnout – something that really does need to be taken much more seriously. It is nuts that we spend so much money educating people to become teachers only to watch them leave the profession 3-5 years later in tears. He discusses sociometric measurement of students in the classroom – you know the sort of thing, ‘who do you like most in the class? Who do you like least?’ Anyway, this is really interesting as I hadn’t realised how hard it is to get approval to do this sort of thing. The problem is that kids are quite exposed after filling in these questionnaires – it is even worse for ones measuring classroom climate – a kind of 360 feedback where (like all other forms of 360 feedback) the teacher then spends the rest of the year tracking down the little bastard that dropped them in it… The point that quickly comes out of this book is that nothing is unequivocally good or bad in itself, but there are real dangers with just about everything and so working out how to protect yourself from those dangers is handy. The discussion of the Hawthorne Effect (basically, you introduce an improvement and productivity increases, so you think the improvement you introduced was responsible for that improvement, but rather what actually happens is that people basically like change – and so it wasn’t the improvement per se that improved things, but rather just doing something different) did something I really wasn’t expecting. You see, normally books talk about this effect as something you need to be on the lookout for so you can avoid it. But the author pointed out that for teachers this effect can be used to basically turn water into wine. You see, if change in itself makes improvement all on its own – and when they first tested the Hawthorne effect they found that even changing things back again improved performance – then mixing things up every now and again, even if it doesn’t mean introducing statistically verified improvement strategies – is potentially a great way to give performance a bit of a kick along every now and again. This person knew Robert Rosenthal. Have you any idea what that is like saying? It is like saying you used to paint with Picasso, or one afternoon you helped Shostakovich with his 11th Symphony. I make sure I tell ALL of the pre-service teachers I teach about Pygmalion in the Classroom. It is one of the most life-altering experiments I’ve ever heard about. The quick version is that he went into classrooms and gave the kids a new, whiz-bang I.Q. test. But this wasn’t any old I.Q. test, but rather one that showed which students were on the cusp of going through a learning spurt. Afterwards he told the teachers which kids in the class were about to become learning machines and then disappeared for a year or so. When he came back those kids he told the teachers about certainly did have a learning spurt – so, all is well with the world, right? Well, except that he didn’t even actually look at the results of the I.Q. text, straight into the bin they went without even been checked – the learning burst kids were actually picked at random – this was, in fact, a test of teacher expectations, not of student ability. The first time you hear about this you might think – yeah, there you go, sneaky psychologists again, can’t trust them… But this is a terrifyingly important result. You see, we are stereotyping machines. We really can’t help it. And our stereotypes over-work, that is, they don't just work from us to the people we categorise, but they mould them too. Not only do our stereotypes impose restrictions on those we place them on (all Asians are great at maths, all Blacks are dumb and violent, all Hungarians are great Frisbee throwers – I might have made that last one up, you'll have to check with the next Hungarian you meet), but our stereotypes do a lot to create what they assume. And Pygmalion in the Classroom did a lot to prove that to be the case. The bits of this book that I liked the most were those on nonverbal behaviour, particularly around the idea of teachers’ pets, and what I guess could be called the geography of power in the classroom. When you test to see which kids like which other kids and which kids are least liked by their peers it is interesting that teachers end up not being terribly good at working out how that social structure pans out. Teachers are far too likely to think that the kids that will be most liked are the kids they like the most. And those kids are most often the academically gifted ones - oh, he loves Elizabethan poetry, everyone in the classroom must think him a complete darling... how could they not? Teachers are also rather hopeless at being able to hide their preferences for particular students – even though they invariably think they are brilliant at it – a bit like parents generally think their kids won’t know which of their own kids is their favourite, even when this is painfully (yep, painfully) obvious. The thing is that having pets might not be a hanging offence in itself, but only if the pet is what the author calls genuinely loveable. In that case the other kids basically forgive the teacher and the pet too. It only becomes a problem with the pet isn’t someone the kids like all that much – and this is sort of where the geography of the classroom becomes interesting. You see, the pets that aren’t liked by their peers are likely to get their emotional succour from the teacher – and therefore are likely to sit close to wherever the teacher is likely to be – that is, up the front of the classroom. Pets that are also student leaders are likely to sit at the back of the class – student leaders are a kind of opposite power base to the teacher, and so they need to be able to see what is going on and who is doing what – and that involves being at the back of the classroom with no one behind them that they can’t see. The conscientious students are likely to sit close to the teacher, but not too close, kind of in the middle of the class in all senses. They want to be able to see the teacher’s eyes, not just to catch their eye when they have a question, but also because these are the kids that are actually going to be taught to. You see, teaching is a performance, but it needs feedback and these are the kids most likely to give that feedback. The stuff here on classroom management is really interesting – the line that stood out for me was that kids will basically forgive you anything, but they will never forgive you being unfair. I’ve been thinking lately that one of the problems with being a teacher is that for the students it often feels like they are having a one-to-one relationship with the teacher, but for the teacher it feels like they are having a one-to-twenty-five relationship. This is a bit like fans of TV stars who think they are acting just for them. This might explain the teacher pet phenomenon in a sense. A bit like finding a way to avoid emotional investment overload, but one that has its own dangers. I haven’t scratched the surface of what this book has to offer, by the way – just pointed to a couple of the things that stopped me and made me think, and not even all of those. Really, I can’t recommend this book too highly – seriously interesting stuff. Oh, and I’ve asked it before, but why is it that so much of the best psychology seems to come out of Israel?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-16 00:00:00 Richard Simon A course textbook. It would be VERY helpful for anyone considering the field of Psychology. Excellent references & resources.