LAUSR

Near the turn of the 20th century, the President and Fellows of Harvard University asked their most renowned psychologist to speak to classroom teachers in the neighboring community (Griffin, 1899). Over the next several years, William James held forth on topics of particular relevance to child development: motivation, attention, curiosity, self-control, what we remember and what we forget, how to forge good habits and how to break bad ones, and more. James (1899) aspired to translate theories and findings from psychology into language that nonpsychologists could understand. “I have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytic technicality,” James observed. “And what they most care for is concrete practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced” (p. iii). James later published these lectures in the Atlantic Monthly and, finally, as a book of essays entitled Talks to Teachers on Psychology. I stumbled on these essays in graduate school. In a sense, the discovery came too late. I had already left the classroom where, as a middle and high school math teacher, I’d many times failed to cultivate the motivation and acuity that lay fallow in my students. When a student showed up in the morning without his homework, my reflex was to exhort rather than to empathize: “If you’d just use some self-control,” I would intone—to no avail. When students made mistakes and gave up in frustration, my most artful teaching move was to urge them to keep trying. This never worked. And when I was the one who was frustrated, I am sorry to say I raised my voice and lost my cool. Like James, I had an intuition that “psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help” (1899, p. 5). I sensed that the perspective of psychological science might powerfully complement personal experience, providing what James called a “stereoscopic view” (p. 11) of the developing child. In particular, I felt that teachers like me needed more psychologically wise mind-sets and strategies to encourage—in ourselves and in our students—empathy, resilience, intrinsic interest in learning, and more. Discovering Psychological Science