“People who seek solitude are more creative, study finds…”

In a world run by extroverts, how do we accommodate the creative, introspective, hyper-metacognitive, and solitude-quiet seeking students? And since all teachers were once students, school based administrators, who don’t already know, will soon find out (or they won’t); that a little bit of linguistic and behavioral ‘code switching’ is required when supervising music, art, drama and dance teachers, for they absolutely see the world in a very different (good) and interesting way. It is my experience as a superintendent that principals who fail to communicate with design, creative and performing art teachers, inside of their ‘language’ (world view); the results are that the school, and thus their students are unable to take full advantage of these teacher’s talents and gifts.

But back to students; how does this study* inform our pedagogy as to how we think about ‘paired’ and ‘group work’? If one of the learning objectives of the lesson is to: ‘teach students how to successfully and productively navigate working with others’; then this study could make the case that students who enjoy ‘working alone’ maybe telling us that ‘alone work’ is their preferred (most comfortable) learning style, and that it works well for them. It would also suggest that ‘wanting to work alone’ is not a negative or counter-productive approach to learning, and for practicing creativity. And further, being inclined toward introversion-inter-vision, may not hinder that person’s ability to be a good team/group member. Finally, does this study push back against the very popular (and in my view overstated) “peer socialization” criticism of the Home Schooling Community?

Over my 11 year tenure as a principal, without fail year after year, students approached me to complain about their problems with paired or group work. Also true is that their protest was focused not on philosophical-psychological principles; but rather on the unequal work energy and commitment on the part of students with whom they were joined. (Another reason why teachers must perfect that very difficult skill of accurately and fairly assessing individual students working in paired or group learning activities.) Now I would probably need to do a better ‘memory-analysis’ of these students since many of them would definitely score higher on the plus-extroversion scale. But the common factor for all of these students, was not wanting to work with the burden and/or discomfort of ‘others’. The way it was presented to me was that these ‘uneven yoking’ work relationships, could possibly lower their grade point average (GPA), and thus honor roll, class ranking (preferred college admissions and potential scholarships). However, perhaps based at the time on their limited knowledge of human psychology, they never defined their opposition to paired/group work to be based on personality preference reasons. But maybe the two reasons (academic and personal learning comfort preference) are not in conflict, and could in fact be co-related, and even co-dependent.

Every sociopolitical group upon gaining societal-political power, seeks to present its ‘personality traits’ as the aspirational normal state of being. And so in a world essentially controlled and managed by extroverts, because they are so loud and dominate the cultural-linguistic spaces where we live, work and play. Behaviors based on inter-version and ‘quiet reflection’ could be seen as a negative trait, thus the term ‘anti-social’; when in fact these ‘ingoing’ individuals (the researchers call them: ‘unsociables’); could be driven by many deep altruistic social concerns for which they opt to apply their creativity; a creativity that can best be cultivated in aloneness. We clearly understand how this plays out in the art (adult) world with writers, painters, composers, sculptures, etc. But what about the individual creativity and self-reflecting we are seeking to nurture in our classrooms? Are we getting in the way of our own metacognitive seeking learning objectives, and at the same time hindering the independent introspectively inclined learner?

*“People who seek solitude are more creative, study finds”:
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2017/11/023.html