Meaning Making in Interdisciplinary Teacher Teams:

A Constructive-Developmental View

Scott Hannon

T006: Adult Development

Professor Bob Kegan

Harvard Graduate School of Education

May 5, 2011

“I…once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me.”

~The Beatles

“I…once had a group, or should I say, it once had me.”

~Anonymous

I’ve always been fascinated by groups. When I was five, my parents chose to divorce, and while I remember some loneliness associated with going for long stretches without seeing my dad, when I put my head on my pillow at night my mind tended to ponder how the ‘whole’ of my family was made up smaller, individual ‘parts’. Everything in life seemed to be made up of smaller parts. And I wanted to be one of the people who put the parts together.

I remember how much my sister and I fell in love with TheParent Trap, a film that features two girls, identical twins, who trick their parents into re-marrying. While my sister and I were not successful in that venture, a curiosity about the intertwining relationship between the individual and the group continued throughout my life. This curiosity contributed to my being a member of various communities, choosing teaching and counseling as a career, and studying the psychology of groups. I taught almost every subject at the high school level and even some subjects at the college level. I was a school counselor, head of a Social Studies department, and a director of a school. I studied emotional intelligence, conflict resolution and transformative education. After a 20-year career in education, I discovered that I’d accidentally become quite knowledgeable about how all the subjects interconnect; I’d become an inter-disciplinarian.

A few years ago, I was accepted into a doctorate program in Interdisciplinary Studies at ColumbiaTeachers College, where I specialized in interdisciplinary teacher teams and eventually led professional development groups for teachers. I’m stimulated by the way a group of people from differing backgrounds and disciplines can come together to become a “better whole”, and perhaps help improve kids’ lives. I never did get my parents to re-marry; I never did put those pieces together. But in the process I’ve become a different kind of minister—a minister in “marrying” diverse groups of teachers.

A key element of the curriculum reform movement is the understanding that existing disciplinary divisions contribute to the fragmentation of the school day for students and teachers alike. This understanding led to the growth of improved interdisciplinary curricula, a movement that by some estimates has affected nearly two-thirds of American schools (Grossman et. al., 2000). Experts on the challenges and problems of our world remind us that solutions are best solved not from a single disciplinary perspective but from many perspectives. For the sake of improving education, experts of different disciplines must learn to work better together. In an increasingly diverse and complex world, the need to work effectively in groups is greater than ever. Collaborative work often produces more stunning results than any one individual could create on his own, and yet so many high schools, colleges, and universities have many extraordinarily gifted people operating relatively independently from each other (Kegan, 2000).

Soon after being accepted into the Interdisciplinary Studies doctoral program at Columbia Teachers College, I started facilitating workshops designed to help teachers develop highly integrated interdisciplinary curricula, while at the same time fostering a sense of collaborative teamwork, partnership, and community. I met with a high degree of success in most schools. But one group of teachers stood out to me and led to an experience that forever altered the way I viewed interdisciplinary groups. I learned more than I ever expected about how to identify complexity of mind from interdisciplinary work and the impact that complexity has on interdisciplinary collaboration itself.

One of the keys to my insights was aided by the notion of Constructivism. Constructivism is a powerful perspective relevant to many different disciplines, including Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Anthropology, and Theology. Central to the constructivist perspective is the concept that our minds assimilate enormous amounts of data and function as meaning-making machines. While it might be a stretch of the imagination, interdisciplinary teams of teachers function in much the same way: the purpose of most interdisciplinary groups is to draw from many different disciplines and construct new and useful curricular meaning and knowledge. In this sense, interdisciplinary groups serve as a kind of a“curricular mind”for the entire school.

Three primary questions drive this paper:

1)Drawing on the constructive-developmental perspective, how does the content of the dialogue within interdisciplinary groups provide evidence for coherence around an order of mind of individual teachers?

2)How does the complexity of mind of these teachers influence the way they conceptualize, construct, make meaning of, and make a difference with interdisciplinary teams and curriculum?

3)What does it mean for a group of interdisciplinary teachers to have, collectively, an order of mind?

Note of Clarification:I’m aware of the fundamental difference between looking for structural coherence in an individual’s order of mind by analyzing therapy and doing so through the lens of his discussion within an interdisciplinary teaching team. However, given the increasing importance placed on interdisciplinary methodologies, I think it’s worth considering. I’m aware that other variables are relevant, such as individual’s relationship with his discipline, his propensity to be more extroverted than introverted, and the unique way a group influences his way of being.

Megan the Math Teacher: A 3rd-Order Perspective of Disciplinary Teams: Multi-Disciplinary

Megan was a recently-trained Math teacher who was rushed through a fellowship program designed to fill the need for Math teachers in the NYC public schools. She taught in the day and attended Masters classes in the afternoon and early evening. Megan reacted frequently to comments made in the group with laughs and sarcastic rolls of her eyes, with comments like “I don’t know about this group. I don’t always want to be here, but I guess that’s what the director wants”. She frequently complained about the time this group took away from her graduate school responsibilities. Her experience of the demands made on her by the school paralleled the way she thought about the demands made on their high school students. Her comment “I guess my dad was a Math geek so I’m next in line”, implied she was to some degree socialized into her discipline, subject to the loyalties and traditions in her family. Her comment that “I think Math gets lost in the interdisciplinary groups”, reminded me of explanation in class of the beaker and water-level analysis with little Stephen. Throughout the semester, Megan almost always deferred to others when creating interdisciplinary curriculum, suggesting around the 3rd-order structuring associated with a lack of self-authoring, and dependency on others.

Demonstrating a metaphor used in Kegan’s lecture on Adult Development, Megan showed a capacity to drive the“automatic car” of her own discipline, but in the context of cross-disciplinary planning, her “driving a stick-shift” skill-set was limited. Megan’s ability to work abstractly was limited. In a discussion about an interdisciplinary unit on environmental destruction, Megan proposed the idea of holding a mock rainforest convention with the mission of reducing environmental destruction and global warming. For the Math component of this curriculum, she suggested the kids play the role of a “Math specialist”, who offers data on the size and rate of destruction. On one hand, her suggestion was a valid contribution; however, it was a relatively linear, limited suggestion for this interdisciplinary team. Taken in conjunction with her quote “Let’s get some Math in this convention—the kids need all they can get in this competitive world”, the other teachers felt that she had a limited perspective of the potential for this interdisciplinary unit. The way she thought about curriculum structure for this group demonstrated something closer to a “multi-disciplinary” perspective, which holds disciplines like separate food choices at a buffet rather than an inter-disciplinary blending together of food items. Multi-disciplinary perspectives usually lack a cross-categorical or cross-disciplinary element. And, since the multi-disciplinary perspective does not encourage much comparing and contrasting of disciplines, the value structures associated with other disciplines tend to remain static. In such a group, disciplines different from a teacher’s specialty tend to stay “subject” to him or her. In this sense, multi-disciplinary groups operate in a kind of 3rd order of mind. Megan’s multi-disciplinary curriculum approach was oriented—whether she was aware of it or not—toward students gaining more information,and her priority became more about in-formation than trans-formation.

One of the more creative questions I asked the group was to visually illustrate their perspective of the nature and purpose of our interdisciplinary group. Megan drew many circles, which themselves made up a circle; the “center of gravity” of her drawing did not land in any of the circles themselves. Other teachers drew overlapping Venn diagrams, implying that the teachers were there to discover and share overlapping themes in their disciplines.

Megan expressed anxiety during some planning meetings. In private discussions she shared that she feared being perceived as “being less intelligent” than the other teachers and that she feared saying something wrong. She frequently deferred to the older and more experienced members of her team, especially her Math department head. Because I did not know of its existence at the time, I did not walk Megan or any of the teachers through the Immunity to Change process (Kegan, 2009). However, I could subsequently imagine, from what I observed with Megan, that one of her hidden commitments would be to “not be seen as wrong or unintelligent by others” and that one of her big assumptions would be “if I say something wrong I will be seen as less valuable in the group”. Megan seemed torn and conflicted when other teachers disagreed with her. While there were tensions in the group relating to whose ideas would get ultimately accepted, the tension of the group seemed to “have her”, while in contrast, other teachers were more at ease with the tension. Megan seemed to bounce back and forth between “part of me does not care about this group” and “I should care more, should think more part of this team“. There was a sense in which, to use one of Kegan’s metaphors, Megan seemed to have “one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake” (Kegan, lecture), implying a 3rd-order way of making meaning in the group. Object to Megan was her personal need and preference; she was shaped by what she perceived to be the expectation of the group. The collective consciousness of the group appeared to be subject to her.

Another highly revealing moment was when the group was fairly deeply engaged in an interdisciplinary discussion oriented around identifying broad process themes that were relevant to many different disciplines. We were exploring the process theme “vicious cycle”. In History, a vicious cycle might envelop two parties in a conflict, whereupon the parties threaten and escalate aggression. In Science, the vicious cycle might be used to model the way cancerous cells grow out of control. It was challenging for Megan to be imaginative with her Mathematics contribution. In constructive-developmental theory terms, she struggled with understanding and working with the “edges of her own disciplinary meaning-making”. In fact, Megan was visually agitated at times. While she momentarily suggested “like the spiral of water as it goes down the drain?”, she hesitated to engage more fully or to bring enthusiasm about her idea to the group. Megan’s focus was on demonstrating what she knew solidly and disguising the nature of what she did not know.

I imagine how this group might approach an interdisciplinary unit by deploying the image used in a lecture in Kegan’s Adult Development lectures: a cylinder with a metal ball in the middle. Given the diagnosis so far of Megan’s approach to inter-disciplinary planning and her preference for the literal over the abstract, Megan might make links through Literature, via a story about how a cylinder is found by a character, or how a cylindrical shape might be used in the context of a telescope as part of an “Age of Exploration” unit in a Social Studies class. Such a literal approach would be more object to Megan, whereas using a more abstract, metaphorical interpretation of the cylinder, as referred to in lecture, would most likely be more subject to her. The degree to which she was able to stretch her mind without being overwhelmed by anxiety might suggest how far along the 3-to-4 continuum she was with respect to the complexity of her interdisciplinary thinking. Megan often understood what a higher-order teacher was saying, but she did not seem to fully get where this teacher was saying it from,in terms of his or her meaning structure.

Many interdisciplinary projects and units are assessed by teachers. When assessment possibilities arose in conversation, Megan suggested more narrow assessments, which other teachers felt were “like standardized tests”. Most of the teachers of this group viewed standardized tests as having a very limited capacity to accurately measure student progress and saw the “standardized test mindset” as being even less appropriate for measuring student progress within the context of interdisciplinary units. The reason they gave: the boundaries of the disciplines are blurred and demand more creative forms of assessment.

Chris the Literature Teacher: A 4th-Order Perspective on Disciplinary Teams: Inter-Disciplinary

Chris was a Literature teacher for many years before our group started to meet. He firmly grasped the concept behind interdisciplinary methodology, having both a detailed understanding of his subject as well asa strong sense for how it overlapped with other subjects. I learned in the preliminary meetings that he came to teaching Literature/Language Arts out of an authentic love of the discipline. He had not been subject to the socialized desires and pressures of family members or others in his surroundings as he progressed through his career. He did not see working across disciplinary lines as “taking away anything from his discipline”. He was at ease with “changing conversational gears” within the group. Chris was self-authoring in his approach to working with the group. He demonstrated a capacity for complex meaning-making with respect to overlapping interdisciplinary themes and was key in constructing and playing an authoring role with the interdisciplinary curriculum. In moments when other teachers deferred to the authority of the heads of their departments, Chris’s relationship with his department head and his speaking patterns suggested an equal status. He would say things to his department head like, “Let’s think this through together”.

When asked what he thought was the goal of interdisciplinary curriculum planning, he said “to tease out themes broadly connected to many disciplines so that teachers can explore with kids the way theyapproach many subjects”.His use of the word “way” implied a way of framing interdisciplinary thinking that demonstrated Chris’s understanding that knowledge is constructed and that how students know a body of knowledge is as important, or more important, than what they know. Chris also said “…in finding overlapping themes between subjects kids will have a broader look, which is necessary in this flat world…they can link arms together and not be so overwhelmed…” which highlights Chris’s understanding of the connection between student work and the real world. His use of the term “flat world” probably is a reference to Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (even if Chris was not aware that the popular use of the term links to Friedman) and is analogous to Kegan’s use of the term “modern world” in the context of a 4th-order, modern world mindset.

When asked about how they visually conceptualized the group, Chris drew a Venn diagram, with the intersection being the central overlap of all the disciplines, implying his fundamental emphasis on inter-connection and the inter-disciplinary. His use of the words “yes” and “no” were fluidly interchangeable, depending on the circumstances. He once said “we are not doing this [interdisciplinary planning] in a linear fashion” which suggested his awareness of interdisciplinary work occurring in a more complex and dynamic context. This way of seeing the group was also evident in how he settled disputes; he had numerous differences of opinion with group members, but the conflicts themselves did not “have him”. He was able to quickly and smoothly transition from being mildly aggravated to focusing in on how to synthesize his viewpoints with the broader interdisciplinary tapestry of the group. For example, he once said “…I’m frustrated, what I want to say is…I want you to see that we can use this portion of it (a quote) in the lesson…” Here, his frustration was more connected to his own struggle to communicate his sense of passion about a complex concept as opposedto the flavor of frustration that arises when someone is irritated by the style or tone of voice of a fellow teacher. Chris held, or “had his thumb around”the tension in the group: the group did not hold himor have him “thumbed down”.