The Anatomy of Peace in Teaching

I just finished reading The Anatomy of Peace (AoP), which is a follow up to Leadership and Self-Deception (I have not yet read the latter). Leadership and Self-Deception is mostly a business book. The Anatomy of Peace applies the concepts from Leadership and Self-Deceptions to familial interactions between parents and children or between spouses. Both books are written by the Arbinger Institute, which is run by Terry Warner, a philosophy professor from BYU (he doesn’t seem to be on faculty there currently, but I can’t find any other affiliation either).

AoP is written as a novel, which is very different from what I have come across in the self-help/business isle. The style makes it a very quick and intuitive read, which was nice. The main idea of the book is that we are all stuck in boxes of “self-deception.” We enter such boxes whenever we choose to act not according to our senses/desires (I would call it intuition), but instead betray our senses. For example, if I see an empty cart abandoned in the middle of a grocery parking lot, my sense is to return it to one of the cart returns because it represents an obstacle to me and other drivers. If I choose not to return the cart, I betray my intuition. To reconcile this sense with what I failed to do, I come up with excuses that result in a state of mind the book calls “a heart at war.” It might help to think of a heart at war as a wall of justifications that I am building up around myself. This wall contains all the little failures that my subconscious has accepted as failures and that my conscious is battling to excuse (this is my language here). Such walls or boxes make it harder for me to follow my sense in interactions that follow and so a vicious cycle of boxes building up all around begins.

The book suggests ways to get out of the box and obtain a heart at peace. The authors argue that heaving a heart at peace is the foundation for a person’s ability to successfully master interactions with others and build relationships (see reconstruction of Arbinger Institute Pyramid below). The central step to getting out of boxes is to see others as persons and not objects. Whenever we fail to do so, we construct boxes around us.

I really enjoyed reading this book for a number of reasons, but one of the most interesting lessons I draw from it relates to teaching. Recently, one of my friends posted on Facebook that you can’t be a good teacher unless you love your students. Michael and I both had trouble with that message because we often struggle to love our students, even though we might agree that that’s the goal. I really don’t think you can love every student and I don’t believe in a general sense of love for my students either. Every honest teacher has had experiences with students that have made his stomach turn and have kept him awake at night. While I was reading the book, I therefore decided that I would like to suggest a slight alteration to my friend’s message: You can’t be a good teacher, unless your heart is at peace with your students. This slight variant on the original message makes it much easier for me to agree and draw out some implications. If you have ever stood in front of a classroom, you have quickly learned that treating your students as objects that have to be overcome to get to the real deal, i.e. research maybe, or your hobby, results in much grief and bad teaching evaluations. Teaching is a lot more fun and rewarding for both you and the students, if you try on your students’ perspective once in a while and deliver a product that they can get excited about. This applies to other interactions with students as well: I have had trouble balancing my teaching responsibilities with the amount of research I would like to do ever since I started my job here at Utah State. I think that that is mostly the case because I somehow got the impression that I have to respond to my students every need to get the best teaching evaluations possible. What I have learned in reading AoP is that what really matters is not doing everything imaginable to accommodate my students, but rather to be honest and tell them where my limits are when they reach them. Doing so would be treating them like persons rather than objects.