Promoting learner responsibility

How is advising different from teaching?

If I want to be a counsellor, I have to adopt a different logic, i.e. I can give all the advice I want, but the one who is responsible is the learner, and he is the one who pays. So I have to stay within this logic and put him within this logic, which means that I’m often going to find myself, because I work with schoolchildren, in the position of someone who is seen as the one who knows, who knows what the learner wants to learn. But my job is to put them in a position of responsibility, and that’s why, in a way, I have to come down off my pedestal a little in terms of my representations of the role of the teacher.

A teenager stands in front of you and says, well, in the next fortnight I’m going to do this and then walks away, and then you see him again a fortnight later, and he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. But the way he tells you, you realise whether you’re still a counsellor or whether you’ve become a teacher again. In other words, they may be feeling guilty, which in a way is a bit out of step with the idea of self-direction.

I’m going to give him advice, depending on his own objectives, in the sense that I’m going to make a number of possibilities available to him, but I’m never going to dictate a way of doing things, a way of being, a course of action. On the contrary, and this is something I’ve learnt from this work, it’s always about giving several possibilities so as to put the responsibility back on the learner. So that’s one of the main characteristics of counselling for me: it’s about opening up possibilities and then leaving the learner to take responsibility for those possibilities. And then, of course, providing the learner with information, because when it comes to making these choices, there’s information that I have that the learner doesn’t have, which is not knowledge to be reproduced but knowledge that informs action.

The information I’m going to give him will depend on the analysis I make with him of the situation he’s in. And this analysis will focus on the state of the journey, whether we’re at the beginning or still learning, and it’s this analysis that will actually enable me to identify possible paths with him.

And so it’s in the discussions with them, in the counselling work, that we’re going to question these reflexes which are in the genes of people who have already spent fifteen or twenty years in the school system.