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G. Daniel Massad, Learning together: the way we do it
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G. Daniel Massad, Learning together: the way we do it
At Changes, there is a saying (and a principle) that goes like this: if you want something done for yourself, or if you want to do something with or for other people, speak up in the open meeting and see what happens. What often happens is the forming of small groups around certain kinds of needs and enthusiasms.
There are groups that serve people in crisis, groups that plan the open meetings, groups that focus together or cry together, and groups that go to the beach together. What follows is a description of another kind of small group - a group that formed for learning.
We began, tentatively, as a training/study group that was convened by Linda Olsen, an experienced therapist. Our purpose was to practice " listening" and " focusing" and to talk about the bearing that these skills have on our lives. We met once a week - at the church, on Thursday evenings, for three hours. Because the membership was open, there was always a mixture of new and old people - beginners who knew nothing and beginners who knew something about listening and focusing. And Linda Olsen was the leader of the group - a warm and highly skilled teacher who did most of the work of structuring the group tasks, nurturing the discussion, and welcoming new members.
Now, after months of gradual change, the group looks like this: we still meet on Thursday evenings for three hours, and our aim is still learning. But beyond that, we are a different animal. We no longer have an acknowledged, permanent leader. Leading, of course, still happens. When it becomes necessary to make a decision about the direction or the structure of the group, some people tend to lead more than others, but everybody understands that everybody leads: all of us can, and do, influence the shape of the group, and anyone who speaks up will be heard.
The membership is closed. Ten people is our limit, and new members come in only when old members drop out. By making this decision, and by keeping ourselves to it, we aim for both stability and the kind of understanding that comes from prolonged dialogue.
We are all beginners, but none of us is at the very beginning. We have all spent months or years practicing and experimenting with listening and focusing. We believe in these skills as potentially valuable, and we are all committed - in different ways and degrees and for different reasons - to learning more about them. And we are also committed to the study and the invention of the way we learn together.
The way we learn together, in our group discussion, is what I aim to talk about in this essay. My purpose is to describe - not the content of our learning - but the way we learn, and specifically to list and to elaborate the seven rules for talking together in a group of ten that we developed for ourselves.
But first, I want to explain that it’s not as if we placed a structure (our new set of " rules" ) over that which wasn't already structured. From the very start, we behaved in the group as we have always behaved in groups, and as a result our discussions took a very definite and a very familiar shape. Familiar, but unsatisfying. We responded quickly to ideas and questions, even before we understood them. We passionately argued in behalf of our own ideas and perceptions without being aware of a personal stake in them. We were too timorous to express confusion, or to stop the discussion in order to clear things up, just for ourselves. No one actively listened to anyone else, and everyone expected not to be heard. And even without the presence of teachers and parents and impending grades, we consistently flaunted what we already knew and hid our ignorance. As if we were not beginners, all of us. As if our ignorance were not the bond between us.
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We had a month of that, and at the end of it everybody felt tired, misunderstood, confused, and uneasy with one another. It was clear that our learning, as individuals and as a group was not being carried forward, and we began to think that possibly this failure in learning was due, at least in part, to the way we interacted with one another. We knew how to compete for space, but we didn't know how to share it. We were yearning to understand each other, and to feel understood, but we didn't know how to make it happen. And so, we became inventors. We began to build the group. We stewed and fretted and experimented, and eventually came up with and agreed upon seven basic rules for group discussion - rules designed to rescue and to enrich our learning. Of course, they were awkward at first, and even now we don't stick to them all the time. But we've found that the awkwardness wears off, and that the more we use them, the more useful they are.
Rules for group discussion
1. Going slow. It's like this: we're all bright and eager and full of ideas that clamor to be heard, and it seems as if there’s hardly enough time for even one person to express one idea thoroughly. But when we act on these feelings and perceptions,
as we have in the past, all we end up with is an accelerating, non-stop group speed rap. Hardly anything gets finished, and hardly anything gets across.
Creative thinking takes time. Finding the appropriate words for complex experiences takes time. Understanding, and being understood, takes time. And until there is a group consensus that going more slowly than we have in the past is productive, it is impossible to follow our other time-consuming ground rules.
2. Giving and asking for a listening response. A listening response, from the listener’s point of view, amounts to saying in your own words your understanding of the gist of what another person has expressed. Not your interpretation of what they said; not your own similar thoughts or experiences; but your sense of their meaning. And, of course, from the speaker's point of view, a listening response amounts to hearing another person's understanding of what you have expressed, or tried to express. In other words, it amounts ideally to feeling understood.
Obviously, this particular kind of a response can be misused. It is possible simply to repeat what someone else expresses, word for word, or nearly word for word, without really grasping what they mean and without really laying aside, for the moment, your own thoughts and feelings. For listening to work, understanding someone else has to matter. It has to be, at least temporarily, your task. When it is your task, and when you concretely communicate your understanding of what someone else expresses, the result of it is that you know that you do understand, because they confirm it, or you know that you don't, because they look uncomfortable or say, " No, that's not quite what I meant. " And if someone is expressing a very intricate thought, the listening response is a great aid for the rest of the people in the group who are trying to grasp it. Temporarily stopping the person with, " Now what I heard you say so far was…" can help all the people listening stay with what’s being said, however complex.
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The person speaking, on the other hand, feels connected to the group, accompanied and understood by the group. Which means that what the person says, with that much practical support, takes a shape more nearly its own. At least that has been our experience. When we feel that the rest of the group is with us, or alongside us, as we express our sometimes complicated and often never before articulated thoughts, it usually happens that we say just what we mean to say. And it has also been our experience that when we say what we mean to say, with the group's support, our thinking takes a step forward.
Or, to put it differently, the listening response is congenial to what we don't know yet - what we don't know of the other person's experience, and what is not yet sensed or explicated in our own. And what we don't know yet is what we're after.
3. Stopping. When you are confused or troubled about what is being expressed or how the group is interacting, raise your voice, call a temporary halt, and ask for what you need. Before we agreed to do this, we found that our inclination was to back away from the group (internally, not physically) whenever we were unable to understand was being said, or whenever we were uneasy with the way it was being said. Some of the thoughts and feelings were simply too complex to grasp the first time around; some of the interacting was too fast to follow, or too full of discomforting unexpressed tension. Instead of calling a halt and asking for clarification (or whatever else we needed at the time) it seemed to be everybody's natural bent, as listeners, to conceal the trouble and to stay physically in the group feeling out of it - disconnected, irritated, bored, sad or critical of ourselves!
On the other hand, as speakers we assumed that our listeners would conceal that kind of trouble. In other words, we expected not to receive direct feedback - not to know if we were confusing or irritating anyone - not to know if we were getting across - which amounted to another kind of disconnection. And so we agreed to carry out the second half of the “stopping” rule: when someone calls a halt and asks for help, we temporarily lay aside what we’re doing and heed them. Stopping is a way of keeping the discussion owned by everyone in the room.
4. Tagging. When you make your contribution to the discussion - your immediate reaction, your own similar experience, or question, or critique, or whatever - try, if it is at all possible, to make your intention known beforehand in a short sentence. For example, " I want to lay out an experience of mine and see if it's like yours" or " I want to clarify that for myself" or " I'm not really sure what I'm feeling about what you said, but I want to try to say it anyway” or “I want to talk about something related but a little different" or " I disagree with your approach, and I want to talk about that. "
We're not always able to tag our contributions, but there are at least three good reasons for doing it when we can. First, in order to make our intention known to the rest of the group, we have to know it ourselves. We have to be aware of what's going on inside of us in relation to what is being said - excitement, criticism, confusion, assent, or whatever. And we have to be aware of what we want - what we want from the rest of the group, and how we want to influence the discussion. And when we have this kind of an awareness, the group comes alive.
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Second, what is happening becomes clear to everybody, because everybody is in on it. We know what each person aims to do - compare, disagree, clarify, assent, or whatever - before they do it. Without this kind of clarity, we're babes in the wood. And with it (and this is the third good reason for tagging our contributions) we are better able to exercise our right to object to, or to support, each new turn in the talk. For example, perhaps Jane wants to share an experience of her own, which is similar to the experience just described by Linda, and she says what she wants to do before she does it. Tom, on the other hand, is still trying to understand Linda's experience, and so he says in response to Jane, " Wait, before you do that I want to hear a little more from Linda. " Jane, then, holds onto her contribution to the discussion until everybody is ready for it. And she can rest assured that when she makes her contribution, everybody will be ready for it.
5. Defining the words we use. As we describe our complex experiences and thoughts to one another, it is often useful - especially at the beginning - to find out what certain key words and phrases mean to each one of us. I am not referring here to the words and phrases that we don't understand because we've never heard them and therefore have no referent for them. I mean, instead, those words and phrases with which we liberally sprinkle our talk, and which bear an assortment of meanings. (For example, " feeling, " " empathic response, " " a felt shift, " " getting somewhere, " " getting stuck inside”, “making contact, " " being centered, " " good therapy, " " unconditional positive regard. " ) We have found that it is particularly useful to talk about just what we're trying to point at with these key words before we assume that we’re all pointing at the same thing. In fact, when we explicate what we mean by them, we often discover that we mean slightly different or very different things, and that we need a richer vocabulary in order to talk sensibly to one another. That is, in order to understand one another at all.
Here is both an example of " defining the words we use, " and a demonstration of the way in which our ground rules work together. If Linda isn’t absolutely sure that Jim means what she means by a certain frequently repeated phrase, she " stops" the discussion and says, " I need to see if we mean the same thing by that phrase. Could you say a little more about what you mean when you use it? " (" tagging" ). Jim, in order to do that, has to turn his attention inward for a few moments. He needs to sense anew what he means to convey, so that he can find other, more finely discriminated words for it. And of course, at this point a " listening response" from someone in the group helps him enormously in his task.
6. Finishing. This has two sides. As a speaker, if the group interrupts you and responds to only the first part of what you were going to say, ask the group for more time and attention and say the rest of it. And as listeners, if you notice that someone else might have been interrupted and might have more to say, ask them if your perception is correct, and, if it is, invite them to finish.
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This was very difficult to do at first. For some of us, asking was hard. We tended to stick up for ourselves in a way that was not responsive to the needs of the rest of the group. That is, we were capable of verbal aggression, but we were not capable of asking the group for the group's attention in order to finish describing an experience or expressing a thought. Not demanding; not asking angrily; but asking vulnerably.
On the other hand, some of us found that we tended not to stick up for ourselves at all. Asking for time and attention was like being another sort of person altogether. And it was especially difficult to assert ourselves - and particularly easy to let the group interrupt us - whenever we were trying to express something long and complex, or something that we hadn’t yet put into words. But we have found that with practice and with the group’s support, we can do it.
Of course, in order to make the second part of this rule work, we had to re-train ourselves as listeners. When we came into the group it was customary for us to assume that people were finished speaking whenever they paused and allowed the rest of the group to interrupt them. We felt so rushed and so competitive that it was easy to assume that other people's experience was not at all like our own. Now, we are just beginning to learn to hear the difference between a finished and an unfinished contribution to the discussion - the difference between coming to a stop, and pausing on the brink. Knowing that the rest of the group is growing sensitive to that difference is helpful to all of us.
7. Reminding each other, gently, that the ground rules are not being honored. We haven't thoroughly learned these rules yet, any of us, but we can help each other learn them simply by speaking up when we notice their absence. Also, we need to keep paying attention to how we're faring with them. They seem to be good for us, because we have profited by them. But we need to keep evaluating their usefulness to us, as we change. We need to keep asking ourselves, Do these rules continue to serve us?
Let me say a little more, generally, about our group.
These rules are not really rules. They are behaviors that suit us. They constitute a description of the way we like to be together - which is the best way of being together that we've discovered so far. But they are by no means a complete description of what commonly happens in our group. There are other things we do that we have no " rules" for - ways of interacting that simply evolved, without our paying attention to them. Our discussions, for instance - even our grandest theoretical schemes - are always grounded in and supported by our personal experience. Likewise, the urgency that originally plagued us - the urgency to express ourselves - has somehow given way, so that now we can sit for an hour and listen actively to one person without our own ideas, reactions, corrections, and comparisons clamoring to be heard. And with the group's encouragement and practical support, we have all developed a knack for separating our interpersonal issues from our intellectual disagreements.
And there are attitudes that we share - attitudes that are, I believe, a prerequisite for the successful use of our " rules. " First, we hold that every person in the group belongs. Every person is valuable, and has a valuable contribution to make, which will be heard. Nobody is too smart or too dumb or too advanced or too behind to be gladly received.
Second, we believe - and we know that everyone else in the group believes - that it is all right to behave in accordance with our rules. It is acceptable to every member of this group - it is considered the norm - it is even considered a virtue -to say, “I want to finish laying out my idea”, or " I'm lost, could we stop for a moment? " or " What I heard you say so far was…" or “I need someone to say what I just said so I can see if anybody understood it. " I have been in many types of groups in my life households, classrooms, meetings, consciousness-raising groups, therapy groups, task groups, churches, dinner parties - and if I had behaved in any of them as I behave in ours, I'm almost sure that my behavior would have been neither understood nor valued. Saying, " I want to finish my idea” would be labeled vain and presumptuous by many of the people I have known, including myself a few years back. Saying, " I'm uncomfortable with what's going on, could we stop here for a moment? " could easily be interpreted as an indirect criticism. But in our group, saying what we want from the group is what we want to hear from one another, and stopping the flow of the discussion so that we can re-enter it is what we all do and value. In other words, if these rules weren't our norms, and if these norms weren't prized by all of us, they would perform a very different task. Instead of connecting us, they would divide us. And then we would all be back where we started.
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But I have to admit to wishing that more than ten people in my world shared these norms - and that other groups I join, in the future, would form along these lines. As Jane Batt once said, " How I would dance in the kitchen then, how my pencil would dance. The very spoons would join in that dance. "
Note: This is a revised version of an article entitled " About the Thursday Night Listening-Focusing Group" which appeared in Rough Times, September/October 1973.
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