The Thirty Seconds That Belong to Them

At a public presentation marking the end of an educational project, several adults present grew anxious because the students took a few seconds to begin speaking. What is at stake in that delay is not the slowness of the students, it is the anxiety of the adult who is watching, and the way one responds to it. The time we believe we are saving for people is, in reality, time we are taking from them.

A few seconds before the words come

A day of public restitution, at the end of a project of films made in class. Several classes, which had not met one another over the course of the year, are gathered in a place they did not know, to present the films they have made. After the screening, late in the afternoon, we are all together in the exhibition that the children themselves have hung, and I hand the microphone to the students so that they can say what they have learned, what they have liked. Each time a student takes the microphone, there is a delay between the moment the object reaches their hands and the moment their speech begins. A few seconds, sometimes a little more, the time needed to overcome the intimidation of speaking in front of others and to find a way to start. One student said it herself, speaking into a microphone is not easy. As these delays kept recurring, several of the adults present grew visibly anxious and said so, wondering whether the session might not run too long.

And yet, these same students led the entire restitution themselves, with an autonomy and a presence that impressed everyone. There is a paradox here, and it is the one I would like to look at. Why did anxiety pass through these adults, who were nonetheless witnessing a manifest success?

I am describing this scene from real experience, but it is one that recurs, in related forms, in many other settings. In a training session among colleagues, in a workshop with trainees, in a team feedback circle, the delay between the microphone offered and the words that come is, each time, of the same order. And the anxiety that runs through it, on the adults’ side, is also of the same order.

I did not fill that silence. I did not whisper any words, I did not rephrase the question to make it easier, and I did not speak in the person’s place. I waited. After those few seconds, the person spoke.

It is this delay that I want to write about, and the anxiety that pushes us to fill it.

Thirty seconds occupied by someone

In front of a person who is hesitating and searching for their words, the adult almost always feels the urge to step in. The urge takes forms that seem reasonable, the wish to help, the fear that the person might fail or be seen struggling in front of others, the desire that things should keep moving and not fall behind. And it is true that if I step in, if I whisper the word, if I finish the sentence, the person gets through it faster. We save thirty seconds.

I speak of thirty seconds as an order of magnitude. The exact duration does not matter. What matters is that the delay is short, so short that it seems to weigh nothing and that filling it appears to cost no one anything.

What drives us to fill those seconds, in the moment we do so, presents itself as kindness. It is in fact something else, which has to be named, because we do not see it while we are living through it. We fear the void, we fear that nothing is happening, we fear that the person will not get through it. We fill in order to relieve an anxiety, and what presides over the act of filling is that anxiety, not pedagogy. In a project whose aim is the learning of the people involved, the fact that it is the adult’s anxiety which guides the adult’s actions runs counter to that aim. In order to learn, one needs to feel safe, and the anxiety of the one who leads, when it dictates their interventions, takes the climate of safety away.

These thirty seconds are not empty time. They are occupied by someone. Either the adult occupies them by helping, in which case the path out of the difficulty has been walked by the adult, or it is the person being supported who occupies them, by searching and finding for themselves, in which case the path has been walked by them. The same delay, depending on who fills it, belongs to one or to the other.

What we call saving time, seen from the side of the person who is learning, is losing the experience. Acting in someone’s place, even for a few seconds, even with the best of intentions, takes from them what made the moment meaningful for them in the first place, namely the experience of having found it for themselves. I have developed the distinction between helping and acting in someone’s place in the article « Lâcher ses critères » (« Letting go of one’s criteria »). It applies to long gestures in a workshop as much as to these few seconds at the microphone, and duration changes nothing about the principle.

When a group forms through mind mapping

The same phenomenon arises on a larger scale, where it is no longer a question of seconds but of minutes, sometimes more. I often use mind mapping to form working groups, in classrooms as well as in adult training settings. Most of the time, the themes of the work are not set by me. They emerge from a collective brainstorming that I conduct at the board or on the screen, and everyone can see the subjects others propose as they appear. Once the themes are displayed, each person writes their first name under the one they have chosen. The names appear one after another. It is slow. People hesitate, watch where others go, change their minds, negotiate. Faced with this seemingly disordered movement, the facilitator or teacher is tempted to say « well, let us just assign people to groups ourselves, we will save time ». And it is true that time is saved, in the sense that group formation takes fewer minutes.

But when it is the teacher or facilitator who assigns the groups, the gesture is one of acting in the participants’ place. The moment when each person projects themselves into a group, feels free to change because the time allowed makes revision possible, takes responsibility for the collective they decide to join, that moment does not take place. The same posture, on a different scale, produces the same effect, what one believes one is gaining in planning time, one is taking from each person’s construction.

And there is something further here, which was not visible in the case of the thirty seconds at the microphone alone. When the teacher or the facilitator refrains from deciding in the participants’ place, they step out of a posture that would have the adult know better than anyone else which group is right for each person. That posture is replaced by something else, the immediate establishment of trust, of the freedom for each person to place themselves where they have decided to, and of shared responsibility for the collective. This energetic foundation, gained in those few minutes that seemed lost, then irrigates all the work of the small groups, which will go on in autonomy without needing to be held from the outside. I have described this device in more detail in the article « Le mind mapping pour constituer des groupes » (« Mind mapping for forming groups »).

Why I do not try to reduce fear

The obstacles a learner encounters are often presented as difficulties to be reduced. In my view, the real subject is not difficulty, it is fear. To learn is to face something one did not know, and that confrontation with the unknown produces fear, by construction. There is no learning without fear, because there is no learning without novelty. The moment when the person hesitates, when they get stuck, when they search, is the moment when they are facing what they have not yet learned.

The learning of a skill does not happen in two stages, where one would first learn the skill in the abstract and then put it into practice. It happens in the act itself. One learns to speak by speaking, one learns the gesture by making it. Philippe Foulquier, founder of the Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, who recently passed away, captured this in four words, faire pour apprendre à faire, that is, do in order to learn how to do. This formula overturns the dominant school conception, according to which one would learn first and act afterwards. It is in action that one learns, and it is in the repetition of the gesture, however imperfect, that competence is built.

If learning happens through action, then the central pedagogical issue is allowing oneself to act. To allow oneself, one needs to feel safe, to not fear judgment, to not fear the adult who is watching. The person who is learning will, by definition, do it imperfectly the first time, and the second, and probably the third. It is in this repeated imperfection that competence is built, and the role of the facilitator or teacher is to hold a frame in which that imperfection is legitimate.

This way of thinking about learning draws on what psychology and the neurosciences have described of how the human brain works. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), in Pensée et langage (originally published in Moscow in 1934, translated into French by Françoise Sève at Éditions sociales in 1985, and known in English under the titles Thought and Language and Thinking and Speech), introduced the notion of the zone of proximal development, the gap between what a learner can do alone and what they become able to do with the support of another. His best-known formulation is that what the child is able to do in collaboration today, they will be able to do alone tomorrow. It is in this gap, opened by the presence of support, that learning takes place. But the support of which Vygotsky speaks is not acting in someone’s place, it is what makes the learner able to do it themselves. When I fill in the thirty seconds, I am not supporting the person within that zone, I am pulling them out of it, I am bringing the task back to what the adult already knows how to do. The person, meanwhile, has crossed nothing.

The cognitive psychology researcher Olivier Houdé, in Apprendre à résister (« Learning to Resist », Le Pommier, 2014), described what he calls cognitive resistance, the brain’s capacity to inhibit its automatisms in order to make room for a new thought. This inhibition mobilizes the prefrontal cortex and has a real metabolic cost. While the person seems blocked, their brain is not inactive, it is busy inhibiting a reflex response that does not fit, in order to make room for something else. It is this work of unravelling that takes time.

This temporal dimension is inscribed in the very plasticity of the human brain. The French neurobiologist Catherine Vidal, in Le cerveau évolue-t-il au cours de la vie ? (« Does the brain change throughout life? », Le Pommier, 2011), reminds us that the human brain transforms throughout life and that every experience leaves a material trace in the synaptic connections. Those connections do not form instantly, they need time to encode, to consolidate, to be repeated. This is what the neurosciences have described since the work of the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb (1949), in a now-classic formula, neurons that fire together wire together. Repeating the gesture, even imperfectly, is physically reinforcing the circuits that will make it easier next time. The educator Hélène Trocmé-Fabre, in J’apprends donc je suis (« I learn therefore I am », Éditions d’Organisation, 1987), built on these neurological findings to call for respect of each learner’s own rhythm. One cannot learn in fast-forward, because synaptic connections need the time it takes for them to be made.

All this rests on a condition that the facilitator or teacher carries almost alone, and that has to do with the climate of the group. When the silence of a person who is searching is experienced by the adult as a problem, as a failure of the setting, it does become a moment of anxiety, and the person being supported senses that anxiety, which contaminates what they were searching for. When the silence is welcomed, when it has its legitimate place in the unfolding, it is no longer a moment to get through despite the adult, it is a normal moment of construction.

And this climate extends beyond the person who is searching, it reaches the whole group. The other learners present, who are watching their classmate search in front of the microphone, are themselves in empathy. The delay sometimes lasts only five seconds, but it can feel long because it is charged with expectation, and whether those five seconds are inhabited by empathy or by anxiety changes everything. The person who is leading, by their way of being present, imprints on the whole group the rhythm in which those seconds will be lived. That rhythm is the rhythm of learning, and it cannot be measured by the clock.

The group preparing their dance scene

On a year-long project with a class of middle-school students, around the making of virtual reality films, a teacher who was accompanying the work, and who is herself thoroughly experienced in pedagogy, told me she had been surprised by the autonomy I left to the students on the day of filming. A group was preparing a dance scene. The students were sitting, discussing among themselves who would do what, how the scene would begin and end. Seen from outside, one might have thought nothing was happening, and the teacher told me she had thought they would not manage. I could see that they had the staging in hand, and I let them work.

This autonomy had not appeared on the day of filming, it had been building since the beginning of the year. From the first meeting, I had given the students room to express themselves, the right to say what they did not agree with, and even the right to choose not to take part in the project. The students had every legitimacy in having their say on what concerned them. The technical setup pointed in the same direction. The virtual reality camera was placed in the middle, and the preparations before each shoot were done in mind mapping, with the students, scene by scene, in order to distribute the responsibilities of each one, who plays the actor, who handles the camera, who creates the sound atmosphere with the instruments brought along, who takes care of the props. I had nothing to do with any of this. It was the students who did and the students who had decided. They could have failed to take ownership of it, and that is exactly what they did take, because it was the stake of their own film, of their staging choices, of where each one of them was placed.

During those moments, I was there, attentive. What I was doing then, which does not show and which demands a great deal of energy, is of the order of what psychoanalysts have called evenly hovering attention, a mode of presence in which one is there so that the person can find their own path, without directing anything. Presence does not consist in intervening, it consists in making oneself available to what comes. For the students, at that moment, the fact that I was there and let them work had a specific function. The students knew that I had experience of what they were doing, and that I was nonetheless making that choice and granting them that trust. The gesture of stepping back, under these conditions, is not an absence from the situation, it is a presence of a particular quality, one that legitimates the autonomous path because it could suspend it and chooses not to.

Donald Winnicott described the capacity of a child to be alone in the presence of another, that capacity which develops when the child knows that a presence is there, available, even when it does not act. This is what happens for these students in the classroom, just as it is what happens for the one hesitating at the microphone. The person walks the path alone, but they walk it knowing that an adult is there and is watching. The presence does not need to intervene in order to support, it supports by being there.

Institutional time, the time of people

The teacher I was speaking of saw, that day, that the first scene was taking more time than expected, and she worried that they would not get through the three films planned for the day. That worry is legitimate, and almost always present among those who accompany. It comes from the fact that one places oneself, often without realizing, from the point of view of the institution, of the schedule, of the division of stages into hours. From that point of view, time is a fixed resource to distribute among stages set in advance, and any stage that runs over threatens the balance of the whole.

That point of view, however, is not the reality of what is happening. The reality is that at every moment, a person is living an experience. The experience is not a stage of the day, beginning at one moment and ending at another. As John Dewey showed in Art as Experience (1934), experience is what one is in the midst of living, and one is in the midst of living it all the time. There is no moment in which a student would be experimenting and another in which they would not. What we mark off as « the phases of the project » is, for the person, a continuity of experience.

On the day of filming I was speaking of, the first film took much more time than the two others. This is not a problem, it is the direct consequence of what happened during that first film. The students acquired during it the skills they needed to make a virtual reality film, the organization of roles, the relation to the camera, the way each one inscribes themselves in a scene. Once those skills were acquired, the next two films were shot more quickly, and they were no less well made. If I had wanted, that morning, to save time by speeding up that first film, by doing things in their place to keep the schedule, those skills would not have been built in the students. I would have had to hold the whole project at arm’s length all day, and I would have exhausted myself for a result in which the students would have been taken care of without having learned anything.

The time of learning does not obey the regular metric of the schedule. It expands when appropriation needs it to, and it contracts afterwards, without quality suffering, and sometimes with quality strengthening.

The schedule itself is not imaginary, it is concrete, written, shared. What is imaginary is the representation we make of it. Cornelius Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society (the French original L’institution imaginaire de la société was published by Le Seuil in 1975, English translation by Kathleen Blamey, Polity Press, 1987), would have spoken of an instituting imaginary, the idea that there would be a time set in advance, precise for each thing, and that this time should impose itself on what is actually happening. That imaginary is rigid. It is borne first by the teacher or facilitator, and it can pass on to the students, who in turn become afraid of not staying on schedule.

And this is precisely the moment to tell the students what is happening. There is nothing to conceal. When the shoot takes more time than expected, I can say to them, « no problem, you are in the middle of learning, you are acquiring skills, take your time, we will go faster afterwards ». Far from worrying them, this explanation reassures them. It tells them that the person accompanying them is not themselves a prisoner of the schedule, that they see what is being built, and that they guarantee that what is being lived, even if it seems approximate or fuzzy, is exactly what is needed. That speech, as much as the silence, is what makes cognitive resistance possible.

There is an essential point here for anyone who facilitates or teaches. The question to ask oneself, at every moment when one is tempted to step in to save time, is not « are we on schedule », it is « from whose point of view are we looking at what is happening ». And behind that question, there is another, harder one, that touches on what is happening inside the person who teaches.

What I do with my own fears

What I have been describing does not come down to a pedagogical technique. It is made of elements of posture, and that posture asks of the one who facilitates an inner work of a particular kind.

The anxiety I described at the beginning of this article, the one of the adults watching a student search for their words, is not a moral failing. It is normal, and it passes through me as well. When I am working with a group and a scene is taking much more time than expected, I too think to myself « no, are we going to make it, are we going to get through ». These emotions, I do not try not to feel, I would have no way to manage that. What I try to do is not to be in direct contact with them. I notice them, I take them as information about what I am living through in the situation, and it is from that information that I decide what I do, rather than from the immediate reaction.

This capacity to take a distance on what one is living through, in the very situation in which one is living it, is what we call inner work. It is not one technique among others in the pedagogical toolkit, it is the condition of all the others. And it is, in my view, one of the things one is least taught in professional training, as if it went without saying that adults in positions of authority were already in distance with themselves. Nothing is less certain.

An ordinary example is enough to show what is at stake. In a class of twenty students, suppose that five of them are making noise while the other fifteen are working quietly. The teacher, disturbed in their concentration, ends up losing patience and shouts « stop making noise » to the whole class. That person is in direct contact with their emotion. The irritation they are feeling, they express as it is, sending it to the entire class. The five who were making noise hear it, but what they hear is a disordered scolding that has not even tried to find out where the noise was coming from. And the other fifteen, who were not making any noise at all, receive exactly the same scolding. Those fifteen, at that precise moment, lose something of their trust in the teacher. They understand that the teacher is not paying attention to them, that the teacher is reacting from themselves and not from what is actually happening in the classroom. The consequence is that all of them, the five and the fifteen alike, begin to protect themselves from this teacher who now seems potentially unjust.

This loss of trust has a direct effect on learning. In order to enter into the cognitive resistance described by Olivier Houdé, that is, in order to allow oneself to inhibit an automatism and to face a novelty that produces fear, one must feel safe with the person who is leading. A student who does not trust their teacher, who senses that this teacher might, under the impulse of an emotion, sanction them without reason, will spend their energy protecting themselves rather than learning. The brake on learning is immediate.

I am not saying that one should be a teacher without emotions, that is impossible. I am saying that one should be a teacher who notices their own emotions, who takes them as information about what they are living through, and who lets them be material for reflection rather than a direct message sent to the students. What distinguishes the place of the teacher from that of the students is precisely this distance, which the students do not yet have. That is why the inner work of the one who teaches is so singular. They bear the responsibility of bringing about an experience for others, and they can only do so from a personal experience over which they themselves have mastery.

The teacher I spoke of, on the virtual reality films project, is thoroughly experienced in pedagogy. She considers herself, rightly, someone who knows how to give a child their place. And yet, this day showed her that she could give the students even more room than she had thought, because several times during the day she had felt the anxiety of not being able to keep to the time. This is true for her, it is true for me, it is true for anyone who practices these professions. One never entirely lets go of the impulse to step in. One learns to notice it earlier, to take it as information about oneself, and to choose, each time, not to turn it into the message one sends to others. What is built in the time during which one lets the students search does not show, and yet it is what produces what comes next.

These same students whose autonomy I described on the filming set led on their own, a few months later, the public restitution of the project, in front of an audience they did not know, in a place they were discovering, with a poise that no one had expected to that extent. The scene that opens this article, where a student takes the microphone and one waits a few seconds before the words come, is one of theirs. That poise did not come by chance. It came because at every difficulty they crossed, at every delay they were given, the students walked the path themselves, in a climate in which their fear of doing it badly was given room rather than being fought. The paradox that opened this article can now be resolved. The adults who felt anxious during the session were witnessing, at the same time, a success they could not have produced themselves by stepping in. What their fear was telling them to do was precisely what would have prevented that success from happening.