Constructive Mutualism

Teaching from a different paradigm

Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

I have always known that my classroom is unlike others in the building. My classroom looks, feels, and operates differently than other classrooms. If you could simultaneously walk into my classroom and another fifth-grade classroom, at first glance, you would immediately notice the difference in decor. Most elementary school classrooms have instructional posters hanging on the walls. There might be an inspirational poster like, Be the reason someone smiles today or Success starts with a positive mindset. My classroom walls are littered with movie, music, and literature posters. I have a poster of Ella Fitzgerald next to one of Paul Simon’s Graceland; Don Quixote and Martin Luther King Jr. are hanging adjacent to The Beatles’ Abbey Road. Laurel and Hardy are next to Rosa Parks and The Breakfast Club. I do have a few instructional posters, one outlining how to read like an octopus (a close reading strategy I borrowed from Marcus Luther and Marisa Thompson’s TQE method) and another organizing the mathematical models we are currently studying to solve fraction multiplication problems. However, the majority of my classroom resembles a college dorm instead of a traditional elementary classroom. That is by design.¹

The most common desk arrangement in elementary classrooms is rows of desks, all facing the front whiteboard. My classroom has large circular tables. Instead of students sitting in rows, all facing the front, my students face each other and work on a communal tabletop. Other teachers stand at the front of the classroom, sometimes behind a lecturn, and teach through lecture. I wander my room constantly, kneeling next to my students so that I can teach alongside them. This is also by design.²

The most striking distinction between my classroom and other rooms is the noise. My classroom is frequently boisterous, whereas others are eerily quiet. There are many times when my classroom is quiet (i.e.: silent reading, mediating, independent writing), however, quiet is not the norm. Standing in my classroom, you will hear my students’ voices more often than my own. Yes, this can sometimes lead to rowdy behavior, but more often than not, my students are exuberantly engaging with what we are learning. In other classrooms, students are often sitting and working quietly. In my classroom, academic discourse is the norm, which sometimes leads to vehement disagreements and loud retorts. Again, these design decisions are intentional.

I am detailing these differences, not to proclaim one superior to another. I make no assertion to be a better teacher than anyone else. I realize that my classroom (and my pedagogy) might not work for all students. Some students need more structure and quiet, and while I do provide both, I understand that some students may struggle in my classroom. I highlight these differences to point out that, for as long as I have been a teacher, I have always operated from a different paradigm. Traditional pre-service teacher training programs promote Behaviourist methods in the name of classroom management. In this paradigm, the teacher controls the behavior through repeated rewards and punishments. Over time, students are trained to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I have never been interested in this one-sided power dynamic. I am not an authoritarian teacher who relies on an autocratic pedagogical system that demand student compliance. I want my students to cooperate and learn, not because I hold the power to enforce conformity and obedience, but because they are part of an interdependent learning community.

Names have power, and naming something often grants it a level of legitimacy. For decades, I have designed my classroom in a way that I believe rehumanizes the schooling experience for my students. My classroom aligns with my values about public education. Early in my career, as a new teacher, I lacked the confidence to adequately explain these conscious decisions. My insecurities led me to overcorrect so that my classrooms better aligned with my colleagues’. Slowly, I would return to my natural predilections because I could not maintain a practice antithetical to my values. As a veteran teacher, now when I am pressed for a rationale, I have decades of experience and plenty of educational research to support my pedagogical practice.

Going Beyond Behaviorism

Autocratic methods no longer work in classrooms. These methods have remained persistent in public school classrooms, largely because of the maxim, teachers teach the way they were taught. I have had many conversations with teachers that are adamant, “If it worked for me, it’ll work for them [students]” or “I was taught through lecture and I turned out just fine!” Honestly, I’m not sure either of those statements are accurate. There is a collective misnomer that drilling students through lectures worked at producing successful adults who function in our democratic society. I believe it is more accurate to say that the generations of students who were taught using a strict behaviorist approach (e.g.: The Silent Generation, Boomers, Gen X), were successful at performative learning; they could comply, but not think critically. Students learned how to successfully get a passing grade without deeply understanding the nuances of the content, and often by sacrificing one’s humanity. Behaviorism gives the impression of learning, but as soon as the rewards and punishments are removed, learning disappears. This is known as extinction. When students are taught primarily through punishment (or threats of punishment) they will comply only when the teacher is present. This is known as situational compliance. Neither of these methods are appropriate for teaching critical inquiry, deep understanding, and using humane pedagogical practices. John Corrigan, Director, Group 8 Education and Dr Mark Merry, former Principal, Yarra Valley Grammar, both located in Melbourne, Australia believe that public education is long overdue for a paradigm change³ in both teacher training and teaching practice:

No longer may a teacher reliably wield the blunt tools of punishments and rewards as students and families now reject such [a] naked exercise of power. Even practiced autocrats whose lessons are deemed to be orderly, are no longer imparting an education which fully equips their students with the skills they need.⁴

Constructive Mutualism

Whereas Behaviorism is operationalized in classrooms through reward and punishment, educators John Corrigan and Dr. Mark Merry discuss in Constructive Mutualism: The Future of Teaching and Learning, that Constructive Mutualism is based on a teacherly authority, an “explicit [teacher-student] relationship and social role dynamic that depends on [students’] perceived legitimacy of the relationship.” Corrigan explains that four conditions must be met for teacherly authority to exist:

1. The teacher has a greater capacity than the student;

2. The teacher wants to teach this capacity to the student, her benefit;

3. This greater capacity is recognized and valued by the student;

4. The student thereby accepts to pay attention to the teacher and to follow wherever the teacher directs the student’s attention.

Dr. Zak Stein, author of Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society, explores the nature of authority and its conditions.

Authority is therefore a dynamic property of relationships wherein one party is granted unique responsibilities and allowances with regards to the other. Importantly, for authority to work this asymmetry must be recognized and agreed to by all parties. … Authority must be granted or given - one must arrange to be seen as an authority.

Teacherly authority, according to Stein, has existed throughout history, from ancient apprenticeships to religious disciples, and is the basis for Constructive Mutualism. In order for teacherly authority to exist, and Constructive Mutualism to operate, students must willingly agree to play their part in this interdependent, pro-social relationship. If they do, students will grow academically and socially. But in order for these conditions to be met, for both the teacher and the students, there must be a learning environment where everyone feels safe, valued, and authentically seen.

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Aside from the obvious differences I have already mentioned when comparing my classroom side-by-side with a more traditional one, there is one other major difference. When you walk into my classroom, it feels different.⁵ This intangible impression is what I am most proud of as a teacher. I may not be the most skilled , or the most knowledgeable, but from the first day of school, I focus all my efforts in creating a classroom that is psychologically safe. When students feel psychologically safe, they learn at higher levels. Amy Edmondson has written extensively about the importance of psychological safety. Fear is not an effective motivator (especially with students) because fear inhibits learning and cooperation. “Research in neuroscience shows that fear consumes physiologic resources, diverting them from parts of the brain that manage working memory and process new information. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving”, exactly what I want to encourage in my students! My first priority at the beginning of the school year is to create an environment with high psychological safety and high expectations for my students.

Psychological safety is antithetical to a Behaviorist paradigm. In a Behaviorist classroom, love and respect are conditional. The relationship between teacher and student is transactional. A Behaviorist teacher says, if you do this, I will be kind to you, if you don’t do this, I will punish you. In this teacher-student relationship, love and respect are currency, to be bartered and traded for extrinsic behaviors. When my own children were babies, I did not stop loving them when they cried or soiled their diapers. My love was unconditional. Religious scholars call this unfeigned love.⁶ This love says, I will be kind to you and respect you no matter what you do. In my classroom, I often tell my students, especially after a conflict, that I am a goldfish. I accept mistakes are a part of life, and I try not to linger on any previous day’s flaws. I move on quickly. Just like with my own children, I teach the students I have, not the ones I wish I had.

It is my unwavering commitment for creating a classroom environment with high psychological safety and unfeigned love, that makes my classroom feel different. This is what propels me to give my students high amounts of accountable freedom. This is why, during the first week of school, before I start any academic work, I start building our culture of shared responsibility and pro-social values; it is our classroom ethos. Psychological safety, shared responsibility, and pro-social values are the key components of Constructive Mutualism. My students know that they can make mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution. They can push back and I will not humiliate or shame them. They can ask me anything and I will answer honestly. They can even mutiny and I will not let that diminish my unconditional care for them.

Nel Noddings, writing in Caring in Education, believes that caring relationships are the foundation for any teacher’s pedagogical practice. She famously asked, Do we put more emphasis on teaching the curriculum or on teaching the child? I focus on teaching the students assigned to me because forming caring relationships is foundational to my pedagogical practice. I emphasize teaching the child over teaching the curriculum.

Invested, Mentoring, and Learning

Corrigan and Merry contend that unconditional love is not enough to provide students with enough psychological safety for a Constructive Mutualism paradigm. In fact, many teachers already feel like they unconditionally care for their students, yet sill many are disengaged or disruptive. Corrigan and Merry return to the concept of unfeigned love. In a newborn baby, this is love that “ensures the newborn experiences the full measure of safety and is not related to the newborn’s behavior in any way or do some other agenda that the parent has.” In a classroom context, my teacherly unfeigned love toward my students ensures that my students experience a classroom where the full measure of their safety is not related to their behavior (or misbehavior) in any way. My agenda is to help my students learn and grow and become good people.

Teacherly unfeigned love is an active process. Corrigan and Merry state three steps that teachers, who operate within a Constructive Mutualism paradigm, follow until their students begin to realize that their teacher is someone who they should attend to.

The Invested Teacher

The Invested Teacher, according to Corrigan and Merry, is a teacher who “looks at a child and sees the child, unfiltered by any hang-ups or triggers that the teacher may have acquired as they have grown up.” When I tell my students that I am a goldfish, I am communicating to them that I hold no resentment. I am not dismissive nor malicious. Students are not problems to be solved or broken things to be fixed. I must admit that on some days, even with my strong convictions in caring and kindness, I struggle with particular students who may have cussed in my face, broken furniture, or repeatedly disrupted my direct instruction with vitriolic behavior. Some behavior is hard to forget and forgive, but as Zadie Smith, in her essay, Shibboleth, says, “The point of foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational.” Smith may be discussing challenging corrupt politics, but the sentiment is true for my ethics as a public school teacher. Smith goes on to say, “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” This is exactly my, and every public school classroom. Students are constantly testing boundaries. Students who have experienced previous trauma are continually testing my unfeigned love for them. And in these moments, I have to remind myself to ask, what happened to this student to make him behave this way? instead of what’s wrong with this student?⁷ And even then, I worry that I might not be able to create enough psychological safety to help some of my most traumatized students. Nonetheless, I am invested in each of my students, and so I work to forgive, teach them how to make amends, and mentor them as best as I can.

The Mentoring Teacher

Corrigan and Merry explain that Mentoring Teachers are able to recognize that students often get “stuck.” They define being stuck as a “perception of their work, themselves, or the world, which is poorly formed or incorrect.” Fixed mindsets abound in public schools. Students come to me believing they are not good at math, not a reader, or do not deserve my unconditional care. 85% of my job as a teacher is to counter this narrative over and over again every single day of the school year. And there is no guarantee that my counternarrative will win over their internal voice. When students do not complete classwork or disengage, many times it is because they do not believe they are smart enough. They are scared to be vulnerable around their peers, despite how much psychological safety I have built in the classroom. As a Mentoring Teacher, my job is to help students “reframe their perceptions so that a way forward to a better, safer state becomes apparent” and they can move forward.

The Learning Teacher

According to Corrigan and Merry, the Learning Teacher “takes in all that they have experienced with striving to be fully invested and with helping children to get unstuck and uses these experiences to change their world view.” I feel most like a Learning Teacher when we are in a collective flow state; I am in my teacher groove and students are buzzing with academic discourse and learning. It is these moments where my pedagogical decisions are intuitive. I have often sat in post-observation meetings and been asked why I responded to a student in a particular way, or why I framed a concept the way I did. Frequently, I am unable to explain my methods. It felt right. When the observer tells me why my pedagogical move was effective, I feel affirmed.

Unfortunately, despite my efforts to create a psychologically safe classroom, grounded in unfeigned love, I do not fit the criteria Corrigan and Merry set out for the teacherly authority of a Learning Teacher. I struggle, especially in these last few years, to achieve the last two conditions of Corrigan and Merry’s teacherly authority principle.

• This greater capacity is recognized and valued by the student;

• The student thereby accepts to pay attention to the teacher and to follow wherever the teacher directs the student’s attention.

I find more students, year after year, are unwilling (or unable) to do their best work and self-regulate in order to avoid disrupting our classroom. Despite my efforts to teach from a Constructive Mutualism paradigm, doing everything I can to make my students and my classroom feel as safe as possible, I am far from having 100% student engagement. Perhaps it is because I am trying to teach in a way that is antithetical to my surrounding system. I do often feel pressure to conform my pedagogy to others.

Healthy Teacherly Authority

Being a veteran teacher, I am more firmly rooted in my pedagogical values than I was as a novice teacher. In my 25 years in the classroom, I have taught a lot. I have made thousands of mistakes and learned thousands of lessons. I have taught many students. What makes Constructive Mutualism so appealing is that it names how I have been teaching these last 25 years; it legitimizes my lived experiences in the classroom, while still giving me a conceptual space to grow as a teacher. Dr. Zak Stein explains that organic teacherly authority is specific to our species. Even without formal public schooling, when there is a task to be accomplished, humans come together to collaborate. One person knows more about the task than the other person. They both recognize that in their current situation, they must work together, one learning from the other, in order to complete the task. This is a fluid, non-hierarchical teacher authority that exists everywhere in human society. Even with the necessary asymmetry of knowledge (one person knowing more than another), the dynamic is healthy. Public schooling has institutionalized teacherly authority, placing adults in the front of classrooms of students, saying, This person is the authority. Listen and obey. The only way for this type of teacherly authority to work is through Behaviorism.

We know this is not the best way to educate children. We feel it is unhealthy because it pits students against teachers in a zero-sum game of transactional learning. Constructive Mutualism not only shows that there is a better, more humane way, but gives teachers a framework with which to bring others along. Instead of having no words to explain why my classroom feels different, and is in fact, better for students, I now use this framework to make sense of why running my classroom this way is better for students. I believe that having high levels of student engagement is possible for public school teachers. The challenge, then becomes operationalizing psychological safety so that it does not become more educational jargon. So too, must unconditional love be seen as legitimate and valid pedagogy, not woo-woo sentiment.

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One addendum. In my 25 years of practicing this type of pedagogy, one with high levels of psychological safety, high expectations, and unconditional love, it is important to note that I often attract a particular demographic of student. These “tricky treasures” come with comments like, This student could really use a strong, male role-model or I think this student will do well in your class with the way you run your classroom. They are overwhelmingly boys of color, all being shoved in my classroom because no one else wants them in their classrooms. The implication is that Mr. Neibauer’s unconventional methods, while unsanctioned and patronized, will somehow magically erase the years of academic trauma many of these students have experienced. Not only does this put an impossible amount of pressure on me, as their teacher, it reinforces the detrimental mindset of white savior teachers fixing broken children of color. While I am confident in my pedagogy and deeply believe in creating humane classroom learning experiences, love alone cannot erase trauma. Some of my most recalcitrant students leave my classroom at the end of the year no more trusting of authority than when they first entered. Teachers breaking away from traditional, Behaviorist paradigms, must have a school community that prioritizes and promotes the psychological safety of their entire staff and all of their students. Vulnerable students who have experienced trauma, must have ample support to heal first, before they should be expected to learn. Otherwise, these students struggle to readily accept unconditional love and support. Maybe if there were more classrooms that felt like mine, then classrooms like mine would engage more students.

So how do you change paradigms? … You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

How do you create psychological safety in your classroom? How do you experience (or do not experience) psychological safety in your life? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Have a great week!

— Adrian

Resources

Constructive Mutualism: Teaching 21st Century Skills in 21st Century Classrooms

• This research article, which I reference heavily throughout this essay, details an Australian study (using a multi-part survey) that shows an overwhelming amount of students and teachers value psychological safety. What I find most interesting is that most teacher surveyed indicate that they do provide psychological safety to their students, yet a majority of students do not indicate they are experiencing it. Corrigan and Merry use a Constructive Mutualism paradigm to explain this “gap.”

Group 8 Education

• The Group of Eight (Go8) is a coalition of Australia’s eight leading, research-intensive universities, founded in 1999. Go8 universities focus on high-quality teaching, research, and international alliances, ranking within the top 100 globally. This site details their educational research, including Constructive Mutualism, student feedback, and different ways of knowing in a classroom.

Podcast Episode 013: John Corrigan explains how to help children learn to listen. | Oscar Trimboli, Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words

• Oscar Trimboli, from his podcast, Deep Listening, interviews educator John Corrigan about helping children learn how to focus and listen. It is a great listen!

Amy Edmondson: How to turn a group of strangers into a team | TED Salon: Brightline Initiative

• Amy Edmondson has a couple of TED talks about building psychological safety in the workplace. I find her most recent one, How to turn a group of strangers into a team, very applicable to classroom teachers. Her book, The Fearless Organization is also an excellent read for understanding the research on psychological safety.

Creating a Safe Classroom Environment | Supporting Mental Wellness

• Here is Dr. Bruce Perry discussing the brain science of psychological safety and strategies that educators can use to create a classroom of regulated students. PBS Learning Media has a ton of great videos, including more with Dr. Perry. For those interested, here is a collection of videos about stress, trauma, and the brain.

• This is a clip from a much longer conversation between Dr. Zak Stein and Artem Zen, titled The Education Crisis | Elevating Consciousness Podcast #13. The entire 100-minute episode is riveting. Stein discusses teacherly authority, the problem with today’s dominant schooling system, and homeschooling. This clip is specifically about teacherly authority and how it relates to public schooling.

• Zak Stein has many videos about educational philosophy. If you are interested, The Last Educators is applicable in the current discussion about education and AI.

• Dr. Bruce Perry’s book What Happened to You? is a must-read for anyone who works with youth. I first learned about Perry from this Oprah interview, and have since applied much of his research on children and trauma to my own pedagogy.

• Before I knew anything about unconditional love or psychological safety, I knew about bell hooks and her deeply human work on love. “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” In this interview with hooks she explores love as an ethical practice, a political stance, and a force for social change. This is so needed now!

1. I am aware of research that cluttered classroom walls distract students. I also know that there is evidence that heavily decorated classrooms can bombard students with too much visual information and interfere with their ability to focus. I acknowledge that these are valid findings, and yet I choose to decorate my classroom with posters because I want to communicate to students that my classroom space is different than traditional classrooms. Our learning environment is for educating children, not training student automatons.

2. Despite research that students who sit in individual desks arranged in rows outperform those who sit in tables (88% on-task behavior compared to 70% in groups) because desks enhance student focus, provide dedicated personal workspace, storage, and clear boundaries, facilitate better independent work, and reduce behavioral disruptions, I choose large round tables for the same reason as why I decorate my classroom walls with posters. I want my students to know that in our classroom, human relationships trump academics. This does not mean that I do not have high standards for academic learning; it is that I choose to amplify my students’ humanity over their academic performance.

3. There is a lot more I can say about systems thinking, leverage points, and changing paradigms. For more on this, I recommend Donella Meadows’s Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System and Thomas Kuhn’s Paradigm Shift.

4. John Corrigan, Mark Merry. Constructive Mutualism: Teaching 21st Century Skills in 21st Century Classrooms. J Clin Psychol Neurol. 2024. 2(2): 1-16. DOI: doi.org/10.61440/JCPN.2024.v2.21

5. The best compliment I ever received about my classroom, It feels like a big hug from you.

6. Originating from the Greek word anupokritos (without hypocrisy) in the New Testament.

7. Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, What Happened to You? – Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, explores how childhood trauma shapes adult behavior, shifting the focus from what's wrong with you? to what happened to you?.