Honoring the Introvert

In the early seventies, when the country was emerging from burning bras and draft cards, I was a neophyte educator with a limited pedagogical toolkit. I was thrust into a teaching environment where the students enrolled were unmotivated, disenfranchised, and as anti-school as one could get. Intuitively, I knew that that I could not teach them all the same way - their reading levels ranged from pre-K to 12th grade even though most were of high-school age. I knew nothing of differentiating instruction, research-based interventions, or accommodating varying learning styles. I did the only kind of individualized instruction I knew; giving each student a folder and letting them proceed at their own speed. To some degree, I was differentiating their readiness level.

Since that time, I feel somewhat like that outdated Virginia Slims slogan, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!” As a professor of education, I now know how to differentiate instruction and that students arrive at the schoolhouse door with a plethora of learning preferences as well as readiness levels and interests. Therefore, I pay particular interest when I find an author who, in promoting a particular theory or concept, suggests how it could be used in education. Susan Cain has done that, to a degree, in her recent article in the New York Times Sunday Review section, entitled, “The Rise of the New Groupthink.”

Susan is a self-proclaimed introvert and she has written a book about that psychological trait and how it is a necessity for creative thinking. I believe it is a good thing that she is shining a spotlight on the need of some individuals to work alone and I strongly agree with her statement, “Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence.” But her inference that all of us have to have solitude to be creative makes me a tad nervous.

I am also concerned about her team and group bashing, especially her comment regarding the visit she made to a fourth-grade classroom. She claims that students working in groups “were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.” Her use of the word forbidden reminds me a bit of the way Alfie Kohn writes. The classroom she describes sounds rigid and controlling. If the sentence was rewritten to say “students were encouraged to ask their group mates before deferring to the teacher,” a much different picture is conjured up. Considering larger class size, especially in New York City Schools, this group processing strategy not only trains students to seek answers from each other, but it is an utter necessity for efficient use of managing learning time.

There are many benefits to using cooperative learning in the classroom, but it has to be done correctly or as Ms. Cain puts it, “People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work.” Structuring positive interdependence takes thoughtful planning, but is the only way to avoid what one of my former students stated as his bias toward cooperative learning; “I do all the work and others get all the credit!”

The author also bashes brainstorming, a technique I use in my class to generate lists of information – students feed off of each other’s ideas and what I get is much more extensive than if I asked students to do it alone. So brainstorming has a purpose and its use has to be aligned with educational goals.

I commend Ms. Cain for bringing attention to the plight of the introvert or rather to the advantages of “some” people working alone in order to foster creativity. Yet, I know from years of learning styles research, that there are many sociological preferences. Some prefer working alone (that was me as a student), while others prefer working in pairs, a team, or with an authority figure. We need to honor all sociological preferences – working alone being just one.