Introverting the Extroverted Classroom

“Active learning” has been a hot phrase in education for the past few decades: inclusion, collaboration, class participation, roundtable discussion, class games, and project-based learning, among other methods, continue to be trendy in high schools everywhere. As a high school student of the nineties, I can’t even tell you how many group projects we had to do, how many visual aids we had to produce collaboratively, how many contrived skits and group presentations we had to nervously give in front of our equally nervous peers. Actually, I have little memory of doing much solitary work, at least not in the classroom. Recently, however, some schools are considering narrowing the focus on collaboration in order to make the learning experience more accessible for introverts. Sure, in a group setting, the confident extrovert will thrive, but what about the more uncertain introvert? A top learning expert once described adolescence as a “24–hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year battle to not be embarrassed,” and certainly this is even more of a challenge for students who are innately shy or anxious.

The original idea of the “inclusive classroom” was to educate special needs students full-time in the regular classroom, which, obviously, covers the academic side of inclusion. But what about the social divide between the boisterous and the restrained student? Today’s trends, according to Michael Godsey, an English teacher and contributing writer for The Atlantic, “embrace extroverted behavior…[and] can undermine the learning of students who are inward-thinking and easily drained by constant interaction with others.” As a teen, I was not exactly a card-carrying introvert, but if you think my hand was going to be the first to go up during a class discussion, you’re nuts. I remember dreading that moment of having to “pair up” with someone in class, hoping I could find a partner right away, in an effort to win that “battle to not be embarrassed.” It goes without saying that this anxiety can impede the learning process. On the flip side, I can recall many classmates who were in their element in environments such as these; they absolutely thrived on the interaction. So while I doubt there is an exact science to this, I do believe, from my experience as a student and educator, that finding a balance between the two can help create a non-threatening environment in which both types of students can excel.

Another buzzy phrase we hear often in education is the idea of the “least restrictive environment,” the classroom setting in which no student feels held back from or intimidated by the experience of learning. But how to do schools create this environment? So much of adolescence is trying to fit in. It’s important to consider both the “easy child,” who will adapt immediately to a new environment as well as the “slow-to-warm-up child” (Thomas & Chess, 1991), who will typically require more time in which to become acclimated. It is, then, interesting that, since the early nineties, classroom environments that embrace extroverted behavior have been promoted over those that don’t. It seems, though, that schools today are realizing that to create this environment of “least restriction,” they need to strike a balance in which we can envision the “mayor” of the class as well as the class “wallflower” learning and excelling side by side, each feeling comfortable, safe, and uninhibited. The one constant in education is that it’s always changing. Sometimes looking at the other side of something- indeed, introverting it- is the only way to see how it can be tweaked to work most effectively.

Written by Phil Lane