POWER AND LEADERSHIP

Because classrooms are organizations, social power is an inevitably woven into the fabric of the relationships. Some teacher may wish they could just pass on information without having to exercise power but they cannot. Others may be quite comfortable knowing that their decisions are the ones that must be followed. Good teaching, however, requires a more subtle understanding of power and a more crafted choice about how to best exercise it.

Teachers must use power to direct social relationships toward educational purposes. Classroom anthropologist Raymond McDermott puts it bluntly when he says, "Teaching is a coercive act." Most social scientists who have studied educational settings would agree, although they would characterize coercion differently (see below). Boiled down to its essence, Teachers must accept leadership responsibility for decision-making that keeps people engaged in work.

Decisions and Their Effects

Power in social relations can be seen as that force which brings people together for common purpose. Like the engineer's concept of power, it is what harnesses energy to produce work. In social relationships the energy comes from individual motivation. Will someone join the group?  Will he or she support the activities? Or, will an individual use his or her energy to avoid or disrupt the work of the group?

For William Glasser, an individual's motivation, especially his or her motivation to learn, depends on whether or not the social setting allows his or her needs to be met. Given a choice, people put the effort into meeting their needs. If a social relationship helps meet that need, then the individual is likely to contribute his or her energy to the group work. Social energy, thus, draws from the group's ability to address personal needs. When involved in group activities that fail to address these needs, however, the individual can be expected to withdraw, avoid, distract, or disrupt the group's work.

While it is worth some discussion on how students' perceive (or mis-perceive) their needs and how teachers can understand these perceptions, for our purposes here, we will take as a given that people aim to meet their need when engaging in social relationships.

Sociologist Randall Collins explains that all social relationships involve people with different needs. How these competing needs are resolved becomes the key to the energy people will invest in the social group.

Collins' categories illustrate the dilemma teachers face. If they are in strict control of the agenda, then students who don't perceive the teacher's interests as something that meets their needs will feel powerless and become subservient or withhold participation. As one educator put it, teachers must somehow exercise authority without becoming authoritarian.

The nature of power in the classroom and its effects on student life have been documented since Kurt Lewin's pioneering work in the late 1940s. The conclusion of social scientists is that students must be involved in decision-making in every class. This allows students to articulate their needs and shape the work to meet them without sacrificing the teacher's need to maintain academic integrity. As anthropologist ?? stated, a study of classrooms shows that democratic practices are essential to learning.

There are three key arenas in which democratic practices shape the classroom: decision-making, conflict resolution, and performance evaluation.

Decision-making

The classroom involves a tremendous number of decisions that continually recur. What subject mater should be covered? How should it be covered? Who is supposed to do what? When is everyone supposed to do what? What is more important than what? Who deserves more time, help, support? Should Mary's lamb be allowed in?

The choices made at each of these decision points is based in each person's perception of what need they are trying to meet. Thus, a classroom must develop a process for making efficient decisions that respects conflicting needs.

  1. Typically, this process begins by the teacher outlining a set of "givens" that are essential to the course. The teacher's knowledge should primarily determine certain content and skills. His or her experience might recommend certain methods or activities.
  2. Next, a teacher should determine the arenas in which students can exercise responsible choice. Their background provides a storehouse of relevant examples. Their relationships offer wonderful ideas about how to organize interactions. Their current experiences provide insights into ways to construct relevance. Whenever students can bring these ideas into the course, the teacher is relieved of the necessity of discovering them. Strategies that take advantage of these capacities incorporate students into the decision making that defines the course in ways that will better meet their needs (thus enhancing ownership and motivation).
  3. Finally, the teacher must judge the gap between what he or she must provide and what students are capable of. This is the arena of growth and opportunity. The more a teacher can introduce students into ways of making these decisions responsibly, the more he or she will get their help in shaping the course in a needs-satisfying way. However, until these skills or taught, the teacher needs to accept responsibility for making them.

The range of decisions that must be made in a course vary from the social (how will we address each other?) to classroom management (how will we act toward each other?) to working procedures (how will we learn this?) to the content (what should we study?) and, ultimately, to the goals and purposes (what could we learn?). A teacher must decide how to approach decision making in each of these areas.

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Conflict Resolution

The classroom provides many possibilities for social problems and disagreements. Sometimes these are not apparent because the power relations preclude them. A student who must face a powerful teacher may choose, instead, to remain silent, and disgruntled. A leader must be able to resolve both open and hidden conflicts if he or she is to engage the learner's cull energy in the course work.

As with the other decision making, the conflict resolution process can be one-sided or shared. The evidence suggests that conflict resolution processes where participants share in working out solutions are preferred.

A good summary of the roles and routines that may be adopted in resolving conflict has been developed by Fisher and Ury in Getting to Yes. Abandoning the "hard bargainer" position that tries to push others around and the "soft bargainer" position that accepts being pushed around, they outline the steps of "principled bargaining."

A teacher who can apply conflict resolution procedures such as principled bargaining uses his or her power in a way that re-defines the terms of the social relationship and re-establishes the feelings of community.

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Performance Evaluations

One of the central decisions made in a classroom is the evaluation of an individual's work. A leader must take responsibility for being the final authority upon which these evaluations rest. At a minimum, his or her judgment must be viewed as fair, honest, and constructive. More deeply, the leader is responsible to see that the evaluation process contribute to the learner's understanding of how well he or she can perform (and what the next steps are for improvement). A teacher who uses his or her grading power simply to hand out grades disrupts the need satisfying orientation of the course work (for everyone but those who only want grades).

Put another way, a limited understanding of evaluation as grading makes both teacher and student dislike the evaluation process. The teacher's use of power to maintain such a limited process usually forces him or her to rely on one-sided coercion to sustain a not-very-needs-satisfying process. To make the evaluation process part of on-going, honest appraisal focused on self-improvement -- what W. Edward Demings called the "quality process" -- a teacher can exercise his or her power to evaluate in a way the encourages commitment and effort by the student.

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