The Disappearance of the Teacher, The Pygmalion Effect and Montessori

 

The Teacher’s Disappearance

Given that one has resolved how to be a virtuous teacher, self-nullification needs to be constantly practised.  

It feels inconvenient witnessing one’s power reduce as the students’ autonomy takes roots. It also feels ironic, since a primary nudge to choose the teaching profession has been the wish to be in the spotlight-always necessary to the weaker. However, this disruptive feeling informing us that our necessity fades, - is in fact the flesh- and-blood evidence of good teaching.  If one can trust their learners with their acquired means and knowledge, probably, the teaching has been successful.

Still, is it inherently possible to compromise with one’s disappearance? It opposes to our human nature.

It is hurtful and still an integral stage of teaching practice, which entails a well-planned disappearance-management plan. Our learners are now independent, -our task is officially fulfilled. We are left agonizing over what our future holds.

A teacher’s summer is a spell of bereavement -a time of balancing and re-committing ourselves to the development of more independent learners. Should the bitterness of letting go feels too intense, so be it. It is a part of the practice anyway.

Breaking the chains of teacher dependency and authority is a top, liberating moment of teaching practice. As every profound transformation, this rupture is silent and subtle.

Rendering second language learners self-reliant on their knowledge and means reassures excellent teaching, expertise and proper attitude of the teacher.

In simple terms, learner’s autonomy and teacher’s disappearance are inversely proportional entities.

The Pygmalion Effect

In 1964, a novice teacher, Beverly Cantello, was about to unknowingly participate in the now widely cited and established Rosenthal’s experiment, which evidenced what is known as the Rosenthal, - or the Pygmalion’s Effect. The headteacher of Spruce Elementary School in South San Francisco announced that Rosenthal, the psychologist who was conducting the experiment at the time, was permitted to administer to the students a supposedly new experiment with the name, “Rosenthal’s Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition”.

In fact, the test was a common IQ test and its findings were nothing but forged; the mockery was persuasively directed by Rosenthal himself,- as he was aiming to examine the real outcomes of expectations placed upon people. School teachers were told that about 20% of the students were to be “intellectual bloomers” . Their names (that were, randomly chosen) were communicated to the teachers.

The following year Rosenthal was about to discover that, those randomly chosen students, the supposedly “intellectual bloomers” , had been, in fact the ones that flourished academically (Ellison, 2015). 

The findings of the Rosenthal experiment sparked heated controversy, especially because, with many aggravating factors ingrained in the educational system of the time, the naming of teacher’s expectations as the culprit would come across as sheer injustice. Again, this could not neutralise the Rosenthal’s effect as a co-occurring factor.

Le Cunff (2019) concludes that “what’s very interesting about the Pygmalion Effect is that it has been proven true even when the person with the expectations tries their best to hide them. That’s because we communicate a lot through unspoken ways, such as body language and facial expressions”.

Simply put, simulating ingenuine feelings will not generate better results when it comes to teaching.

The Spruce School Experiment, now a classic lesson in psychology and education classes, has since inspired legions of teachers. It has also helped fuel a backlash in the 1970s and 1980s against “tracks” and “ability groups” for students (Ellison, 2015).

The Montessori Method

Decades before Rosenthal broke new ground to teaching psychology with the articulation and the experimental evidence on the importance of emotional background, a genius of her century and the generations to follow, Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori (1870-1952), had already established a fully-fledged educational method, rooted in the trust of the child’s potential. The Montessori Method is structured upon the belief that in the prepared environment and the liberty to exercise their innate abilities, children do flourish. 

Born at Chiaravalle in the province of Ancona, Dr. Montessori was a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine. She was subsequently appointed assistant doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic in the University of Rome, where she worked with mentally challenged children, nurturing interest in their education. She believed  that, with special education treatment, their mental condition would improve (Phillips, 2010).

Observing them, Montessori realised that the children were starved not for food but for stimulation […]

Mental deficiency, she decided, was often a pedagogical problem. Experimenting with various materials, she developed a sensory-rich environment, and designed letters, beads and puzzles that children could manipulate, as well as simple tasks […]

After working with Montessori for two years, some of the “deficient” children were able to read, write and pass standard public-school tests. […] She supported that each child must be free to pursue what interests them at their own pace but in a specially prepared environment. Montessori’s chance to act on her philosophy came in 1906.

[…] The “Casa dei Bambini”, or “Children’s House”, opened in 6 January, 1907. […] Today, there are about 5. 000 Montessori schools in the United States, some affiliated with AMI (Association Montessori Internationale), others with the American Montessori Society (Philips, 2010).

Maria Montessori founded her educational principle starting from the child. Her starting point placed the teacher in the side-role of the observer, the trained guide, the designer of the materials and the prepared environment. She provisionally erased the teacher, starting from the fulfilment of the child’s innate potential, so that little depends upon external sources: in the Montessori Method, expectations are a priori annulled, as the epicenter is the child and the environment.

References

Ellison, K. (2015). Being Honest About the Pygmalion Effect.

Le Cunff, A. (2019). The Pygmalion Effect: An Invisible Nudge Towards Success.

Phillips, S. (2010). Maria Montessori and Contemporary Cognitive Psychology. British Journal of Teacher Education (pp. 55-68) .

Shute, N. (2002). Madam Montessori. Fifty Years after her Death. Innovative Italian Educator Maria Montessori Still Gets High Marks. Smithsonian Magazine.