Education's Quiet Side

If you walked into a high school classroom right now, chances are that you would observe some form of group activity. Maybe it’s a project. Maybe it’s a discussion. Either way, the piercing sounds of students voices loudly carry throughout the classroom. Everyone is actively participating, or so it seems. But if you look a little closer, you’ll realize that this isn’t the case. There are some students who are sitting quietly and observing the rest of their peers. It’s not because they don’t care. Most of these students are considered introverts and this group style of learning just isn’t their cup of tea.

Unfortunately for them, group-learning, or cooperative learning, is taking the education world by storm. More and more teachers are planning curriculum that is filled to the brim with group projects, group presentations, and group discussions with participation strictly enforced through grades that are heavily based on how often a student actively engages in class. However this approach is one-size-fits-all and doesn’t take into account that back-to-back group-work isn’t for everyone.

This new education system is isolating introverted students and does not allow them to reach their full potential due to an emphasis that the exemplary student is one who is a talkative, loud, outgoing, sociable person.

In her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in World that Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain coins this the “extrovert ideal”. She defines this extrovert ideal as “the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight”. A quick trip to the thesaurus confirms this. When I typed in “introvert”, words with negative connotations such as “shy”, “withdrawn”, and “self-absorbed” came up. However, when I typed in “extrovert”, the associated words are more positive ones such as “affable”, “friendly”, and “sociable”. So it’s no wonder that introverts are often left feeling like something is wrong with them, but this just isn’t true.

In fact, one third to one half the population are introverts. That’s up to 3.5 billion people worldwide that have this “less than ideal” personality trait. And yet there is evidence of the extrovert ideal everywhere we turn. It’s in politics, business, celebrity culture, advertising, and has made its way into education.

Our very own Common Core puts a “far greater value on small-group discussion and student-led work than on any teacher-led instruction,” according to high school English teacher Abigail Walthausen. Lessons and lectures are reduced to “mini-lessons”, which are about 10-15 minutes of the so called “teacher-led instruction” that only covers the very basics of a given topic.

I recently completed a semester-long course in which the teacher gave only two of these mini-lessons. Two. In the whole semester. Aside from that solid 40 minutes of ‘lecturing’, the rest of the class consisted of group projects in which we, the students, had to first teach ourselves the rest of the material, then create a presentation on said material, and finally (you guessed it!) present that material to our classmates in order to teach it to them.

Another teaching phenomenon that I have noticed are large group discussions called ‘socratic seminars’ that have become the norm in pretty much all English and History classes that I have taken. In these seminars, a group of 8-10 students take turns sitting in a circle in the center of the class to discuss a given topic for anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes while the rest of the class takes notes. Participation is mandatory if you want to get credit.

Professor of Higher Education Bruce Macfarlane believes that this is because “student talk is equated with evidence of learning”. He goes on to assert that this leaves “no place in the new regime of student engagement for shy students who might participate in less obvious ways through active listening, making eye contact, taking good notes and even, dare I say, thinking”.

But why is it that quieter, introverted students suffer in classroom environments centered around group-work and discussion?

The answer, of course, is complex and multi-layered, but part of the solution lies in neuroscience. Cain cites a variety of studies from the last half century that focus on arousal levels in the brain. She summarizes by saying “there’s a host of evidence that introverts are more sensitive than extroverts to various kinds of stimulation...and that introverts and extroverts often need very different levels of stimulation to function at their best”.

In a classroom setting based on cooperative learning, the high levels of stimulation that come from things like noisy student discussions or the feeling that everyone is staring during a presentation are Cain’s so called “sweet spots” of arousal for extroverted students who flourish in these types of environments.

On the other hand, introverted students are overstimulated and find it hard to think straight and focus. Because of this, going to school can be an exhausting experience. But it doesn’t have to be.

In order for all students to thrive in their classrooms, teachers should try to balance the amount of group work with the amount of lectures. After all, active listening is just as important a skill as cooperation. Instead of working and discussing in groups of 5-6 students, try putting them in pairs or groups of three.

Smaller groups still give students important practice with cooperation and give extroverted students a chance to converse with their peers, but are much more manageable for the introverts who feel suffocated in the midst of large groups.

When everyone is allowed to function at their full potential, they will feel more comfortable, no one will feel left out or undervalued, and all students will get the education they deserve.