From an early age I was curious about why people do what they do and how they become who they are. When I enrolled in the psychology program in the National University of Uzbekistan, I felt propelled along a path that gave my life a special meaning and purpose. For the first time, I met people seeking to learn how to build healthy relationships, how to find happiness, and what makes life worth living.
The area of psychology that attracted me the most was human development. I wanted to understand how children perceive their world, their powers of adaptation and resilience, and which childhood experiences made their adult life more difficult and which brought greater success. I sought the skills needed to connect with children and facilitate their development into adults capable of using creative thinking and executive functions.
After graduating from National University of Uzbekistan, I applied for a postgraduate program at Tashkent State Pedagogical University to study emotional stability in early adolescence and interventions that enhance children’s emotional well-being.
In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, researchers found the quality of teacher-student relationships to be the keystone for all other aspects of classroom management (Marsano, 2003). My perspective was affirmed by Thomas Gordon, author of Teacher Effectiveness Training (2003), “If you solve the relationship problem, you solve the misbehavior problem.”
One story from a teacher illustrates this point. She learned that an extremely challenging student, whose lack of self-control disrupted her classes, had witnessed his mother’s murder. She began talking with him each morning before school just to catch up with the news of his family and what he did the previous evening. Building this relationship made him sensitive to the teacher’s expectations, and he behaved properly in class.
Another lesson I believe teachers and parents must master is to be “a thermostat, not a thermometer” – we must try to understand and reflect the child’s feeling rather than react to the misbehavior (Landreth, Bratton at al., 2006). It is not what people do but how you respond to them that determines the quality of the relationship. For example, I advised another teacher to manage a disruptive child by moving closer to him, smiling at him when he was quiet, and even touching his shoulder to calm him. She also worked on understanding the underlying feelings that contributed to his behavior, reflecting emotions and addressing frustrations instead of reprimanding the child for the behavior. This work resulted in a strengthened relationship between the teacher and student and consequently decreased the level of disruptive behavior that the teacher was struggling to manage. After all of this, the teacher began calling me “the magician.”
These kinds of experiences inspired my interest in humanistic psychology. From Haim Ginott’s books and Play Therapy by Garry Lendreth, I learned that you don’t have to focus on children’s problems. Instead, by building a meaningful relationship, you can create a secure foundation that empowers children to solve their own problems. Paying attention to a child’s feelings and experiences proved so much more effective than trying to control and suppress their emotions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the child-centred model, I conducted a pilot study applying Child-Teacher Relationship Training (CTRT) based on the principles of play therapy (Landreth, Brown, 2000). The results demonstrated the effectiveness of CTRT in Uzbekistan, which led to increasing the awareness of a nondirective approach towards managing children. This perspective has guided me as a school psychologist and a university professor, and drives my research interests still today.
While lecturing at the National University, my reading of literature published in English made me aware of how important it is for Uzbekistan to use evidence-based approaches in therapy and teaching. I wanted to improve my skills to help students think creatively and focus on outcomes rather than just memorizing information. With the hope of incorporating critical thinking into psychology education in Uzbekistan, I applied for the Humphrey Fellowship program and will be forever grateful for being accepted.
The Humphrey Fellowship program brought mid-career professionals to the U.S. for professional development to benefit our home countries when we return. My experience at Penn State was far more beneficial than I could ever have imagined. Our weekly Humphrey leadership seminars and Global Leadership Forum with all 150 fellows from around the world cultivated my leadership abilities and enhanced my global perspective. Attending the lectures and workshops of amazingly talented professors not only allowed me to learn about play therapy, counselling and research methodology in psychology, but also exposed me to best practices for engaging teaching and presentations. I also spent time in a Cedar Clinic and a “quality talk” lab where I learned about supervision as a way of developing professional skills of prospective psychologists and a project on developing students critical thinking skills, respectively.
The list of people, institutions, techniques and theories that have deepened my understanding and expanded my horizons are beyond listing here, but I appreciate them all more than I can express. During my final month, my meetings with Dr. Richard Carlson, the director of undergraduate study, gave me an overview of psychological education. This background proved to be an important orientation for the project I would lead during my placement with the American Psychological Association (APA).
My transition to a professional affiliation with APA’s Office of International Affairs (OIA) in Washington, D.C., is expanding my perspective on psychological education beyond the borders of the United States. Currently, I am working on the International Competencies and Mobility in Psychology Project (ICMPP), which is a large-scale effort to evaluate training in the field of psychology across the world. This is allowing me to study competency-based approaches to education, learn other ways psychology education can be organized, and reflect on the nature of education in Uzbekistan.
I am inspired by APA’s mission to be a partner and leader in the global advancement of psychology and health. From my perspective as a newcomer, I can see how greatly psychology has influenced the U.S. culture, in ways Americans likely take for granted. In the U.S., people customarily reflect on their experiences, use communication and relationship building skills, value empathy and compassion, pay attention to and address their emotional and social needs, learn to resolve conflicts, seek therapy when they are in emotional pain and personally educate themselves to become better leaders and happier people. Here, it is easy to find examples of people seeking happiness by serving a purpose greater than themselves and helping other people rather than serving oneself alone. It is also common to celebrate uniqueness rather than conformity, and, with obvious exceptions, embrace cultural differences with an eagerness to learn from international experience. Seeing the power of psychological education to enhance both personal and social well-being, I am hungry to learn how it is done and how it can be applied globally.
My experience with APA is a unique opportunity to reflect on the nature of education in Uzbekistan, how to better apply a competences-based approach and how to take advantage of a global perspective in our curricula.
My heartfelt thanks to all of you, professionals and families, who so generously supported me.