One of the consequences of realising that other people are different to ourselves and, therefore, will not necessarily react in the way that you expect to situations is that we are often faced with dilemmas in interpersonal relationships because our behaviour will determine the way that the relationship progresses.
One of my particular interests is in the way people learn – and conversely the way to ‘teach’ them to help them in their learning. I found myself this week in precisely the sort of dilemma that I am considering here within the teaching context.
A little background context – I was tasked with overseeing the work of someone new to a particular software tool. The person is very bright, but this is largely outside his area of expertise and, additionally, he is not someone that I know well enough to understand his “mental models”.
I therefore had to strike some balance between telling him to go away and get on with it – thereby giving him no guidance whatsoever – and explaining everything step by step leaving no room for any creativity at all. Clearly it is very rare to be in a situation where you are at either end of this spectrum and I knew without thinking too hard that was the situation here.
I needed to give him sufficient guidance to let him go away and use his undoubted brain power to solve the problem, without giving him so much that it felt that I was “teaching granny to suck eggs”. 😀
In these sorts of situations it is not uncommon to explain something to someone and, at the end of the explanation, say “do you understand that?” and almost always the answer will be “yes” regardless of the real level of understanding. The “yes” answer can actually be wrong on all sorts of levels – it may be that the learner thinks he understands it, but when he goes away and tries to put it into practice it is a complete disaster; it may be that the learner is too intimidated by the teacher to risk a “no” answer; it may be that the leaner does understand everything he was told – but that the teacher has missed some crucial points; and many more.
Fundamentally, the teaching/learning process must connect in such a way that all barriers between he participants are broken down – it is more important (in my world!!!) that the relationship has developed to a point whereby the learner s comfortable to admit to whatever difficulties he has with the subject than to actually pass the right knowledge!!
Is that a surprising statement?
Of course it would be great if all teaching passed on perfect knowledge – I doubt that is achievable. So, the teacher/learner relationship must become strong enough that the learner does not have any problem with asking questions for clarification. Don’t forget that these questions are, implicitly, criticising the teacher for not having taught perfectly in the first place, so the learner as well as the teacher is in a place full of dilemmas. Hence the need for a good relationship to take precedence over completeness of teaching.
We do face similar dilemmas in almost all relationships – there is a need to behave in such a way that the other person in the relationship responds ‘correctly’ – success in this is why the great musical ensembles work so well; it is why people who have known each other for a long time often seem to have some sort of telepathic link; it is why husbands and wives know the best way to deal with each other; it is why the truly great teachers inspire their students.
I remember teachers – good and bad – and the best ones were those who made some sort of connection with you – there were some that I admired for their knowledge and intelligence, but they were not good at passing it on because they tended to treat everyone as thought they were at the same level as they themselves were and were probably very disappointed to find that few matched that.
In all relationships I believe it is important to try to understand the range of possibilities for the other person’s behaviours/reactions. It is very easy to criticise because the other person does not “meet our expectations” but often the problem is actually the expectations. This is something which I have been guilty of in the past – where I have allowed relationships to suffer because the other person was not acting ‘correctly’ with respect to my worldview.
Now, I try always to act with respect for the worldview that I think they have! Note that this can be troublesome as well, for this is still my worldview we are talking about and this part of my worldview must necessarily be more error prone. We have all been through the thinking process that goes “what if he/she knows”; “what if he/she knows that I know?”; what if he/she knows that I know that she knows”; and so on ad infinitum. This is precisely the sort of thing that we must – almost unconsciously – go through in order to relate to other people in every situation. Its just that some situations are more ‘important’ than others.
When talking previously about friends and “how close” they were we suggested that one of the paradoxes was that it was more difficult to deal with close friends on this sort of level because the closer they got to you the more they became individuals rather than a crowd. Here we see that (at least part of) what causes this is that the mental models of individuals differ significantly, whereas the mental model of a crowd is (relatively speaking) more predictable.
If you think of your youth (regardless of how far away that might be) and when you were trying to impress a potential girlfriend/boyfriend it is much easier to interact with girls or boys as a group than it is to tailor the interaction to a single individual.
Similarly, there are huge fortunes made from the advertising ‘business’ – but that only works on crowds – very little is successful on an individual level – unless it is particularly tailored to the individual himself.
So, to sum this up – it is hugely important to understand that people have a complex set of mental models through which they make sense of the world and make decisions on how to behave/react. In order to properly connect with people, it is necessary to fit in with those models. As they say “know your audience”.