The Skillful Teacher

Responding to Resistance
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in the same way that a stain can be washed out of a garment. Resis-
tance is stubborn and persistent and frequently confounds our
attempts to defeat it.
Why people resist learning is a puzzlingly complex question, par-
ticularly when such resistance appears to come out of nowhere.
Sometimes students appear to be truculent from the start of a
course, seeming determined to sabotage our best attempts to engage
them. At other times, however, they appear to be going along quite
well and then suddenly resist doing something that to us seems like
a fairly simple operation. However, if we can get a sense of where
resistance springs from, then we are in a better position to make an
appropriate response. Even if no easy resolution suggests itself,
knowing what’s causing resistance is sometimes helpful, decreasing
the demoralizing frustration we can easily slip into when it’s
encountered. Specifically, it helps us fight the myth (well chroni-
cled by Britzman, [1991]) that everything depends on and is caused
by the teacher. We come to realize that in some situations cultural
factors (such as the fear of committing cultural suicide, the culture
of entitlement, or an ethnic or racial difference between teacher
and students) that we have absolutely no control over can create
deep and sustained resistance rendering all our careful planning
completely useless.
It is important to remember that in many situations where stu-
dents are resisting learning the best we can hope for is to contain
the resistance displayed by some so that it does not completely take
over the classroom. We should also be ready to admit that the resis-
tance displayed might be completely justified. Resistance should not
automatically be equated with mindless truculence or vindictive
sabotage. In the face of unreasonable teacher demands, pedagogic
misjudgments, broken teacher promises, or clear incompetence, it
is often principled and justified. I have been a resistant learner
myself in situations where learning was prescribed for me without
any attempt to justify how this would be in my own best interests
and where the person teaching me seemed to me to be unqualified.
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Being forced to learn something that I regard as a waste of time, and
that is taught by an incompetent to boot, is hardly likely to produce
a motivated state of learning readiness. So it would be naïve to
imagine that we can wave a magic wand and remove the resistance-
inducing frustrations, anxieties, and cruelties students have suffered
before they arrive in our class. If people are determined not to learn
something, there is often little you can do to convince them that
such learning is worth their effort. Indeed, one of the biggest mis-
takes we can commit when encountering resistance is to fall into
the trap of conversional obsession. Conversional obsession is what
happens when you become obsessed with converting a small and
easily identifiable minority of hard-core resistant students into
becoming enthusiastic advocates for learning.
Imagine the scene. You walk into the classroom on the first day
of a course and, as soon as you start to teach, you see all the famil-
iar signs of resistance displayed by a knot of students sitting at the
back of the room. They put on Walkmans and open up magazines
as soon as you start talking. They fall asleep, arrive late, leave early,
take cell phone calls in the middle of class, and spend the time pass-
ing notes or holding a series of private conversations. Eyes roll,
glazed or angry expressions dominate, and there is a complete
absence of questions, comments, or any other signs of interest.
When you notice these signs, a switch is turned on in your head.
It’s as if the students have walked up to you, slapped your face with
a glove, and challenged you to a pedagogic duel. The duel is one in
which they are saying “Do your best to motivate me—I’ll bet you
won’t succeed.” You enthusiastically accept their challenge and start
to do everything you can to engage them in learning.
As the weeks go by and this cabal of learners refuses to crack a
smile, display any interest, or participate in any way, you feel your
reputation is on the line. You say to yourself “If it’s the last thing I
do, I’m going to break this resistance.” You become obsessed with
their faces—will they ever laugh at your jokes? Can you plan an
activity so irresistibly engaging that they cannot help but show a
Responding to Resistance
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flicker of interest? You pour all your energy into provoking a
response from this group, visualizing them leaving your course at
the end of the year wreathed in beatific smiles of self-actualized grat-
itude for the wonderful transformations you have wrought in them.
In your fevered imaginings these same students will be writing you
notes of thanks, telling you that they were initially skeptical about
the course but that in the future they will urge all their friends to
take your class because of your personal charisma as a teacher.
There are two problems with this situation. First, the transfor-
mation you envisage will almost never happen, leaving you feeling
that you’ve failed in your quest to motivate students. In acknowl-
edging that the students have won the duel, you start to call your
competence as a teacher into question. Second, and even more
troublingly, in enthusiastically accepting the challenge the resistant
students have offered you, all your efforts are poured into converting
a relatively small number of individuals to being enthusiastic advo-
cates of learning. Along the way the legitimate learning needs of
the majority of students take second place to your efforts to prove
to yourself that you’re a real teacher because you can win over hard-
core resisters. You are so concerned to show that you can be a moti-
vator of resistant learners that what happens to the majority of
motivated, or potentially teachable, students becomes of little inter-
est to you. So watch out for the trap of conversional obsession. Left
unchecked, it can come to dominate your life.
The basis of resistance to learning is the fear of change. Learn-
ing, by definition, involves change. It requires us to explore new
ideas, acquire new skills, develop new ways of understanding old
experiences, and so on. No one is the same after learning some-
thing. The change might not be very dramatic or even evident. But
even incremental and imperceptible change carries its own dis-
comforts. Given that change is threatening, some people much pre-
fer to remain in situations that to outsiders seem wholly
unsatisfactory. Abusive marriages, oppressive workplaces, and auto-
cratic regimes are all systems of domination that maintain their
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power through a mixture of repression from above, self-monitoring
not to challenge the status quo, and the fear of learning new ideas,
skills, and behaviors. As teachers we need to remember that learn-
ing entails change and that the prospect of such change is often
highly threatening. To this extent it would be highly unusual for
teachers not to face student resistance to learning on a continual
basis.
In my own life the prospect of learning something new—