Enriching Critical Thinking in Teaching and Learning

Good psychoanalysts do not necessarily make good teachers. Given the amount of time devoted to classroom teaching, the challenges of integrating the “tripartite model,” and the fact that we are, for the most part, a group of untrained, amateur educators, we should pay more attention to teaching our teachers to be effective educators. Larry Inderbitzin, former COPE chair, was concerned about this problem and invited me to join him in establishing a COPE Study Group on Teaching and Learning. We sought out a group of analytic educators and formed the study group about three years ago.

Since COPE has had longstanding study groups on supervision, we decided to examine didactic teaching and the analyst-teacher in the classroom, in the hope of generating useful ideas and suggestions.

As usual, it took a few meetings for the group to define a focus and to cohere as a working group. We read and discussed some of the educational literature because professional educators study educational theories and methods more than analysts do. This enriched our understanding of Inderbitzen's focus on the development of critical thinking as an essential element in deep learning. We realized we did not want to simply transmit the “received wisdom of psychoanalysis” to our students, to be absorbed, digested, or ignored. We wanted to learn more about how to develop, in our students and in ourselves as teachers, the ability to critically examine and deeply understand psychoanalytic models of mental life and development and apply them to clinical theories of technique and process.

The Four Questions

One group member characterized this as a “good news/bad news” approach. She outlined “the four questions” of critical thinking applied to the teaching of theory:

1. What deficiencies of the current theoretical model did the new one seek to correct?

2. How did the new model correct them?

3. How did the new model affect clinical technique?

4. What are the deficiencies of the new model?

With this in mind, we began to discuss various educational problems with attention to specific methodologies.

One of the first issues was defining educational goals. We asked Deborah Cabaniss, who is conducting a multi-institute collaborative project on the use of clearly defined clinical learning objectives, to present her Learning Objective Project as a method of facilitating learning and assessing the effectiveness of teaching. She defined core clinical psychoanalytic competencies that could be used to structure clear constructive feedback. Students and teachers could assess what knowledge and skill should be acquired at each stage of training.

In a subsequent meeting, we turned to the continuous case seminar. The group discussed specific examples of teaching problems in these seminars, which have long been seen as requiring little teacher preparation and coordination and as an easy and preferred teaching assignment. The primary goal is to help candidates use the case to integrate their growing knowledge of theory, technique, and process. Rather than simply demonstrate what an expert would do, the teacher should reveal the critical thinking that underlies the connection between theory and technique. The group used these discussions to examine problems of classroom group process, latent and explicit transference/countertransference process, teacher and student preparation, the “candidate in trouble” dilemma, and others. We developed a draft of pedagogical guidelines for structuring and conducting clinical case and continuous case seminars to include:

• Prior preparation and discussion with the candidate presenter about the case and the goals of the class to ensure candidate comfort and to avoid “supervision in the group”

• Discussion of the seminar plan with the case supervisor

• Development of a teaching focus and goals for the conference

• Appropriate teacher preparation

• Clearly articulated structure and goals at the beginning of the seminar about how the clinical material will illustrate principles of theory and technique

• Attention to the class group process, given the diverse levels of experience and comprehension

• Use of critical thinking model in classroom discussion

• Use of feedback in and after the class

Master Class

The group has gone on to consider the idea of master classes: Is there a way to have our “master teachers” teach us how they teach? Can we develop vehicles to disseminate the skills and methods of our best teachers on topics of general concern to all institutes? The group has discussed the possibility of generating a library of educational resources, e.g., master class seminars for educators, distance education approaches that would allow institutes to have access to master teachers via video conferencing.

Further Issues and Questions

Many other issues and questions weave through our meetings:

• Integration of the curriculum; having teachers for the different tracks meet to discuss the relations among the courses

• Differences in teaching theory and clinical technique in classes devoted to overviews and to subjects in depth

• The iterative process in training: how the curriculum teaches topics repeatedly at deepening levels of sophistication

• Problematic use of readings in seminars: what the candidates actually read and how to effectively employ readings in a class

• Candidate and teacher evaluations and how to use them effectively for constructive feedback

• Questions of specific institute culture or organizational/systemic problems that impact the teaching process, e.g., insufficient teachers, political crises, ideological struggles, teacher and student motivation

The study group's ongoing goal is to explore and create tools for our teachers that can enrich our educational process. We welcome ideas and suggestions.

If you are have an interest in the issues of teaching and learning, please contact Robert Michels, chair of COPE, at .