Partnership Education

If we want students to create egalitarian and compassionate institutions and organizations when they go out into the world, we need to give them those kinds of experiences from the beginning of their education. This is an idea I learned from my favorite educator,

Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg.

While students’ emotions and needs are being given more attention in current classrooms, most classrooms still operate as a hierarchy. Education is still very often a top-down, teacher-driven experience for students.

The communication and relational model that Dr. Rosenberg advocated, as early as the 1970’s, creates an egalitarian and compassionate classroom environment which often leads to a more peaceful, cooperative experience for both teachers and students.

This information is a summary from my master's thesis. It was originally a scholarly document with 179 citations. In summarizing it here, I was not able to cite every author, but I highly recommend all of the books of any of the people mentioned here.

I did my master's thesis in 2009 at a charter school in San Diego, California where we taught students, teachers and directors of the school how to apply the tools and underlying principles of Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication model (often called Compassionate Communication). Many changes came about in the way the directors directed the school, the way the teachers taught the students, and the ways the students interacted with the teachers and with one another. It was a very rewarding nine-month experience.

Partnership-oriented educators believe that egalitarian relational

and emotional skills are as important to a student’s future as academic

and vocational skills. While social/emotional skills are taught

to current students, most students are not getting a strong enough

education in these skills; skills that will also be very important to them as adults.

This page discusses several ideas about the nature of hierarchy

and unique ways to create a more egalitarian classroom environment

between teachers and students.

Can these ideas work? They have already worked in classrooms

around the world. They do, however, challenge teachers and students

to think outside the traditional educational box and to examine many traditional ideas about teacher/student relationships.

Empathy

Empathy, or an empathic presence with others, has become the thing I value most in my communications with students. Below, I define empathy and explain the ways in which it can contribute to teacher/student relationships and, eventually, to interpersonal relationships and employer/employee relationships.

Carl Rogers, co-founder of the branch of psychology called Humanistic Psychology, defines empathy (or being empathic) as the accurate perception of the internal frame of reference of another individual arrived at by listening carefully to what a person is experiencing and, in particular, to what is meaningful about the experience to that person. Empathizing with students’ emotions, and the needs underlying those emotions (a student-centered approach), rather than seeking compliance to the teacher’s rules has led to much better connections between teachers and students.

Face or Empathy

When a teacher insists that a student do what they are told to do rather than try to understand the unmet needs that may be impeding the student's completion of an assignment, or ability to stay focused, this may result in less participation, slower production of work, or even rebellion by the students. Students rebel in many ways: work slower, refuse to learn what is being taught, express anger or miss class if that is possible.

Empathy – Traditional Messages or Empathy – Paragraph 1:

Every individual has a conception of themselves that they present to others. When an individual makes this presentation, the individual implicitly requests that others acknowledge this presentation of self and take what is called their “face” seriously. There are two kinds of face: positive face (the presentation that an individual wants others to acknowledge), and negative face (an acknowledgement of what the individual does not want to be part of). When a teacher insists that a student do what they are told to do rather than try to understand the needs that impede the completion of an assignment or a student’s inability to stay focused or express their need, may result in less participation, slower production of work, or even rebellion by the student. Students rebel in many ways: work slower, refuse to learn what is being taught, anger, missing class if that is possible.

In a partnership-based classroom, empathic concern for one another’s needs would be the norm. Students’ needs would be as credible as the needs of the teacher. If a teacher’s and student’s needs appeared to be in conflict, the teacher and student would enter into a dialogue about how to best satisfy both parties’ needs.

If a student comes to class and does not feel like learning, Rosenberg suggests that a teacher refrain from taking a hierarchical stance with the student and empathize with the student instead. Students often have contextual factors (brought from outside school) that get in the way of their ability to concentrate, or their willingness to participate. Empathizing with a student’s “No” to learning at that time may bring to the surface what it is the student is saying “Yes” to; saving the student’s face and possibly leading to an alternative way for the student to learn the intended lesson.

As students learn to empathize with the teacher’s feelings and needs, this dynamic could work in favor of a teacher’s face as well. In this way, both students and teachers show their recognition for one another’s autonomy. A mutually satisfactory and beneficial solution could be sought through a dialog between the teacher and student; a dialog in which both teacher and student discuss their personal and educational needs with one another.

Traditional Messages or Empathy

Thomas Gordon, the author of several books, including Parent Effectiveness Training and Teacher Effectiveness Training, identified three categories of messages that teachers sometimes use when working with students: solution messages, put-down messages, and indirect messages. He claims that none of these messages are effective. Empathy may more likely lead to a connection with a student, creating a channel for communication that can lead to mutual resolutions to academic and behavioral issues.

Fixing Problems or Empathy

When teachers empathize with a student’s feelings and needs, the student’s value and worth as a human being is affirmed. Teachers often believe, however, that it is their job to question students about motives, to give advice, or even to give false reassurances that everything will work out. For people who work in helping professions, such as teaching, there is often a temptation to "fix" things that are wrong. Fixing the problems of others, however, is a hierarchical approach, and this approach may seem domineering to those being “helped.” Listening empathically to a student, rather than attempting to fix the student’s problem, allows the student the space to fix their own problems.

Teacher Responsibility or Collaboration

Author, Alfie Kohn, suggests that to create a cooperative learning environment, teachers may want to give up some power in the classroom. Kohn suggests that teachers think in terms of what students need, and how teachers and students could work together with students to meet those needs. This approach could involve partnership strategies such as mutually creating learning objectives with students, mutually deciding on course content, and mutually creating and enforcing classroom rules.

Mutual Learning Objectives

In a partnership learning environment, students and teachers would mutually set learning objectives for each student. These learning objectives would differ from one student to the next. The learning objectives would result from the student’s interests, and the natural capacities the student demonstrates. In a classroom with 20 to 40 students, working with each student to create learning goals probably seems impossible. Part of the problem, however, may be the way teachers are educated.

As early as 1973, Rosenberg expressed concern, as a psychologist conducting in-service training in schools, that college courses were educating teachers to believe that 30 children could learn the same thing at the same time in the same way. Rosenberg considered this a dehumanizing approach. He believed that it is possible to teach 30 children as individuals, that it is possible to have each student working toward objectives that are within the student’s realm of capability, to have each student working toward personal objectives according to a time schedule that fits the student’s personal orientation (style and preference), and to have each student working toward learning goals in a manner that fits the student’s unique skills and approach to learning.

To approach teaching in this way, many long-held assumptions would need to be reexamined (e.g., assumptions about learning styles, assumptions about the value of compliance-gaining, assumptions about the most effective type of relationship between teachers and students and assumptions about power).

By acknowledging that students have needs, interests, and timing issues, that students come to school with many contextual factors brought from home or community, and by assuming these needs and interests matter and are a valid part of the learning/teaching experience, the attitudinal space is created to work mutually with the students.

Kohn points out that adults who are told exactly what to do and how to do it at work are often subject to burnout. Some adults become actively resentful, others just go through the motions and collect their paycheck. Teachers, who understand this dynamic on a personal basis, often do not realize that students also experience burnout. This is just one reason that helping students be responsible for their own learning is beneficial (e.g., children who pick their own projects and materials have been shown to stay more interested in a project longer).

Learning that Meets Everyone’s Needs

Teachers often ask, “Where am going to find the time to teach this way?” The main obstacle to overcome in a transition from traditional hierarchical education styles to partnership styles is the unwillingness to consider that it might be possible. Below is one interesting story about how one teacher applied this idea. Susan Ohanian, a 2nd grade teacher, demonstrates the kinds of options that exist if the traditional assumptions are tweaked a bit.

When it came time to learn cursive writing, some of Ohanian’s 2nd grade students resisted because they thought it was too difficult. Ohanian decided not to force the students to learn cursive on her schedule. About half-way through the year, one of the students who had been resistant to learning cursive asked Ohanian to write a spelling word on the board using cursive. Other students who had been resistant to learning cursive then began asking her how to form individual letters. Ohanian took this cue and began writing the spelling words for the week on the board in cursive and suggested that the students try to write the words out for themselves. The students took her suggestion. Three weeks or so later, Ohanian began comparing the cursive production of the late learners to that of the students who had been practicing cursive all year. Ohanian did not see much difference between the skills of the two groups. Furthermore, the students learned to write in cursive without a lot of distress.

At another time, Ohanian noticed that the vocabulary words she was trying to teach her 2nd grade students did not have much meaning for them, so she introduced letter writing to help students integrate the words into stories about their own activities. Each day, the students would write her a letter about their activities. Some students who had never spoken in class wrote interesting letters. One child quit writing at one point, and, on a hunch, Ohanian asked him a question about stock car racing. He answered her question with a six-page letter, even staying after class to finish. The students were able to integrate vocabulary words into their lives on their own terms.

Critical Engagement

How can teachers apply partnership education with older students who are required to master skills such as research and critical thinking? Dynamic presentations of important and interesting material, lively instruction and debate, open discussion and critical analysis of material, and discussions that not only connect to the real world but transform perspectives on the real world would help greatly with this type of critical engagement. Following is a story that demonstrates how this is possible.

In the fall of 2000, Michael Dreiling received a research grant to teach a course on global issues. Dreiling had taught several courses from the critical paradigm, but a recent exposure to NVC, and feedback from students who were asking for more of a voice in what they were being taught, led him to take a partnership approach to teaching this class. He had been dissatisfied for years by the usual intellectual critical approach. It seemed too disembodied from the students’ feelings about what was being learned. NVC offered reflexive tools to focus attention on what was alive for each participant, in the moment, by way of guiding the students and Dreiling to focus on the feelings, needs, and requests that came up for each student during the course. Dreiling knew that he could always overwhelm the students with statistics, but also knew that the students had been leaving his previous critical courses with unaddressed emotions and unmet needs.

NVC was helpful in designing a strategy for evaluating students. Rather than evaluation based on how the students performed on papers or exams, evaluation was based on how clear it was to Dreiling that the students had engaged the subject. Rather than telling students what to do to get a grade, Dreiling asked the students to demonstrate how they each engaged the course material in a way that they imagined would be most life-enriching for them. Students, individually or in groups, were asked to make a proposal to Dreiling about how they would learn about the subject; in this class the subject was the use of children as sweatshop workers in developing countries.

Dreiling found himself empathizing with some students who had a fear of being evaluated in this autonomous way. Eight students asked Dreiling to write them a final exam and grade the exam. He did what the students requested as a way of respecting the students’ autonomy.

Dreiling and the students discussed each proposal, coming to a mutually agreed upon version of the project. Students actively sought strategies that met everyone’s needs about how to contribute to a more just world. Dreiling believes that students engaged more fully with the subject in this class than in any class he had previously taught; in some cases, students even chose to finish up their project after the course had ended. Dreiling has seen this partnership approach work in many classes since this first attempt in 2000. This project demonstrates that, when given assignments that stir their curiosity, most students do not need extrinsic motivators.

A Partnership Discussion

Rosenberg describes what a class discussion in a partnership-oriented classroom would be like. In a traditional educational setting (if there was an NVC-oriented topic) a teacher might say, “Today we will be learning how to express needs.” In a partnership educational setting, each person, whether in the role of teacher or student, would share ideas about learning for the day. For example, a teacher or student might say, “I have been learning some things about expressing needs that have been helpful to me. I would be willing to share this with any of you who might be interested. It involves some things we might do when we are not clear about what our needs are. I have in mind a 10-minute explanation and then an exercise that would take 45 minutes. I’d like any of you who are interested to raise your hand.”

At any time during the learning period that another student’s needs are not being met with what is being presented, or how it is ibeing presented, that student might say, “My need for hands-on experience is not being met with the way the material is being presented. I would like us to limit the present discussion to another five minutes, and then go into groups of six people to give each person a chance to actively practice what we have been discussing. I’d like anyone whose needs would not be met by my suggestion to raise your hand.” A teacher might make a similar request: “I am enjoying this topic and I would also like to add some concepts to the discussion. I suggest that we discuss this concept for about five more minutes, and then I would like to introduce another concept.” While teachers do use this approach in class discussions, it is generally understood, by teacher and students, that when a teacher makes this kind of statement, it means that the discussion, as it is happening, will be completed in five minutes, and the students will move on to another topic, whether they are ready or not. In a partnership setting, students would feel free to make a counter-suggestion. For example: “I find this concept really interesting and useful to my life. I would like to continue discussing this concept for at least another 30 minutes.” Other students would feel free to agree or disagree.

Teachers generally assume that this approach to teaching would be too time consuming and would prevent the teaching of material that students must learn. While this approach is a bit more time consuming than a hierarchical approach, in a partnership setting, where this type of interaction is normal, students are more likely to use this freedom of choice in a balanced fashion, adding to the discussion only if a genuine need is present. Prior group agreements and teacher/student learning agreements would also frame these class discussions. When transitioning from a classroom climate where students do not generally have much input into the topics discussed or the length of classroom discussions, students may, at first, overreact to having more autonomy, and may have to learn how to balance their own autonomy with the autonomy of the teacher and the other students. Once students learn to trust that their autonomy will be respected, however, a more balanced interactional approach is more likely.

Choice-Based Learning

Research on choice-based learning (where students choose the learning style they will use, choose assignments, and choose how tests will be taken) has generated self-reports that are positively related to feelings of student empowerment. Choice-based learning is rooted in the belief that students want more from a class than a grade, even though it often seems that a passing grade is all a student cares about. Sample quotations from student self-report surveys regarding choice-based learning included such statements as “not everyone is the same, so it gives options to students,” ...“allows me to be graded on my strengths,” and “increases motivation, interest, and creativity.

Mutual Creation of Rules

In a partnership environment, course and classroom rules would be mutually created by everyone who would be affected by those rules, rather than by administrators and educators without the input of students. When students are equal partners in creating the learning environment, they may be more likely to cooperate with the rules. This mutual creation of rules, along with the mutual creation of learning goals, gives students a stake in creating their educational environment, creating for students the experience of taking responsibility for personal needs while acknowledging and cooperating with the needs of others. These experiences may teach students how to create this balance as adults.

Some psychologists and educators believe that it is never possible to control anyone’s behavior for very long. Behaviors are intrinsically motivated and attempts to control an individual’s behavior will lead to resistance in some form, starting in very young students and evolving from outright resistance to higher order reasoning against teachers’ requests for compliance. College students who had a willingness to comply with most teacher requests did so, more often than not, despite feeling resistant and claiming that resistance was not voiced because the students did not want to upset the teacher. Rosenberg suggests that compliance, when there is actually a desire to resist, may lead to a disconnection from the teacher as well as the material and the learning process.

Control theory (William Glasser) posits that all humans are born with inherent needs and spend a great deal of time attempting to satisfy those needs. In a culture such as the American culture, where needs are played down, individuals are not always clear about what those needs are. This lack of clarity can lead to a student acting out (talking back, turning in late work, not studying for exams). Glasser considers this acting out to be a strategy used by students who are not meeting a personal need to understand or make sense of the relevance of the material to their own life, or a need for stimulating interaction with the teacher or the material. While teachers often consider lack of motivation to be a problem within the student, students often consider a poor presentational ability on the part of the teacher to be the most frequent source of demotivation.

It sometimes appears that outside stimuli are the cause of behavior or behavioral change, but it is not the outside stimuli causing behaviors. Teachers tell students every day to work hard, and even though they are punished for not doing so, many students do not work hard. When students are threatened, they may do what they are told, if they believe it is better at the time not to resist. Students are, however, likely to become resentful and do only the bare minimum of what is required in the future.

What students get from outside themselves is information, and then each student decides how to use that information. If students were encouraged to identify the needs underlying their behaviors, the students would be more likely to understand the motivations for their behaviors. Considering this, the mutual creation of rules may create a more interesting classroom climate that will better serve students and teachers.

Praise and Punishment or Critical Engagement

Navigating the various aspects of classroom justice is time consuming and can be energy draining, leading educators to believe in the necessity of rewards to entice students to stay on task and to behave, and punitive actions when students refuse to comply. Rosenberg calls both punishment and reward hierarchical approaches.

Despite a solid belief that there is often justification for punishment, punishment always stems from a belief that one individual has the authority to set the standards of behavior in an environment. This belief is often coupled with the believe that, if a person does not comply to these standards, that person deserves to experience negative consequences for their choice of behavior.

Rewarding a student, including verbal rewards or praise, is also a hierarchical strategy because it assumes that one individual is in a position of setting the standards for the receipt of rewards. Furthermore, praise is often an attempt to persuade a student to actively modify their own view of the value of a strategy; to reach out for more “appropriate” behaviors rather than attempt to understand personal motivations. One of the most important ways to help children think and learn is to free them from the control of rewards and punishments. This is because rewards and punishments all too easily establish, in the student, the pattern of doing what the student believes will yield rewards and forestall punishments; patterns that typically result in impoverished learning.

Praise or Gratitude

While children are willing to, and often do, say “No”, there is also a strong desire in children to please. Therefore, it is important to be cautious with this desire to please, and not exploit it to meet personal needs as a shortcut to the development of needed skills, to the fostering of a commitment to helpful values and behaviors in students, or to bringing students in on the process of deciding what are helpful values and behaviors. Two principles that might be thought of as a standard against which all praise might be measured:

1. Self-determinism: With every comment made, and specifically every compliment given, is the intent of the comment or compliment to help the student feel a sense of control over his or her life (e.g., do comments encourage the student to make personal judgments about what constitutes a desirable action or an effective performance, or are the comments meant to manipulate the student’s behavior by getting the student to think about whether the student has met the teacher’s criteria about what constitutes a desirable action or effective performance).

2. Intrinsic motivation: Are the teacher’s comments creating the conditions for the student to become more deeply involved in what the student is intrinsically motivated to do, or turning the task into something to meet the teacher’s approval?

There are several issues that point to the ineffectiveness or even the harm of praise. An intention to offer feedback about the quality of a student’s work may lead to an interpretation that the teacher is limiting the student’s autonomy.

The conveyance of rewards (material or verbal) may indicate good performance, but a performance contingency reward could also convey poor performance (e.g., if rewards are offered in different amounts for different levels of performance), a positive evaluation that does not fit a student’s self-mage may evoke anger, the use of rewards as a strategy for externally regulating behavior can undermine natural organismic processes that evolved to keep organisms in touch with their needs and responsive to their surroundings, and students interpret praise differently (e.g., one student, hearing exactly the same words of praise, may interpret the words very differently). Therefore, the assumption that praise is a universally positive action is not necessarily an accurate assumption.

In many cases, rewards are used to get individuals to do what does not come naturally (e.g., engage in non-valued behaviors) and may generate a desensitization to personal interests, as well as disrupt awareness and choice, undermine intrinsic motivation, and override inherent tendencies to integrate the value and meaning of actions; tendencies that form the structural basis for the self-regulation of action.

Adults like to think of praise as useful, informational feedback. However, even when it is believed that a student has done well, and the teacher wants to tell the student so, it is not easy to strip from that information the emotional weight of it. Because praise from the teacher may also discourage self-directed learning, deemphasizing the performance aspect of learning might help free students, and teachers, from the reward-and-punishment frame of reference. If a choice is made to offer praise, it would be least harmful if the attempt was made to: a) praise what the student does, not the student, b) make praise as specific as possible, c) avoid phony praise, and d) avoid praise that sets up competition).

Rosenberg suggests that, rather than offering praise, it is more helpful to offer gratitude. If one individual (teacher or student) informs another individual that what that individual did or said stimulated a pleasant feeling or carried some information that was useful, the sender may feel happy or even relieved that his or her words or actions contributed to the other person’s well-being. Generalized praise, in contrast, seldom offers much information and can leave a person feeling criticized or in a one-down position .

Punishment

Most individuals are taught that bringing up children requires control and discipline; that children need to be punished and that “bad” children need to be punished more. Punitive child-rearing, however, is ineffective and can also be hazardous to the mental and physical health of children. Moreover, punitive discipline is not conducive to developing a truly democratic society or creating a world of peace. For all these reasons, the issue of how children are treated is of profound social importance. If, as a society, we are serious about working toward a culture of peace, these ideas about the socialization of children need to be examined.

The alternative to the old hierarchical method of discipline is not a permissive approach. Rather, a partnership approach to discipline would involve young people in creating the classroom and behavioral rules. This approach would model respect for one another’s autonomy. Gordon suggests that non-power methods add up to a more effective method for gaining genuine cooperation. By giving up the need to control children, but also not being a doormat, teachers may be able to foster more independence and interdependence, allow control for students over their own destiny, and contribute to higher self-esteem. Further, by involving students in their own governing process, teachers may make school far more interesting, prevent disciplinary problems, and foster higher achievement motivation. Classroom rule setting by all who will be affected by those rules encourages students to regulate their behavior out of a consideration for others. Non-power approaches to problem solving (e.g., negotiation and empathy) can create a situation where neither party must lose, and both parties can win.

The belief that discipline is necessary, or effective, with children is seldom questioned. Discipline as a spontaneous approach, however, can create problems. A child’s behavior is a movement toward a definite, although sometimes unconscious goal. This goal will impact whether the teacher’s response to the behavior is effective or not. For example: if the goal of the student is to get attention, the teacher’s response to the behavior may end the behavior (for a while at least), but if the goal is to challenge a teacher’s power, a response from the teacher that attempts to curb the student’s behavior will probably not work. The interaction becomes one of a power contest and will probably make the situation worse. Therefore, it is important for teachers to assess what the goal (or need) behind the student’s behavior is before deciding to respond to the behavior (Dreikurs).

Discipline, as a noun, is perceived by most individuals as: behavior in accord with rules or regulations. As a verb, to discipline means to train by instruction and exercise; to drill, edify and enlighten. Discipline, as a verb, however, also has many tacit synonyms: to punish, to control, to restrict, to direct, to rebuke, to reprimand, and to reprove. These synonyms fall more into the category of demands for obedience. If what teachers want is self-discipline from students, coercive tactics are not useful.

* In the following nine paragraphs , I ran into an issue with my coputer

My program won't let me set my own spaces between the lines. I have not typed this last section with any intent to highlight it over other sections.

Rosenberg suggests that, If what you want is self-discipline, do not

use any coercive tactics because they get in the way of self-discipline. A self-disciplined student…acts out of a certain consciousness of his own values, of how what he is doing will contribute to his own and others’ well-being, not out of a desire for reward or a fear of punishment.

Negotiated order theory is a classroom management philosophy that can be helpful in maintaining order without creating unnecessary and cumbersome rules. Typically, effective classroom managers communicate fewer rules than ineffective classroom managers. Negotiated order assumes that the classroom environment is constantly changing and negotiated in every moment by all the members of the class. Each negotiation would be temporal and may need to be renegotiated in the future.

Resistance to learning is almost always an indicator that the student has encountered a distracting problem in life. Rather than punish the student for being distracted, it is the teacher’s job to help the student return to the learning function as rapidly as possible. Problems are often uniquely coded (e.g., when a student asks a question with an obvious answer, or the question seems out of place or incongruent). When this happens, teachers could look for the underlying feelings. The teacher might want to guess at the feelings of the student and then guess at the needs underlying the feelings.

This is not the same as mind-reading, assumption that the teacher knows what is going on with the student without checking it out with the student. This is also not the same as perspective-taking; imagining what the person is experiencing. Though a guess is made, it is only made to help the student discover the student’s need, and once the student identifies the need, the interaction shifts toward getting that need met. This is not to say that teachers would meet the student’s need if that need were in opposition to the teacher’s need. If this is the case, then teacher and student would negotiate, through empathic listening and compassionate expression of needs, a solution that would more likely meet the needs of both parties.

Tuning in to the subtle clues, verbal or nonverbal, that students send when resisting a lesson or request could increase productivity and enrich learning. Students naturally encounter problems in their daily lives, and as they grapple with these problems, students learn to handle negative feelings. To the degree the student is encouraged to trust their own feelings and needs, and to generate their own solutions, that student will develop self-confidence and independence, and may also learn to respect the autonomy of others.

If teachers taught Control Theory to their students, the students could figure out for themselves what needs are not getting met, requiring much less counseling from busy teachers or principals. Control theory be taught to students as early as kindergarten.

Compliance Gaining or Autonomy

Compliance-gaining is considered important for the promotion of student learning and controlling the classroom environment. Educator compliance-gaining efforts have been positively related to a number of positive student outcomes: stimulation of student involvement in classroom activities, minimization of student behaviors that interfere with classroom work, and efficient use of instructional time. It is important, however, to consider, in relational terms, what is actually being sought when compliance-gaining strategies are employed. Are the compliance-gaining strategies being used to gain student participation in interesting, fulfilling lessons and activities, or to insist on student participation in subjects and activities that are not interesting to students, and that may not meet the students’ needs? Are the strategies an attempt to help students progress, or to get things done in a manner, or time frame, that the teacher (or school administrators) determines? Furthermore, it is important to think carefully about what the term compliance refers to. Is the concept itself a domination-style strategy?

Scholars who examine compliance-gaining in the context of the classroom are generally concerned with the tactics that educators use to keep students on task, and to correct and prevent misbehaviors. The amount of restriction of a student’s autonomy is a common criterion for assessing whether compliance-gaining tactics are more or less appropriate. Almost by definition, achievement of compliance-gaining goals must restrict autonomy, at least to some degree. Compliance-gaining goals can be separated into types: gaining assistance, enforcing the sharing of activities, changing opinions, changing the status of a relationship, enforcing an obligation, protecting a right, and changing a habit. What, though, really differentiates these strategies from one another? These strategies could restrict autonomy.

Compliance-gaining strategies can also be damaging to a student’s self-attitudes, especially if compliance-gaining strategies consist of attacking personal characteristics, telling embarrassing stories about a student, poking fun of mistakes made, or making fun of abilities. The main goal of education is to impact students’ lifetime behaviors and motivation to learn. Given this goal teachers may not want to sacrifice this long-term goal by using compliance-gaining attempts too readily to control mundane classroom activities.

Any persuasion encounter is an interdependent process in which sources may have strategies to gain compliance, but receivers have strategies to resist compliance. Compliance-gaining strategies are often interpreted by students as a form of control, or domination, and students tend to resist teachers who attempt to control their behavior. Students were found to be more or less resistant to any use of control in the classroom, and reported even greater resistance to strategies that involved coercive intent or teacher-induced peer pressure.

Teacher immediacy, the nonverbal behaviors that reduce physical and/or psychological distance between teachers and students appears to mitigate students' resistance to compliance-gaining attempts. Nonverbal teacher immediacy was the most powerful predictor of students' reported willingness to comply with teacher requests. When teachers were immediate students do indicate a stronger willingness to comply, regardless of the other strategies these teachers employed.

Teachers who use prosocial communication strategies are generally given higher student evaluations than teachers who use punishment to gain compliance and use of prosocial compliance-gaining strategies has been significantly related to positive attitudes toward learning. A point to consider, however, is whether a prosocial approach to gaining a student’s compliance is enough to counter any possible negative relational residue left behind if a student is being persuaded to do something that the student may not want to do. Critical engagement, mutual setting of learning objectives, mutual creation of classroom rules, and mutual designing of curriculum may lead to less need for compliance-gaining as an educational strategy.

Extrinsic or Intrinsic Motivation

Underlying all human motivation is what Carl Rogers called the organismic tendency toward fulfillment (or the formative tendency). Organisms are always seeking, always initiating. The central energy source of the organism is a trustworthy tendency towards actualization involving not only the maintenance, but also the enhancement of the organism, in other words, intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsically rewarding experiences are experiences for which there is no apparent reward except for the reward gained by the doing of the activity. Individuals engage in many activities which, on the surface, do not seem to have any reward attached to the doing of the activity (e.g., solving puzzles or painting pictures). These individuals are intrinsically motivated to do challenging work, which requires resourcefulness and creativity. They are drawn to these activities, not because of any external rewards that might be gained, but because doing these activities creates certain internal states that the individual finds rewarding.

Intrinsic motivation is based on two hypotheses: 1) individuals will seek out stimulation/challenges and, 2) individuals enjoy feeling competent and self-determined, therefore, often find it pleasurable to overcome challenges. This perception of competence, and an environment that encourages self-determination, is what energizes a person’s will or the capacity of the human organism to choose to satisfy its needs. Self-determinism is more likely to exist when an individual perceives the locus of causality to be internal rather than external. The self-determinism aspect of intrinsic motivation is more fundamental than the competence aspect. Extrinsic rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation in students. While extrinsic rewards can convey positive information (e.g., a gold star indicates that a person has been performing well), every reward has two essential aspects.

Controlling (brings behavior under the control of the individual dispensing the reward and, 2) informational (conveys information about levels of competence). How a reward affects intrinsic motivation depends on which aspect of the reward is salient. If the controlling aspect of the reward is more salient, it will decrease intrinsic motivation. If the informational aspect is more salient, it will increase intrinsic motivation by enhancing a student’s perception of competence. Even negative feedback can be helpful if the student is intrinsically motivated to accomplish a task and the negative feedback helps the student increase competency. A student’s intrinsic motivation and sense of self will benefit from a classroom climate that is informational; offers opportunities for self-determination and autonomy.

To the degree that a student is able to approach learning as a task to discovering something, rather than learning about it or performing it, there will be a tendency for the student to work with the autonomy of self-reward or be rewarded by discovery itself. The most effective learning occurs when the primary reward is the intrinsic satisfaction with personal accomplishments. When students are learning intrinsically, they tend to interpret their successes and failures as information rather than rewards and punishments. Thus, stimulating and informational task involvement and internal information regulation will contribute to motivation.

Extrinsic controls can produce immediate learning but also impair conceptual learning. External rewards may also impede the development of a capacity to think creatively if students aim activities toward those that can be expected to receive rewards. Glasser suggests that, while extrinsic rewards can work for a short time, people who rely on extrinsic rewards cannot be trusted to really think.

Because young students are curious and motivated to learn, it is important for teachers to provide them the opportunity to follow their natural curiosity. This does not mean that students would be left fully to their own devices or allowed to do whatever they want to do, or only what they want to do. Self-determination involves initiating the activities that a student wants to engage in, but also sometimes involves an accommodation to the environment and functioning harmoniously with others in the environment.

Grading as an Evaluative Strategy or Feedback about Progress

Grading, as an evaluative strategy, often stimulates emotions in students. Too often, though, educators ignore the emotions connected to the disappointing grade, and discuss only the instrumental goals that the student “should” be considering. In a hierarchical educational system, concerns of face and self-

identity are generally not addressed when a student is upset about receiving a low grade, leaving students unsatisfied and sometimes feeling hopeless about their capabilities. Furthermore, whenever extrinsic rewards are experienced as controlling, they will adversely affect intrinsic motivation for learning.

Students generally have two types of goals: learning goals and performance goals. When the goal is the demonstration of ability (performance), individuals are more likely to feel failure. In contrast, when the goal is an increased level of ability (learning), setbacks are seen as a natural part of learning, as an intrinsic incentive for greater effort. It matters what meaning an effort has to the person who undertakes the effort.

One option to grading by teachers is to have students grade themselves. It is often assumed that students given this option would always give themselves a high grade. I have experienced the opposite to be true. Students who grade themselves, as well as students who are asked to grade group mates, often demonstrate thoughtfulness about grading themselves or others in a way that seems fair to themselves, others and the teacher. Of course, this type of grading option would only be useful for subjective grading, such as with essays, presentations, or group participation.

In partnership schools, progress reports, rather than grades, are generally used to inform students and parents about how a student is progressing from one level of ability to another. Generating a progress report is more time consuming than adding up grade points. Given the potential downside of grading, however, progress reports may deserve consideration.

Education in Partnership Terms

How and what teachers teach, as well the structure of the teaching environment, are all equally important. A partnership-style educational system has three interconnected components: process, content, and structure. Process is about how educators teach. The teaching process allows students to have a stake in their education. Teachers act primarily as mentors and facilitators. Students learn teamwork, rather than being continuously placed in competitive relationships with one another or the teacher. Content is about what students are taught. A partnership curriculum would teach, not only basic skills, but would also teach and model the life-skills students will need to be competent and caring citizens, employers, employees, and parents. Structure is about the kind of learning environment educators construct. The classroom environment would be democratic rather than authoritarian. Decisions would flow from the students to the teachers as well as flowing from the teachers to the students. Students would participate in decision-making about the course material and the setting of course and classroom rules.

Partnership-oriented curricula would support a partnership-style education. Without both elements in place, teachers would send conflicting messages to students. A partnership-oriented curriculum would consist of more than just “add-ons” such as black history classes, or women’s history month, programs to address children’s emotions, and conflict resolution training. These are all important contributions, but more is needed. A shift from a hierarchical approach to subject matter to a partnership approach to subject matter, and from hierarchical to non-competitive activities, could demonstrate for students a wider range of human relations, and foster discussions of interconnections and interactive psychosocial dynamics. This more holistic, or systemic, approach may help students develop both cognitive and emotional intelligence, enabling them to navigate through difficult life experiences, and better understand, and begin to lay, local and global structural foundations for compassionate interactions and actions.

As a trainer of NVC in educational environments, I have been questioned several times about the wisdom of teaching students that partnership-based relationships are valuable in this day and age. One Graduate Teaching Assistant asked me, “Aren’t we just setting our students up to fail if we teach them to prioritize relationships and concern for others in the business world?” Another individual asked, “Isn’t it important to teach both partnership and competition? What about people who want to pursue a law career?” Eisler believes it would be useful to students if they were taught about both social models, and informed that both dominator and partnership models as points on a spectrum. Learning about both models, students can decide for themselves which model they prefer to operate within.

A partnership-oriented approach to learning standard subject matter could work. Teachers can assist students in looking at history assignments from the perspective of what needs the participants of each event are trying to meet, or by contemplating how the participants could have met needs to thrive and survive differently. For example, how could the participants have handled a conference in ways that would have met the needs of the countries, rather than start a war? In literature, students could examine the needs of literature characters. Even students as young as eight and nine years old can be taught to look at characters in literature in terms of what needs those characters were attempting to meet by the actions that the characters choose. This method of teaching also supports the needs of administrators who want to provide a solid foundation for students in academic subjects.

Relationship-Based Learning

There are four types of relationships in every classroom: a) teacher-to-self, b) teacher- to-student, c) student-to-student, and d) student to his or her own learning process. An understanding of these relationships might encourage teachers to ponder: a) what is valuable to the teacher about her/his role as a teacher, b) what kind of relationship does the teacher want to create with the students, c) whether students are learning teamwork, or encouraged to compete with one another for attention, participation points, or grades, d) whether the teaching process allows students to have a stake in their education by allowing them to participate in the design of course content and classroom rules, e) whether students are encouraged to assess their own levels of ability and their own learning needs for themselves, and f) whether the curriculum models the life-skills students need in order to be competent and caring citizens, employers, employees, and parents. Rosenberg laid out four dimensions of partnership teaching that he believes are vital to teacher/student relationships.

1. Mutuality: a teacher/student relationship where the teacher relates to a student as a colleague:

a) The teacher openly shares personal thoughts and feelings with students without blaming students for those thoughts and feelings or demanding that students take responsibility for those thoughts and feelings.

b) The teacher shows empathy and respect for students’ feelings and thoughts, and thereby avoids ignoring the student, passing judgment, and giving advice.

c) The teacher resolves conflicts with students through rational problem-solving techniques rather than through any coercive techniques such as punishment and reward.

d) Mutual consent: by recognizing the importance of a student’s consent to learning objectives, teachers are less inclined to avoid passing on irrelevant information to the students.

e) The teacher and student(s) know what the objectives of the lesson are prior to the beginning of the work on each lesson.

f) Both teacher and student(s) are committed to this objective because the objective has been arrived at through mutual consent.

2, Adjustment to learning styles:

a) Teachers make adjustments to teaching because of a recognition that students have diverse learning styles, and by fitting the curriculum to the child, not the child to the curriculum.

b) Teacher facilitation rather than a conduction (e.g., lecturing) of learning:

c) Teachers would supplement reading assignments and lectures with student-centered learning experiences: games, group project.

I appreciate your attention to this information. I hope it turns out to be very useful for you . My thesis was shared with teachers in several countries around the world: England, Australia, New Zealand, Bangledesh, Austria, Canada, Portugal - and to teachers all around the United States.