Intensional Orientation

As teachers, it's imperative for us to be able to recognize these barriers, not only in ourselves, but in those with whom we have stewardship, our students. They both perpetuate and are victims of these barriers. We see it every day in classroom and playground behavior, those who bully and ignore, and those who are bullied and isolated. Here is our chance to step in, engage and teach how both can bring down the barriers and improve relationships.

Intensional orientation is the tendency to view people in terms of how they're labeled or talked about instead of how they actually are. How often do we do this with students? We tell a colleague about a problem student we've had in class, orienting the colleague to them instead of allowing them to form their own evaluation of the student based on their own observations. We're all quick to do this because it's much easier to take someone else's word than it is to form an assessment on our own.

Students do this with each other. In fact, recent research on the human behavior of gossip indicates it's a survival instinct. This barrier happens on a primal level, one that seeks to preserve one's self. These labels transmit on the backbone of rumor and are just as injurious as a direct insult. 

Intensional orientation labels the student, the person and it does not allow them to prove themselves otherwise. This orientation can be both negative and positive.

The cure is to extensionalize, go to the person, not a third, to find out more about them. Pretty simple, really, and yet if we lack assertiveness, we rather default to someone else's evaluation. In threat assessment, are you going to trust someone else's label? As you evaluate threat assessment with students, how apt are you to default to existing labels?