Troublemakers (Part 2— Givers and Takers)
In the previous article, I discussed class troublemakers. I reflected on a teen student from the previous academic year who disrupted my class, not in any major way, but enough to have negatively impacted on the other students. This raised the question: would the class have been better off without him? In Part 2, I examine the theories of organisational psychologist Adam Grant and consider if they have any implications for my harsh line of questioning…
I first heard Adam Grant on a podcast talking about his job. As a professor in organisational psychology, he has busied himself by going into workplaces and analysing interactions between teams, departments, colleagues and bosses. He has some fascinating ideas and insights which have seen him propelled into the limelight through bestselling books and Ted Talks. Of course, when I began to hear his ideas, I immediately thought about teaching and the classroom. It is, after all, a workplace.
For example, one idea that Adam Grant promotes, originally conceived by Adam Bryant, is that leaders should write a user manual for themselves,
From the very first day, your staff is going to be wondering what you’re like — your pet peeves, your quirks, and what it takes to earn a couple of gold stars from you. And they will find out these things over the course of a year, through trial and error, through observation, and maybe through some difficult conversations you have with them about something they’ve done or haven’t done.
So why not shorten that inevitable learning curve, and let people know right up front what you’re like?
Adam Grant takes this a stage further, saying that it doesn’t need to be confined to just the leaders of an organisation. If we have a user manual for the office printer, why not for everyone? Taking it into truly terrifying territory, he even (jokingly?) suggests it could work for romantic relationships, a user manual co-authored by all your exes!
The classroom application for this should be immediately obvious. In fact, I’ve seen and done versions of it already, but nothing framed in quite this way. Teachers and students could write one for themselves, or for each other. Perhaps the students could even write one about the teacher at the end of the year for the benefit of the next year’s students? There’s no reason why this couldn’t be set up in an interesting and engaging way either, with brainstorming and interviewing and plenty of language input along the way. You could even have a scaled down version for younger/lower level learners. In a monolingual class, it could also be done in the students’ first language (if the teacher knows it) and used as a translation exercise.
That’s just one example of how an idea from the business world can be applied to the classroom. However, the main idea of Adam Grant’s that I want to focus on, due to its relevance to our troublemaker situation, is what he calls givers and takers.
Givers, takers (and matchers)
It probably doesn’t sound too profound to you if I told you that there are people out there who are happy to give, and those who just want to take. It sounds like some life advice your grumpy grandad gave you when you told him you’d got your first job. But then you made the mistake of forgetting his advice and treating your colleagues like fellow human beings. That was very naive of you… because, while I guess they technically are humans, Adam Grant thinks your wise, old grandad had a point too.
Working with high profile CEOs and businesses, Grant has some interesting findings to share about givers and takers.
The bad news
- One of the first things I heard Grant say was that sometimes when he goes into a workplace, and he interviews a team, he has to tell the bosses that the people on the team he’s assessing just aren’t compatible. Grant argues that some people (usually takers) are simply going reduce the team’s effectiveness. This sounds like practical advice if you are the head of software engineering company and you’re compiling a team to work on a specific app, but in a teaching context, it would mean excluding students. As this is a last resort, is there anything else to take away from this harsh advice? I think so. Because Grant’s conclusions tell us that our problematic team/class may not be our fault. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up trying to make the class work, but that the teachers shouldn’t blame themselves or work themselves to the point of exhaustion for a class that might be not be fixable. This is also supported by another idea of his, which is that the givers on a team (in this case, hopefully the teacher) need to be protected from burnout.
- More bad news: it seems the old adage about one bad apple spoiling the others is as true for a fruit basket as it is for people. Grant says, Let even one taker into a team and you will see that the givers stop helping. And unfortunately, this means that adding no amount of givers to a team with takers is going to balance out the group. One solution, he suggests, is of course, to weed out the takers. Again, this seems like the case is being made for exclusion here, but I think there’s a subtler point in this revelation that gives us cause to be more optimistic…
The good news
- As the above point suggests, our nature can change or be changed. We can be givers or takers in different situations. Givers, who have their fingers burned often enough, may well become takers. But it also follows that takers can become givers. Additionally, there should be ways to appeal to a taker’s better nature: these are not evil people after all (they may once have been givers!)
- While the takers might not be evil, the givers are clearly the goodies. The ones we are rooting for to win — and guess what? They do win! In fact, the majority of the most successful people Grant works with have been givers. As an example of why this might be, consider a negotiation between two parties. On the surface, it may seem like any takers are going to come away the winners, with all the things they wanted because the givers will just give in meekly to their demands. But there is something more subtle at play here. The giver may have sacrificed in the short term, but they have benefited in the long term by cementing a stronger relationship with the other party and proving that they are someone you want to do business with. We see a similar situation in the teaching world when a teacher agrees to doing at least one game with their students a week, in order to build a stronger relationship with the them and increase their motivation. If the game manages to motivate the students, is educational, and doesn’t take long to prep, then the clever teacher has in fact given away something that cost them nothing.
Identifying givers and takers
So who are the givers in your class, and who are your takers? Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as you might think. It turns out that how generous or selfish a person is, doesn’t necessarily correlate with how agreeable they are. This is demonstrated in Grant’s TED talk with this excellent 2x2 diagram.
As Grant explains, the agreeable giver (Flanders) is easy to spot, they’re friendly and generous. The disagreeable taker (Darth Sidious) is easy to spot too: they’re probably not very well liked in the team. Harder to spot are the gruff Dr Houses who may be curt or abrasive at times, but when you take a closer look at their actions, you discover they are actually very helpful and willing to give up their time — even if they outwardly seem to resent it. Similarly, hiding in plain sight are the Stewies, i.e. the charismatic ones who are actually very demanding. In the classroom, Stewie is surely the class clown: outgoing and funny, they may even have formed a close relationship with the teacher, but they are also monopolising the teacher’s time and won’t hesitate to ask for special treatment or favours.
The third category, unrepresented in our 2x2, are the matchers: the people who want to get as much as they give. Grant says that, in fact, most people fall into this category. The benefit of having plenty of matchers on your team is that they will punish the takers by treating them with reciprocal stinginess. The only issue is that Grant still maintains that the most effective (or profitable) teams and individuals are givers. The aim should then be to encourage more givers and weed out or limit the effect of the the takers.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, givers can also be the least effective team members because they are just being altruistic to the point where they aren’t getting any of their own work done. He says that we need to take care of these givers to prevent this burnout. I would imagine that this is relevant to a giver-teacher, but also relevant for a giver-student.
Elephants and ethics
So if Grant is right with his analysis of personality styles, then what does it mean for a teacher’s classroom, or how does it relate to our troublemaker students? I’ll be considering this further in my next article, but first an elephant in the room needs addressing: learning styles.
Regular readers might remember my attempt to objectively, through reference to research (or lack of it), discredit learning styles. I ridiculed nonsense such as learning by smell, or the idea that we only ever learn via one style, e.g. if you’re teaching a child what an apple is, do you show them one, or describe one to them because you’re convinced they are an ‘auditory’ learner? Surely, the former. But I also tried to give credit to the styles/preferences/motivations that had more scientific merit.
Adam Grant is a respected university professor who stands on the shoulders of other giants in psychology, so that’s definitely something to bear in mind when considering the merits of his ideas. Additionally, I think his work also passes the sniff test, mostly because I can think of people in my work and personal life who might fit into these different categories. But we have do be careful with this kind of thinking. Freud’s psychoanalysis theory also passed the sniff test for me while I was at uni, even while I was listening to my lecturer discredit it. So one man’s ideas and our feelings about them are not enough to make them gospel. And, as with learning styles, we need to be wary of pigeonholing students based on our opinions or ill-conceived tests. Otherwise, we risk stepping into unethical territory.
Instead, we should carefully consider these ideas, and tentatively decide if there is any way they can inform our classroom practice without adversely affecting the students. I think there is strong case to be made for this with respect to troublemakers, because here, we’re not talking about a teacher experimenting on their students, so much as them trying to seek a solution to an existing problem.
Join me for Part 3 where I discuss some potential classroom applications of Grant’s ideas, and share some activities with a focus on preventing and limiting the impact of classroom troublemakers.
