Choice Theory for Teachers
Mojca Belak, Slovenia
Mojca Belak works at the University of Ljubljana as a teacher and teacher trainer. She is also editor of IATEFL Teacher Development Special Interest Group newsletter and a trainer at Pilgrims, UK. E-mail:mojca.belak@guest.arnes.si
Menu
Introduction
Some basics
Quality world
You cannot make them learn
The four psychological needs
Love and belonging
Power
Freedom
Fun
The four needs combined
Total behaviour
Examples of Total behaviour
Teachers, disruptive students and total behaviour
Conclusion
References
The founder of Choice theory is William Glasser, an American psychologist, who is also the father of Quality School projects mushrooming all around the world. Dr. Glasser has written many books, including Reality Therapy (1965), Schools Without Failure (1969), The Quality School (1990), Choice Theory (1998) and many others. Choice Theory differs from other psychologies in that it rejects the commonly-accepted view that outside events influence somebody’s behaviour. Instead it stresses that people can and should take control of their own lives and stop trying to control others. Basically, there are two general statements at the very core of Choice theory: I cannot change others. and I can only choose my own behaviour. Knowing more about Choice theory can help to solve some every-day down-to-earth discipline-related problems and can deepen the awareness of how people interact.
The idea that people can really choose our own behaviour, our own reactions, can seem strange at the beginning. The widely-accepted view is that it is others who make a person happy, sad, jealous, furious, and so on. This is deeply imbedded in the language also, which is why the accepted way of expressing the cause of one's anger is with statements such as You broke my heart, or You know how to make me cross, and the like. But the truth is that it is the person themself who chooses that very behaviour. I mean, let's face it, you couldn't break my heart unless I decided to cooperate, and certainly nobody can make me cross or even livid unless I myself allow it to happen. I can be more or less successful in preventing others to interfere with my feelings; indeed, the art of controlling own feelings and reactions can be learned, mostly through a lot of practice and many mistakes along the way, which is where Choice Theory overlaps with personal growth.
Traditionally it is said that people cannot control their feelings, that these simply happen. I'll try to show the opposite with this example: Imagine that you are driving a brand new car, maybe it isn't even yours, and you are slightly hit at the back by the car behind you. You stop your car, switch off the engine, step out and wait for the driver of the other car to show his or her face. You could be pretty cross or frightened or whatever, but would your reaction and the choice of words aimed at the careless driver be the same if you found out that the other car was driven by
- A charming good-looking person you'd fancy
- A big uncompromising bully
- A frightened spotted teenager
- A confused middle-aged woman?
I suppose your reaction would be different for any of the said choices, which only proves that people can indeed control our reactions - our behaviour.
Or take another example parents are fairly familiar with: your child falls from the bike or swings and you are not there. If the child is still rather small, more often than not they will start crying only when they get to somebody who will feel sorry for them. If their reaction couldn't be controlled, they would start crying straight away in response to the pain. But this is not what usually happens. They usually need an audience, a person who would comfort them, before they start crying.
When my friend's daughter was a toddler and started having tantrums, she carried them out very dramatically. She threw herself down and banged her small fists on the floor. Bored with this performance, which she was carrying out in the hall, her father once closed the door leading to the living room where he sat. The girl was left without an audience, so she stopped banging, picked herself up, went to the living room door and opened it, and only then did she go back to the middle of the hall, threw herself on the floor again and continued her tantrum. This way she showed that she was in perfect control of her feelings.
It is popular pop songs that make a lot of damage making people think that it is others who control their own feelings and reactions. By doing this they alienate the person from their source and instead of looking inside for clues and taking an opportunity to change something, people blame others for their own misfortune. This way they miss great opportunity for change.
People always have a choice. Imagine you had a person in your life who doesn't like you, and this person sends you a highly offensive email. How do you react? You can get upset, show it to the people who you know will give you support, you can spend most of your time thinking about it. Or, alternatively, you can delete the email as soon as you've read it and focus on something more pleasant that you are currently doing in life. And these are only two out of many possible options...
Now, when I have accepted that I am in charge of my own actions and reactions and start believing that nobody can influence or change me unless I want to, what does that mean in the context of teaching? Could it be that pupils will only learn from me if they want that, or if I look from another angle, could this mean that there is no way the teacher can make pupils learn if they are disinterested in the subject, school or the teacher herself?
From a very early age on every person builds their own quality world in their mind. In it they store images, pictures or feelings which brought the feeling of well-being or pleasure. A baby would start this collection of pictures, their unique gallery, with the pictures of the mother, her lap, breastfeeding, fresh nappies, and so on. Later in life other actions, people, objects, feelings, etc. are gradually added, and the person will try different behaviour to reach one, two, many pictures that give them pleasure. If somebody puts family life high on the quality world list, they will try to reach this goal, land achieving it will be very important for them. If they should fail in this respect, they would feel much more upset and negative than someone who also doesn't have a family but has never included the picture of a family in their quality world.
In my case, say, looking after Nature and respect for living beings is very much present in my quality world, which is why I cycle to work, re-use envelopes and carrier bags, don't eat meat, and so on. On the other hand, anything even remotely connected with maths never entered my quality world so I never really tried hard in this direction and the fact that I'm not very good at it doesn't bother me at all.
If a child has a good relationship with their parents and the parents think that going to school, working hard, getting good grades and graduating is important, then the child will soon put all these into his or her quality world. It won't be difficult to go to school and work hard even when they don't feel like it. Most teachers have school and obtaining a degree in their quality worlds: some took this idea (picture) over from their parents, who they trusted, others placed it there themselves later in life.
Of course, not all children have placed school in their quality world, which is what teachers, with their different quality worlds, may find difficult to understand. If school is not in a child's quality world, then the child will not strive to reach this picture. Very often the people who are in the quality world of such a child, his or her family, friends, or neighbours, don't have school in their quality worlds either.
Trying to teach somebody who likes neither the teacher nor the subject, is impossible, because the teacher doesn't have control over her students, she cannot 'make' them learn unless they want it themselves. Is this where classical educational system hits a dead end? The teacher is expected to teach her subject and produce students who get decent exam grades, while some students are totally disinterested in what she teaches and refuse to learn.
The only way for the teacher to succeed in such situation is, according to Glasser, to try and get into the students' quality world. In order to achieve that, the teacher has to be accepted by the students as a human being, not only as a teacher. Shouting, humiliating, threatening and punishing them will definitely not get the teacher into her students' quality world. Many most problematic children lack an understanding, warm personality in their lives and if the teacher, instead of being a figure of authority, strives to be more humane, chances are that she will be accepted, liked, and respected. All this opens the door to the students' quality world.
Students like teachers who are kind and caring, and above all, who are interested in them. I may know something about teaching English but may be totally useless when it comes to handling a DVD player which won’t work or buying an I-pod, so asking students for advice would bring me a step closer to them. Students would also warm to a teacher who acknowledges that her subject is not the one and only in the world and notices that the class is quiet and tired because of a difficult maths test the previous lesson, for example. Asking pupils how it all went wouldn't take much of the precious class time but it would give a clear signal to the students that someone there actually cares for them.
Listening, too, is very important – a teacher who talks to her students and takes into consideration what they say also has a chance to get into their quality world. Sometimes it is good to ask students for some advice because they may have the answers the teacher would never think of. The example I'll give here is from my teaching experience even though I am in a slightly different situation than most of my colleagues because I teach university students who are usually motivated and unproblematic. Two years ago a student in my class was particularly chatty and practically never stopped talking. I tried a few things but nothing worked, so I asked her what she would advise me to do to stop her chatting in class. She came up with some fresh approaches I would never have thought of and which, not surprisingly, worked.
According to Choice Theory, every human being has five universal needs. Apart from the very basic, physiological need to survive (eat, drink, sleep, as well as multiply) each and every one of us has four basic psychological needs: love and belonging, power, freedom and fun. According to Glasser, they are driven by our genes and since all human beings are members of the same species, all people have the same genetic needs. From an early age on a person always knows how they feel, and lives their life striving to feel good. And "just as a northern migrating bird must always attempt to fly south for the winter, we, too, must attempt to live our lives in ways that we believe will best satisfy our needs" (Glasser 1998b: 46).
The most important of the four is the need to love, be loved and to belong because people seem to feel happy and content only if they are close to those they care about. This need is not only about finding a special person in one’s life. It encompasses everybody that a person lets into their life on a more intimate level. A good relationship with your parents or siblings will grant the fulfilment of this need in early childhood, while later in life a person needs friends, maybe a spouse, their own children, relatives, teachers, trainers, spiritual teachers and various circles of people they belong to – from pals they regularly meet at the pub or over a coffee to members of the same club or association where they spend their free time. No matter how old a person is, if they are rejected by their family, friends, schoolmates, colleagues or the whole culture, the impact is always the same – they do not feel good.
A teacher should therefore be kind and caring as well as deeply interested in their students and their subject. They should be able to listen to the students and sometimes ask their advice. Not everybody is skilled in using the computer in class and if things go wrong, as they often do, why not ask students for help? A shy guy sitting at the back of the class may excel in computers and maybe the teacher’s computer disaster will be their time to shine.
However, having a good relationship with your students isn’t always well accepted, as Glasser (1998b: 58) clearly points out in his description of problems that a teacher who wants to lead instead of bossing students around, will encounter: "The lead-teacher will also be criticized for caring too much and told that too much personal involvement is unprofessional. She will be admonished to keep the state assessment tests in mind and to fragment the subject so that students will do better on these tests, even though this approach fails to capture the attention of over half the students. She will quickly learn that in schools (as well as in a world) dominated by boss-managers, she will be unpopular for what she believes and especially for what she does. She will see many boss-teachers failing miserably, but still most of those who run the system will continue to support what the boss-teachers do as right and criticize her as wrong."
The need for power is closely connected with respect and self-worth. In a relationship power means that I can do things my way, for example squeeze the toothpaste in the middle of the tube and not at the end, and I am not criticised for it. According to Choice theory many relationships break down not because there is no love in them any longer but because spouses never learn how to share power. The need for power is interesting in that bossing other people around usually results in the need for more power, not less. Some people feel powerful when they have a lot of money, others exercise their power by shouting at others, insulting or even beating them.
A teacher who badly needs power as a person is usually distant and bossy. Many university teachers exercise their power by making students wait for hours to be admitted to an oral exam. Whenever I see scores of students waiting the whole morning to be finally given those twenty minutes of their lecturer’s attention, I always imagine that their lecturer must be very unsure of their power, which is why they need to energise themself by keeping so many people in suspense for so long.
A teacher whose power tank is almost empty often resorts to criticising the students in many different ways. Any comments on students’ mental (dis)abilities or shouting are markers of this need. Threatening with certain measures or punishing students are also indicators of a power-hungry teacher. However, people are different and in a situation where one person needs their ego to be massaged a lot, somebody else working under exactly the same circumstances and with the same learners may not feel the need to show their power at all. Teachers who aspire to leading instead of bossing students do not overuse their power when they teach.
People have such a great need to be free that some are even ready to fight or kill to acquire freedom. Everyday life is a clear reminder of how important freedom is. Just imagine what it would be like if you had to do without the freedom of speech, the freedom to choose where you live, how you live or who with. And it is in the human nature to have the tendency to break the rules which make no sense. Similarly, students who do not feel free in the school environment will lose interest and may become disruptive.
If I find myself in a situation where I am forced to do something, I will more often than not feel the need to rebel or I will at least resort to criticising the situation. As I’m writing this, about eighty lorry drivers blocked the busiest streets of my town during the morning rush hour as part of their protest. This way they exercised their power, which, admittedly, they have, especially when they are behind the wheel. But while showing off their power, lorry drivers took away the freedom of many people who had to either go to work or do their errands at that time. And even though lorry drivers’ ingenious plan to attract attention did not directly affect me, I found myself secretly longing for those long lost times when people still threw bad eggs and rotten tomatoes into those they didn’t like. What I want to say is that even though I am usually a perfectly decent citizen, I felt this primal urge to fight back this morning when I was confronted with a possible temporary loss of freedom to move.
I’ll give another example: cycling from work I always pass a rather small and unimportant café and recently I noticed a big sign ‘no cyclists’ in front of it. It had never occurred to me before that I could cut across their space on my bike but when it came out so loud and clear that such manoeuvre was, according to them, now forbidden, I couldn’t help but get off my usual track to pass exactly where it was not allowed - simply because from my point of view it was so stupid of them to have forbidden it.
If students are forbidden too many things, if the lists of don’ts vastly exceed the do’s, they will want to rebel simply because they may feel their freedom trampled on. Instead, the teacher can negotiate a short list of rules with their class and this way gives students choice. When students have put together and confirmed their own rules, they will also have a more serious attitude towards them. They will feel more responsible to follow and not break what they had created. In this context it is also important to tell between punishment and consequence. If a student is ten minutes late and I give them twice as much homework as the rest of the class without a previous warning, this is punishment. I exercise my power and take away their freedom. I won’t even ask what would happen to the need to love and belong at that point. However, if we as a class agree that whoever is more than five minutes late either gets more homework or maybe even brings a 300-gram chocolate to the whole class next time to make up for having disturbed everybody, a student arriving late will know very well what to expect - the rules are clear. If somebody is late, getting more homework or buying chocolate would be the consequence, not punishment. Students will know exactly what the consequences of breaking the rules will be and will therefore be prepared for it. By knowing the basic rules students can also exercise their freedom because when they choose not to come to class on time, they know exactly what will follow.
How often do you make the whole class laugh in the sense that they laugh with you not at you? Laughter has a great binding effect and it relaxes the atmosphere. Ideally, classes should be entertaining and humorous, although it is sometimes hard to expect so much from the teacher: "The desirability that a teacher be entertaining is a further indication of how difficult it is to be an effective teacher" (Glasser 1998b: 70).
If you think of a good teacher, somebody who had a great influence on you and your teaching, you will often notice that the most memorable lessons and the best teachers were in fact those who managed to combine work with a healthy dose of humour. What is more challenging is to be fond of a teacher who is always serious, and who takes themsef and their work utterly seriously. However, if the nature of your national character is such that by being serious you show respect, which is probably imbedded in the depth of your being, a more light-hearted approach of a teacher or speaker could be regarded as frivolous. Anyway, examining the problem on a deeper level will show that humour does the teacher and their students a lot of good. Remember British speakers at conferences? They use humour as a rule at the beginning of their talks to create a better atmosphere and win the audience in the first seconds after taking the floor.
When people have all the four psychological needs – love, power, freedom and fun – satisfied, they feel happy and content, but if only one component is missing, they will often try to have it satisfied by changing their behaviour. You can do a little test to see your own situation: think about a relationship which is important to you and check if all your needs are satisfied there. And what is the situation like in your professional life, at work? Are all the four needs covered equally or is there something missing there? Now think of your students while thinking of the four needs – what is it that they may need most? What about individual students, especially the more disruptive ones, those who are a challenge to teach?
Behaviour in itself is not a simple action or activity, it is a combination of four separate behavioural components and it is therefore called total behaviour. In order to understand total behaviour better I suggest you follow these instructions: First, slow down your heartbeat. Okay, you know you cannot do this, so you most probably haven’t even tried. My second request is: Can you now get angry? I mean really angry. You’ll soon realise that you cannot do this either, at least not directly, because getting angry probably doesn’t make sense at the moment. What you need is think of something to which you usually react with anger and only then can you feel the anger. And now task three: think of an elephant. Can you see it in your mind? Well, you can probably see it for a short time but when you stop reading this, you will forget all about it because, again, thinking of an elephant probably doesn’t make sense at the moment. However, if you thought you’d lost your car keys, that thought would keep coming back to you because it would make sense for you in that particular situation. And my fourth request: Can you close your eyes? You could probably do this in no time, directly and without hesitation, because you can fully control your actions.
Total behaviour is made up of four components: doing, thinking, feeling and physiology but despite the fact that all behaviour is chosen, people only have direct control over the first two components, namely doing and thinking. You had no problem closing your eyes just like you don’t find it difficult to stand up or scratch or turn around. Thinking, too, is voluntary (unless in dreams) but on one condition – it needs to make some sense. If I happen to find myself having to attend a boring lecture, I would probably stop listening and decide to think of something else, something that would make more sense than following what I would find boring: daydreaming or doing my shopping list in my mind. The last two components of total behaviour are a bit different, though: when it comes to feeling and physiology, I cannot control them directly, I can only influence them through doing and feeling.
If I were writing this in a computer room with many people around me and somebody there started talking on their mobile phone, I would probably find that disturbing and, knowing myself, I would soon be rather cross. This would be the feeling component of my total behaviour. My blood pressure could go up, which would be the fourth component, physiology. I could not change these two components or total behaviour but I could do something on the doing and thinking level. If I still believed I could influence other people, I could approach the mobile-phone addict and ask them to stop using the phone in the computer room, or, alternatively, I could simply leave the room for a while, stretch my legs and then come back later. By doing something I would also change my thinking because when my legs took me out of the irritating situation, I would stop thinking black thoughts or wishing to vent my spleen on the intruder and as a consequence my blood pressure would go down so I would also indirectly control my physiology.
Similarly, if I got some bad news and started feeling depressed, I could not control my feelings but I would still have a choice to either do nothing so that I could continue to feel miserable or I could do something about it, go for a run, say, and let it all out on the steep part of my usual route. The choice is always mine and mine alone, even though I can really choose only two parts of the four-part behaviour.
Now try to imagine a situation in class when things went really well. Think about it and try to analyse your own total behaviour in that situation. What were you doing, thinking and feeling, and how was your body responding?
And now imagine a more unhappy class situation where something went wrong. What were the four components of your total behaviour like then? What were you doing, thinking and feeling, and how was your body responding?
According to Choice theory and the way total behaviour works, there is no point trying to deal with a student who is upset. Knowing how behaviour works, the teacher can decide not to get drawn into the same behaviour herself and can - by staying calm - control her behaviour better because she will not focus on her feelings or physiology. Similarly, she will know that if she wants to deal with the situation successfully, she shouldn't focus on the disruptive student's feelings or physiology because the student cannot change those components directly. Instead, the teacher should focus on the student's actions and thoughts.
The worst – and least successful – tactic the teacher can do in class is lose their temper. Getting on the feeling level of total behaviour will not get anybody anywhere. This year I closely followed a rather unhappy approach of making students do quality work, carried out by a teacher of physics at a primary school. I am sure he is enthusiastic about his subject, which is why, I think, he tried to elicit answers from his class. Initially, when pupils did not respond to this with a show of hands and he didn't find himself snowed under their enthusiastic suggestions, the teacher used criticism. Next time eliciting answers was even less successful, so the teacher added insults to criticism which later lead to a vicious circle. According to Choice theory the teacher broke a couple of basic rules. Firstly, he seemed to be convinced that he can influence students and make them work instead of trying to get them interested in what he is so passionate about. Secondly, when his ideal picture of a lesson, the one that is in his quality world, was not met in reality, he allowed himself to react with the pronounced feeling component of his total behaviour. In such a state not only did he fail to solve anything, he also brought himself to an emotional state, which was highly impropriate for the situation.
What about his students? Naturally, they didn’t like being humiliated for days on end, so most of them started hating the teacher and his subject. They hated and rejected everything they thought their teacher had in his quality world, above all physics itself. In short, the students reacted to the teacher's strong feeling component by their own (negative) feelings.
Teachers who try to coerce students into the kind of behaviour they think is appropriate in a certain teaching situation are not successful in the long run. Glasser and Glasser (1999: 78-79) give the following example of two different approaches to the same problem of a disruptive student. "I'll tell you, John, you're going to have to sit by yourself the rest of the year. Stop bothering everybody around you," mirrors external control, while a Choice theory alternative would go like this: "I'm tired of punishing you, John. I want to be your friend. I think you need some friends. I have time this afternoon during my free period to talk with you about making friends. I'd like to get to know you better." The first example could make "John" sit still for a little while, but he will soon repeat his behaviour. In the second example, the teacher went beyond the surface, touched on John's psychological needs, especially the possible lack of love and belonging, and gave the student choice to actually do something about it by talking to a calm, understanding adult later that day.
Learning is easier if students have the teacher and her subject in their quality worlds. Teachers get there mostly by establishing good rapport with the students. A teacher who knows the four basic psychological needs will try to help her students satisfy them in class and will become more a friend to them than a threatening figure of power. Ideally, the teacher should be interested in their students' personal lives and also let the students get to know her better. Glasser states (1998: 128) that teachers often forget how "most students are not on easy personal terms with adults, in many cases not even their own parents". Some teachers, naturally, feel uneasy about letting students get to know them better, but sharing little problems, maybe some anecdotes would help students become more supportive of the teacher, because "not knowing another person, especially one who has power over you as a teacher does over a student, makes anyone more likely to cast that person in the role of an adversary or, at least, not as a friend." (Glasser 1998: 129).
When teachers and students appreciate one another, the feeling of caring satisfies the students' need for belonging (or love) while the teachers' readiness to share power, to lead instead of coerce, results in a higher-quality work.
Glasser, W. 1984. Take Effective Control of Your Life, New York: Harper & Row Publishers.
Glasser, W. and C. Glasser. 1999. The Language of Choice Theory, New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Glasser, W. 1998a. Choice Theory. A New Psychology of Personal Freedom, New York: Harper Collins Publishers
Glasser, W. 1998b. The Quality School. Revised edition, New York: HarperPerennial.
Glasser, W. and C. Glasser. 1999. The Language of Choice Theory, New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
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