I see a lot of people who are clearly introverts who describe themselves as extroverts
Historically introverted students have simply been told that they need to speak up more in class.
Do you think there's a flaw in attributing grades to that direct classroom participation?
I do and not only because it penalizes introverts, but
really in some ways more fundamentally because a
system where you're just rewarding people for
doing this or just speaking out
It's a system that's encouraging a lot of blather
You know, it's not a system that's encouraging people to be thoughtful or to be respectful of other people's time
This is kind of a cultural thing.
So in many Far Eastern cultures
there's much less of an emphasis placed on this and I was talking with a woman who had come to this country from Shanghai and
she had been raised in that system and she told me that she kind of couldn't believe it when she got to
American university - the way she put it she said, you know
everybody just raises their hand and the more they do that the professor nods respectfully, and she said and they're all talking nonsense
and there's this feeling that she had that they're taking up everybody else's time.
But the more you do that the more you're actually rewarded.
So it's a western ideal?
In many ways it is a Western ideal. Yeah, and so I think that
we often recommend
getting rid of the phrase class participation and thinking instead of classroom engagement,
which is kind of a deeper way of looking at it and it recognizes that there's a lot of different ways of being
engaged with material and of being engaged with your fellow classmates. You know for some people
they might do it by by talking deeply with a classmate when class is done or by engaging with a professor at office hours or whatever.
There's a lot of different ways to kind of get in there.
And are people good at self-identifying as introvert or extrovert?
Should we assume it's accurate when a student tells me that she is one or the other.
Oh, that's a good question. I would say sometimes yes and sometimes no.
Probably the biggest inaccuracy that I see people
making, especially during the college years,
I see a lot of people who are clearly introverts who describe themselves as extroverts.
And I think that's because of the social stigma that they might feel about being an introvert.
And so they they'll kind of grit their teeth through a lot of situations that they actually find not to their taste.
So building on that then what do you think is
the best learning environment that in particular introverts can thrive in?
Well for introverts I would say, you know, first of all making much more space for independent work. I would really bring that back
more centrally into the college curriculum. From what I understand we're moving farther and farther away from that
so I think, you know, having students present and write individual papers and do deep thought on their own.
I think of the model that existed, which isn't necessarily
financially practical, but I'm gonna talk about it anyway.
I think it's intellectually useful.
You know, a model at Oxford where the student would sit one-on-one with a professor and really think through ideas.
Those are the way introverts want to process things. They want to do it kind of either in solitude or in
one-on-one or in very small groups in a really deep and thoughtful way, as opposed to
a setting where you're more like jockeying for position and it feels more like the
advancing ideas is more about performance and about
who's taking over when and I think we want to kind of get away from that.
So I would say too that when we're structuring groups
we should be thinking about okay, what role is each person going to play, make sure each person knows what their role is and
really structure discussions carefully so you're making sure that you're inviting everyone into the situation instead of getting into
you know, hearing from only the most dominant voices