PCM and Child Development
The Process Communication Model® (PCM) is a framework for appreciating, respecting and developing the uniqueness and dignity of others, adapting approach and environments for better learning, helping teachers and students negotiate conflict in productive ways, and empowering children with skills to be more effective throughout their lives.
It is well known that how we say something is as important as what we say, and that many times well-intended messages meet with unintended consequences because of how they were packaged. Children are largely unaware, yet acutely sensitive to the “process” of communication: the tones, gestures, postures, and facial expressions of those on whom they depend in their lives.
Children can be deeply affected in both positive and negative ways by the “messages between the lines” they receive from parents, teachers, friends, media, and the world around them. Likewise, communication between adults can break down because of how things are said rather than the message itself.
PCM had its genesis in the field of Transactional Analysis (TA). Dr. Taibi Kahler, a developmental psychologist in the TA field, felt that TA was unnecessarily complicated, yet profoundly relevant to helping people move from unproductive miscommunication into more productive and healthy relationships. He received the Eric Berne Memorial award in 1977 for his “Miniscript,” a clinical model for rapid psychological diagnosis, and developed the core theories of the Miniscript into PCM, an elegant model to understand personality, communication and behavior. It has since been adapted for use in education (the Process Education Model TM), corporate, legal, and spiritual settings.
Listed below are the core components of PCM along with their relevance to early childhood development.
Contact Perceptions – Essential filters through which people view the world and take in the environment.
Like doorways into a house, perceptions are how we get into each other’s worlds. There are six mutually exclusive perceptions, which form the basis of six unique personality types. Understanding, learning to recognize and being proficient in communicating using these perceptions gives educators and parents unique capacities to empathize and engage with others, and gives adults unique capacities to “read” children and adjust their language for maximum engagement.
Contact perceptions are one way that educators and parents can speak to children in the native language of their engagement.
Character Strengths – The natural abilities and strengths associated with one’s personality structure.
Unfortunately, in many situations, children are raised to be something that they are not, forced to practice, work, or study in a manner that does not engage their gifts. Understanding and appreciating character strengths is the key to leveraging diversity.
These gifts are so ingrained that a person cannot help but naturally approach the situations and tasks in their life using these strengths. PCM helps teachers, parents, and students transcend the stereotypes of gender, race, and ethnic origin and focus on true diversity – the variety of traits that exist within all of us, but in different amounts and order of priority in each of us. PCM has been shown to be valid and reliable across multiple nationalities around the world. PCM is about types in people, not types of people.
A healthy social life is found only when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.
- Dr. Rudolf Steiner
Although adults are most responsible for adapting their approach for all character strengths, they must also recognize their strengths, become stewards of these abilities, and gain awareness into how these gifts permeate their approach to teaching. PCM provides a framework for doing this.
Psychological Needs and Motivators – In-born hungers that must be met in healthy ways to function optimally.
Learners who get their needs met in school seldom cause trouble because doing something that interferes with getting a need met is not in their self-interest.
- Savage, 1991
All humans need to be appreciated and need attention. However, the nature of that appreciation, recognition, and attention is specific to personality type. Being able to facilitate a learning environment that meets each student’s psychological needs and motivators is one of the core competencies in PCM. True empowerment comes from within, and involves the awareness of self- determination, appreciation and understanding of how one is uniquely motivated, and skills to get those needs met in healthy ways.
In essence, then, the role of the educator or parent is to help the child be who they are truly designed to be, to realize their capacity, and to steward their gifts in effective and meaningful ways in their community. In many ways, this is the ultimate goal of every interaction between humans.
Distress and Negative Attention - When psychological needs are not being met in healthy ways, human beings will still attempt to get needs met – except in unhealthy ways.
Negative attention is extremely predictable, and PCM outlines the second-by-second, daily, and weekly behaviors by which people attempt to get needs met in unhealthy ways. When in distress, students, teachers, and parents are less objective, less compassionate, less effective, and become self-absorbed around seeking justification for their views about themselves and others.
This is where PCM truly sets itself apart from other models of personality and communication. By outlining distress sequences for each personality type, PCM empowers people in the community to be more aware and more able to uniquely reach out to others in constructive ways.
Channels of Communication – Dr. Kahler identified Channels as the specific combinations of body language and perceptions that compliment one another during productive communication. Through the teaching of Channels, PCM outlines principles for communication in ways that can be practiced, observed, and demonstrated. This lays the groundwork for assessing whether a particular approach is working, whether people are truly connecting with each other on their level, and encourages accountability within the community.
Leadership Styles, Environmental Preferences, and Learning Styles – Dr. Kahler has correlated personality type with a variety of other key variables, including how students and employees prefer to be led, their preferred learning style, and what types of environments (“the third teacher”) will be most conducive to engagement. These tools further assist teachers in adapting the learning experience to encourage the student’s natural and intrinsic journey.
Next Element’s training staff include two certified PCM trainers and one PCM Certifying Trainer, with advanced certifications in education, spiritual, and corporate applications. We offer a complete slate of seminars to teach PCM and other social-emotional skills, and design custom skills-development programs for schools and business.
If you are interested in bringing PCM to your organization, call us at 316-283-4200, or e-mail michele@next-element.com
Other Next Element white papers you might like:
Social Intelligence and Leadership
Discipline or Motivation: Which One Works?
Download PDF Version
