How do people learn?

That's the big question I need to work to express an articulate answer to in the coming weeks. . . . As I write this I am sitting at a table in an apartment in Jerusalem. I had the opportunity to come and live here for two months for personal reasons, but I made a commitment to my employer that I would use this time to work on the papers I need to write as part of my effort to become certified as a professional teacher of chaplains and other spiritual caregivers. The next paper I need to write is about my educational theory.

Back before the summer started, I made a stab at writing in a single statement what I believe about how people learn:

Through participation in a loving community of mutual caring, learning and personal transformation led by a teacher/role model(s) able to bless students and give them a balance 1) of structure (דין/din) with flexibility/compassion (חסד/hesed), and 2) of immediate presence with (progressively increasing) withdrawal (tzimtzum).

That statement needed work then and it still does now. . . . . Most importantly, I need to do some serious work reflecting on how the work I did leading a group of chaplaincy students this summer relates to that statement. Is that really how the learning happened in practice? If not, is that because I a) really believe something different about how learning happens, or is it because b) I just didn't get it right this time (and I can work to better implement my theory next time I lead a group of chaplain students).

I also need to work towards asking myself what educational theorists or models correlate with my belief. I need to seek out those sources and engage them -- asking myself how they enrich, or undermine, my understanding.

I am so grateful to be able to do this work while I am in Jerusalem. I have missed this holy city so much. I have not been back since my rabbinical school year (2000-2001). . . . It is certainly a frightening place to be, however. . . Although it might surprise people to know what it is that I feel fear about. . . . It is not so much terrorism (although that is a real concern). It's the challenge of being somewhere so foreign. . . . Where just doing little things -- like going to the supermarket, or crossing the street -- can be confusing and make me feel small and incompetent. . . . . Minna put it well in a conversation she had with her Hebrew language teacher -- Jerusalem is a place of strong smells: both the beautiful smell of the abundant flowers . . . and also smells that are a bit more like manure. . . . This is a city of contrasts. I love it for that. Those contrasts are part of what makes life feel so incredibly intense here. . . I feel so alive here!!! . . . So grateful to the Holy Blessed One for sustaining me and upholding me so that I might see this, again.

[X-posted to smamitayim]

Judaism meets the chaplain – the “House of Inquiry” at the middle

At the rabbinical school I went to, we had a place we called the Beit Midrash/בית מדרש. To the untrained eye, it might have looked something like a library. It had books on bookshelves. It had tables and chairs. But it was anything but a place of silence. In fact, when it was full the sound of study became nothing short of a roar. People had books in front of them, but they were not reading them alone. They read them to each other out loud. People were thinking and analyzing and debating and creating, but the product was not a typed paper, or anything written at all. Instead, people were speaking their thoughts to one another. This was a kind of live-learning that only happened if we were all together. If there was any end product of this collective endeavor, it was within the minds and souls of the participants, not something on paper with the name of a single author on it.

In that Beit Midrash – and in the ones at the other Jewish institutions that nurtured me on my way to becoming a rabbi – I learned to love a particularly Jewish approach to learning. An approach that valued learning being done in groups or pairs, instead of the individual-focused and paper-writing-obsessed model of academia. An approach that might have seemed aimless to the person unfamiliar with it. An approach that upheld, in particular, the seemingly aimless value of Torah Lishma/תורה לשמה, Torah study for its own sake (as opposed to studying to achieve any particular goal). But, it would not quite be accurate to say Torah Lishma has no aim. Its aim is about cultivating something in the individual – transforming him or her to be a better person, one closer to God. One who knows better how to follow God's will. One who knows better how to care for his or her fellows -- something like the aim of learning through personal transformation that we have in chaplaincy education.

This summer – my first leading a chaplaincy education program on my own – I've had a chance to figure out how I can bring the educational and spiritual forms I have learned on my Jewish path to the multi-faith sphere that is Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).

Last week we hit the middle of our program, a time when many programs do a mid-term review where the students take stock of what learning they have done, where they have been surprised and what they would like to do with the remainder of their time in the program. Many times this is done by each student writing a paper on their own. When I was a summer student, our supervisor asked us to express ourselves artistically by making collages that we shared with the rest of the group.

But I wanted to bring the model of the Beit Midrash – literally the House of Inquiry – into CPE. I decided that our learning should be done out loud and together. I did ask the students to reflect a bit on their own first and gave them some questions to think about. But most of the work was done out loud. We devoted about 25 minutes to each of our five students (mostly young, Protestant seminary students) over the course of one long morning and then spent 30 minutes reflecting on how we had been functioning and developing as a group. The students were very active in asking each other questions and most of the time I was able to do what I like to do most as a group facilitator – just sit back and enjoy how well the group is functioning on its own with only the slightest of interventions from me.

To be honest, it was only upon reflection that I realized how well what I had chosen to do fit the model of the Beit Midrash that I want to bring into CPE. I also realized that another aspect of how I had organized my summer program well reflected the live-learning and collective/group-learning values of the Beit Midrash – I have a minimum of ndividual writing requirements in my program. Most programs set an individual requirement for how many verbatims (detailed written reports on a patient visit) a student needs to write during the unit. Most of those get presented to the full group, but if there's not enough time in the group not all of them get presented. I, however, turned this kind of requirement on its head. I started with a group requirement for the number of verbatim presentations we would do (three a week, more than some other programs), and asked the students to set up a schedule on their own of who would present when. No verbatims would be written and not presented.

___________

Above I mentioned that when I was a summer student, we had done an artistic mid-term evaluation. As a person who personally prefers the written word as a means of expression (I can't even draw a straight line!) I hated this! So, I was surprised to see art playing such a central and effective role in our mid-term evaluation last week. Early in the week, an art therapist at our hospital had come in and done an exercise with our students. He gave them a simple exercise to carry out in clay – create a representation of a wall, of yourself and of the relationship between the two. I was stunned to see how the sculptures the students created reflected so well what I had assessed their learning issues to be. We were able to use the images from these sculptures during our discussions as a springboard for analysis and as metaphors for what the students were experiencing. It was very rich and helped make the mid-term evaluation the great success I believe it was.

I am so proud of my students. They are working so hard to engage the very challenging learning issues that the work of caring for people in an intense hospital environment brings up every day. I hope they find blessing – and much learning – in the weeks remaining!

Torah Lishma and the Living Human Document

Studying Torah for no other purpose than the study itself -- תורה לשמה/torah lishma in Hebrew -- is one of Judaism's most central spiritual practices, approaching a level that prayer has for many Christians. This practice is not one I expect Christians to be familiar with, or to be easily able to understand.

So I found it highly suprising -- and also deeply rewarding -- when our (Lutheran) senior supervisor turned to me during a lecture he was giving to our summer chaplain students and said that what he was telling them was really the same as the concept of Torah Lishma that was at the core of how Alan (=me) is organizing their program of education.

He then went on to beautifully and succinctly describe how I apply the concept of Torah Lishma to the task of educating people about pastoral care: Torah Lishma, he said, is developing a lifelong love of learning (or curiosity) about the human predicament/experience for the sake of nothing but the relationship itself (whether that be a relationship through the study of the "living human document" that is a hospital patient in spritual distress or whether it be a relationship with God through the study of the Holy words/text God has given us).

Actually, what he said was a lot more succinct and articulate than that, but that's the basic idea.

What he was lecturing about at the moment he said that, by the way, was about a pastoral attitude that creates the possibility of forming relationship with the person you are ministering to. There are four attributes that contribute to that pastoral attitude (and they are the same four that formed the basis for the lecture I wrote about here is more detail in a post about meeting certification committees):

• Authority and assurance in your role (offering authority with an open attitude and hand)
• Understanding (of the human predicament)
• Being non-judgmental
  
• Empathy (conveying it accurately)

_______________

I, by the way, used the term Torah Lishma a little differently in the syllabus I gave my students -- instead of describing it as an overarching theory about pastoral care and education, I made it the name for a single seminar where the students would teach one another. Here's how I described it

Blaming the student

On Friday, I heard an excellent lecture by my supervisor about coping with “impasses” in dealing with students.

He based his lecture in large part on a book that’s not about teaching chaplains and seminary students at all, but rather on the struggles psychotherapists have with difficult patients (Psychotherapy With "Impossible" Cases: The Efficient Treatment of Therapy Veterans by Barry L. Duncan, Mark A. Hubble, Scott D. Miller).

The issue of ‘blame’ really jumped out at me here. We are so often so quick to blame the student when there are problems. But the idea here is to throw out the entire concept of blame altogether and to assume that neither the teacher nor the student is to blame.

Rather, the idea is to focus on

• Relationship (between student and teacher), and
• The students desires, thoughts and feelings, etc.
  

That is, the teacher (or therapist or CPE supervisor) should not be so rigidly wedded to his or her own (learning or therapeutic) theory or curriculum. Rather than blaming the student when the student resists the theory or curriculum, the teacher should ask what it is that the student really wants to learn and ask whether this can be accommodated and nurtured. That is, the student should largely be directing his or her own learning and/or supervision.

This is an idea that has long had tremendous attraction for me. My main two experiences in university-level learning during my life have been my undergraduate education (Grinnell College) and my rabbinical school education (The University of Judaism). (I also have another couple of masters degrees from other institutions, but that's a story for another day!)

At Grinnell, believe it or not, we had _zero_ required classes. That is, there was no core curriculum at all. Students could sign up for whatever courses they wanted.

You might think that this would lead to laziness. But it was anything, but. Students – despite taking on something of a slacker and/or hippy exterior appearance – were amazing motivated and hard working. It was just an incredibly exciting learning environment. People wanted to do well. They cared about their classes. They studied things that interested them. Often, they hero-worshiped their teachers.

Rabbinical school was almost the complete opposite. Almost every class was required. There was almost no choice in the curriculum. The result worked very well for some people. But not so much for others. It had its strengths, but it lacked flexibility.

None of this tension between non-structured and highly structured approaches to learning is new. One prominent advocate of a non-directive learning approach was the famous psychotherapist Carl Rogers.

Now, in an age when cognitive-behavior therapy and other _hard_ and directive approaches have taken over the world of psychotherapy, it seems positively old-fashioned to cite Rogers.
But, I find myself more and more attracted to him. Here is how one web site sums up his approach to learning:

Rogers distinguished two types of learning: cognitive (meaningless) and experiential (significant). The former corresponds to academic knowledge such as learning vocabulary or multiplication tables . . . . The key to the distinction is that experiential learning addresses the needs and wants of the learner. Rogers lists these qualities of experiential learning: personal involvement, self-initiated, evaluated by learner, and pervasive effects on learner.

To Rogers, experiential learning is equivalent to personal change and growth. Rogers feels that all human beings have a natural propensity to learn; the role of the teacher is to facilitate such learning. This includes: (1) setting a positive climate for learning, (2) clarifying the purposes of the learner(s), (3) organizing and making available learning resources, (4) balancing intellectual and emotional components of learning, and (5) sharing feelings and thoughts with learners but not dominating.

According to Rogers, learning is facilitated when: (1) the student participates completely in the learning process and has control over its nature and direction, (2) it is primarily based upon direct confrontation with practical, social, personal or research problems, and (3) self-evaluation is the principal method of assessing progress or success.

I’m convinced by Rogers (at least for learning for professional adults). But, suprizingly, so much of the professional learning I see (especially in the medical setting) moves in the opposite direction -- it is very much what Rogers calls “meaningless” and which I might call content-oriented (the assumption being that you can indeed successfully shovel a certain amount of information into people’s brains as long as it is on power point slide). I also think this emphasis on standardized testing (for schoolkids) is moving us more and more towards a content-focused approached.

The problem is that non-directive learning -- as superior as it is overall -- requires a leap of faith. You need to trust the students and the teachers (especially that the teachers be both motivated and talented). It's very hard to certify and/or quantify that the learning is happening. Having a set amount of data in a powerpoint presentation that we can at least certify that someone sat through gives us the illusion we are _certifying_ that they are learning all the material in the presentation. So, we can certify something. We can measure something. We feel like we can justify what we are doing. And -- in a society that is more and more obsessed with numbers and evidenced-based approaches -- this kind of approach has a growing attraction.

Clinical Pastoral Education seems to be an island where what I would call a relationship-centered approach to education can still find a hold. . . I'm glad to be a part of it!!!

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