Cognitive dissonance

      I had to sit and think for a while before I could come up with an example of a situation when cognitive dissonance caused a change in my attitudes based on a prior change in my behavior. Most people are enough focused on getting themselves accepted by other people or reaping the rewards of conformity to the demands embedded in various social situations that they will change attitudes that run counter to the behavior required to achieve these two goals rather than risk rejection by acting according to those attitudes or suffering the anxiety that results from a divergence between attitude and behavior.

The example that I will use is the changes to my presentation of self in interaction with others that I had to make in order to become a teacher. These changes initially went against the grain of the attitudes that had previously determined my self-presentation in other social domains. I developed a different self-presentation for interacting with students and was rewarded by better learning outcomes and much greater intrinsic motivation to do my job well based on the real joy I take in doing what I do.

I have always been inordinately curious. I became a voracious reader very early and have spent much more time since with my nose in a book or pressed up against a computer screen watching text scroll than even most other little boys and girls who grow up to be teachers. I ended up as a teacher because I loved to read and because this insatiable curiosity never left me. I was, in early life, less interested in the other people around me than most people are. I spent much more time alone, by choice, than most young people do. I never saw school as preparation for a career. I wanted to know for the sake of knowing and school was where you read books and talked to people who knew about the things that were in books. I never felt any burning desire to teach. I wanted to stay in school forever and was told along the way that the only real way to accomplish that was to “move to the other side of the desk” as a sociologist who was something of a mentor to me put it.

      I was not by temperament born to teach. I learned this the hard way in my first attempt to “move to the other side of the desk” as a teaching assistant in an English department. I went in naively assuming that my love of literature and my own passionate desire to learn to write as well as I could, perhaps well enough to end up in some Norton Anthology myself someday, were enough to make me fit to teach rhetoric and composition to freshman. Two semesters were enough to convince me otherwise.

This was a real crisis in my life that would have been much worse if I had not, during that same time, gotten to know a professor of Educational Psychology based on a number of shared interests. He convinced me that one could be taught to teach and, what was more, that I would need to learn how people learned and how to create and maintain the conditions under which learning was optimized in order to do so. This sounded like great fun so I transferred from the graduate program in English into the graduate program in Educational Psychology.

      I did learn to teach. I learned to be student-centered and developmentally oriented and to respect students as individual learners and to respond to student responses in ways that were intended to encourage a further articulation and unpacking of those original responses. I learned a thousand way to get students to tell me rather than telling them. This generated some cognitive dissonance at first. I had started out as an “I’m right and I don’t care what you think” sort of guy, exactly the kind of guy who would lecture for an hour, ask for questions, wait 30 seconds and then say “dismissed” before trotting out the door convinced that he had done his duty. I sometimes felt like Mr. T pretending to be Mister Rogers but, when that happened, I always reminded myself that Mr. T had no business being a teacher whereas I had decided that being a teacher was going to be my business and should do my best to act like the kind of person who was actually good at facilitating other people’s learning. 
     My student evaluations were typically good and I genuinely enjoyed teaching, something I could not have said during those two awful semesters years ago. My behavior in the classroom feels perfectly natural to me now and the contrast between my self-presentation in the classroom is not nearly as different from my self-presentation in other domains of interaction. Looking back, I’m amazed at how sharply my personality has diverged from my temperament based on changes in attitude that were initially driven by the pragmatic behavioral demands of functioning well in a particular line of work.