Kijun Times

My ongoing efforts at professional self-improvement center on teaching graduate students despite what Richard Russo called their “increasingly militant ignorance.” In some ways, I resent having to think about this, because I think graduate students should either get on board with learning or leave, but this attitude is way too authoritative for contemporary clinical culture. I also wonder if this is the right area for self-improvement, since as resentful as some students act toward my efforts to educate them, the students I am most interested in teaching seem to be drawn to me. Still, I imagine there are some who take the line of fragility and passive-aggression who are actually educable.

One concern I have is that if I bend over backwards too far to “validate” them, I will pervert the professor-student relationship beyond recognition, to the point where education will disappear. “Validation” seems to translate to applauding everything they say and giving them participation medals. An analogous concern occurs in therapy, where the therapist can go to such lengths to coddle the patient that real therapy becomes impossible. One strategy that makes for a more pleasant classroom is to preface my feedback by asking if it is permissible to say something that might disagree with what the student has said. But I resent this, partly because I would think that graduate students would give consent to correction by enrolling in the program, and partly because it worries me that trainees will then accept corrective feedback from their patients only if their patients similarly coddle them.

And please don’t get the idea that I demean the students who say things that are wrong. Typically, I might express curiosity about where the idea came from, or I might ask what evidence supports it, or I might just say, “The problem with that approach is ….”

A lot has been written by others about millennials and their expectations of praise. I comment only to say that this is a major problem in therapy. Once the therapist praises the client, the client begins to interpret silence or curiosity as aversive (compared to praise). Praise also connotes that there is something aversive that needs to be warded off; it can make the client want to hide a lack of progress, and it can make a student want to hide ignorance.

One year I asked a class why they don’t talk more, since we know that learning is facilitated by trying and failing. They said they were afraid that I would think they were stupid. I said, “But I already think you’re stupid. I thought you came here to get less stupid.” Now I like to write on the board in the first class period, “Whoever hates to be rebuked is stupid. Proverbs 12:1.”

So I was talking about the problem with Lisa Solursh, a psychologist who works with cancer patients, and I saw an analogy between my students who hide their ignorance and patients who don’t accept their cancer. I asked her what she does with the latter, and she said (applying a behavioral perspective to health psychology) that she explores the costs of their denial. It leads to avoidance of cancer, which is negatively reinforced, but it also leads to avoidance of treatment, accommodation, and acceptance, which make the cancer worse and can ruin the person’s life.

I’ve tried to inspire students to celebrate their ignorance in many ways, and I’ve blogged about those here and here. What I love about Lisa’s formulation is that it has the potential for fixing the problem while also teaching the student something about behaviorism. We can even discuss Dollard & Miller’s idea that punishing verbal behavior leads to repression and functional stupidity, or we can identify the only really useful cure as conditioning corrective feedback to be a reward. (When someone points out that the coffee maker is not plugged in, are you embarrassed or grateful?) Now I just have to find a way to do it that doesn’t make students angry and defensive about not already understanding behaviorism.