Creating Discomfort...Comfortably ;) How careful instructional planning can shape the beliefs and at

I was reading a tweet from Will Richardson (<-linked here) that connected me to an article by Josh Bersin called Good Presentations Need to Make People Uncomfortable from the Harvard Business Review. The article's central theme relayed how a well structured and well crafted presentation can be used to create cognitive dissonance and engage the audience in new thinking.

After I read the article, I began to reflect back on the psychological principle of cognitive dissonance and its use in engaging and activating learning for students and teacher.

First, a brief psychology lesson...Cognitive dissonance was first purported by psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. He purported that the brain's desire to maintain cognitive consistency when presented with a conflict between beliefs, attitudes and behavior can give rise to irrational and sometimes maladaptive behavior. One classic example of this principle is embedded in Aesop's fable The Fox and the Grapes. If you are not familiar with this fable, click here to see it.

The psychology behind cognitive dissonance is that when we are presented with something that incongruent with our thoughts, beliefs or attitudes we have to resolve this conflict and do so in one of a few different ways. We can change our thought, behavior or attitude for starters. We could also simply add this new thought to our current beliefs. Or, we could trivialize the new thought as being unimportant or irrelevant. How often have you seen this in yourself or your students? What about that child who always says "this is boring" or "why is this important?" To me, these are signs of cognitive dissonance that a teacher can use as a "teachable moment."

In a field focused on change, educators benefit from harnessing the power and potential of cognitive dissonance. By creating discomfort, we create the conditions for change! But we must also be prepared to support students and colleagues through the dissonance as they work to reharmonize their attitudes and beliefs by shifting their thinking, adding to their thinking or rejecting the new for maintaining the status quo.

We do it everyday in our classrooms with our students, or at least we should. But do we do it enough outside of our classrooms? Do we also create discomfort in our conversations with colleagues, in our dialogue with parents, and in the larger context of education as a profession? The beauty of challenging the thinking of others is that we, ourselves, begin to reshape our own thinking in the process. Like professional debaters, we begin to think about the counterarguments that might be presented by others and by doing so, we strengthen and change our own thinking.

It is critical for us to understand that creating cognitive dissonance within the classroom requires preparation, intention, and support. Through solid questioning strategies, open ended learning opportunities, problem based instruction, and authentic and relevant learning tasks teachers can present and facilitate opportunities for students to experience the power of cognitive dissonance and receive the benefit of growing their own mindset in the process.