Using Metaphors to Facilitate Dialogues

Ever heard of a feedback sandwich? It's a great strategy (not just for teaching) to use when you are giving feedback to someone. Very simple: you start with something positive, then insert your constructive criticism, and finish with another positive note. Example:

In the TeachPaperless edublog, John Spencer writes about a metaphor he has been presented with concerning educational institutions, that is, the analogy made between a "minimum security prison" and a school. What really impressed me was his ability to see the whole student and consider the home life and circumstances influencing these students lives. I think that this is an easy thing for educators to forget, especially when they are being pressured by administrators and parents and community leaders and state legislators to mass-produce successful students--when students are constantly represented as numbers. John clearly has a great understanding of his students and considers them as more than just a grade.

That being said, I am surprised by a statement that he made,

Some would point to me and say that it’s simply a “minimum security prison.” And at that point, it’s not worth it. When we disagree on metaphors, it’s pointless to have a conversation.

For being such and understanding educator, it shocked me to see this perspective on dialogues. For me, metaphors and analogies represent an individual's unique perspective on the world expressed through a higher-level cognitive and creative process of evaluating and synthesizing information. Even if the comparison is relatively weak, the use of one unrelated entity in order to highlight certain characteristics of another provides a glimpse of an individual's thought process and should open the door for mutual understanding in a dialogue.

In my classroom experience, I've heard many bizarre and far-fetched metaphors (some of which can be very entertaining). But as out-of-focus as they may be, they always describe the perspective of the speaker, which can and should be used (especially in an educational setting) to work the conversation to a point of mutual understanding. In this case, the metaphor being made about schools and prisons shows me that the speaker's experience with both is most likely secondhand, or viewed from the outside. Even John admits,


They can make charts comparing the similarities (walls, cafeterias, lack of free movement, design, etc,).

So there are clearly some aesthetic and functional similarities between the two. This information can be used in a dialogue to shift the focus to the more intricate and contextual qualities of each institution, which would then of course widen the gap between the two entities.

Yet for the response given by John above, I did admire his perspective on alternative education and the responsibility of teachers to "repurpose the box" of education. Schools these days are becoming more standardized and in many cases even scripted. I agree with him that we as educators can still throw our weight around in these boxes to shake things up and make them as authentic as possible for our students. This is a great perspective to take in response to the jailhouse metaphor, and I was glad to have read this post.