It's Okay to Be a Follower

This week’s article summary is Not Leadership Material? Good. The World Need Followers.

To me, kids always seem to be assessed on whether they’re leaders or have leadership abilities and skills. Most kids are encouraged to lead in most activities be it in the classroom, at recess, on the sports field, at home with friends. Being a leader is generally viewed as a positive.

But as we all know, we all can’t be leaders in all situations.

Teachers and parents need to help kids learn and understand that there are times to lead and times to follow others.

Much of what kids see in the media and even in what they read and study at school is about being a leader, yet we adults spend more time being the one who is following than the one being a leader. 

While it’s fine to aspire to lead, our students also need to see the positives of being a follower too!

Joe

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In 1934, a young woman named Sara Pollard applied to Vassar College. In those days, parents were asked to fill out a questionnaire, and Sara’s father described her, truthfully, as “more a follower type than a leader.” The school accepted Sara, explaining that it had enough leaders.

It’s hard to imagine this happening today.

Today we prize leadership skills above all, and nowhere more than in college admissions.

Harvard’s application informs students that its mission is “to educate our students to be citizens and citizen-leaders for society.” Yale’s website advises applicants that it seeks “the leaders of their generation”; even Wesleyan, known for its artistic culture, was found by one study to evaluate applicants based on leadership potential.

If college admissions offices show us whom and what we value, then we seem to think that the ideal society is composed of Type A’s. It’s part of the American DNA to celebrate those who rise above the crowd.

So now we have high school students vying to be president of as many clubs as they can.

Yet a well-functioning student body — not to mention polity — also needs followers. It needs team players. And it needs those who go their own way.

It needs leaders who are called to service rather than to status.

Many students I’ve spoken with read “leadership skills” as a code for authority and dominance and define leaders as those who “can order other people around.”

The pressure to lead now defines and constricts our children’s adolescence. One young woman told me about her childhood as a happy and enthusiastic reader, student and cellist — until freshman year of high school, when “college applications loomed on the horizon, and suddenly, my every activity was held up against the holy grail of ‘leadership,’ ” she recalled. “And everyone knew,” she added, “that it was not the smart people, not the creative people, not the thoughtful people or decent human beings that scored the application letters and the scholarships, but the leaders. It seemed no activity or accomplishment meant squat unless it was somehow connected to leadership.”

This young woman tried to overhaul her personality so she would be selected for a prestigious leadership role as a “freshman mentor.” She made the cut, but was later kicked out of the program because she wasn’t outgoing enough. At the time, she was devastated. But it turned out that she’d been set free to discover her true calling, science.

Our elite schools overemphasize leadership partly because they’re preparing students for the corporate world, and they assume that this is what businesses need.

But a discipline in organizational psychology, called “followership,” is gaining in popularity. A Harvard Business Review article listed the qualities of a good follower, including being committed to “a purpose, principle or person outside themselves” and being “courageous, honest and credible.” It’s an idea that the military has long taught.

Recently, other business thinkers have taken up this mantle. Some focus on the “romance of leadership” theory, which causes us to inaccurately attribute all of an organization’s success and failure to its leader, ignoring its legions of followers. 

We also rely as a society, much more deeply than we realize, on the soloists who forge their own paths. We see those figures in all kinds of pursuits: in the sciences; in sports like tennis, track and figure skating; and in the arts. Art and science are about many things that make life worth living, but they are not, at their core, about leadership. 

Perhaps the biggest disservice done by the outsize glorification of “leadership skills” is to the practice of leadership itself — it hollows it out, it empties it of meaning. It attracts those who are motivated by the spotlight rather than by the ideas and people they serve. It teaches students to be a leader for the sake of being in charge, rather than in the name of a cause or idea they care about deeply. The difference between the two states of mind is profound.

If this seems idealistic, consider the status quo: students jockeying for leadership positions as résumé padders.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

What if we said to college applicants that the qualities we’re looking for are not leadership skills, but excellence, passion and a desire to contribute beyond the self? This framework would encompass exceptional team captains and class presidents. But it wouldn’t make leadership the be-all and end-all.

What if we said to our would-be leaders, “Take this role only if you care desperately about the issue at hand”?

And what if we were honest with ourselves about what we value? If we’re looking for the students and citizens most likely to attain wealth and power, let’s admit it. Then we can have a frank debate about whether that is a good idea.

But if instead we seek a society of caring, creative and committed people, and leaders who feel called to service rather than to stature, then we need to do a better job of making that clear.

Structured Versus Unstructured

This week’s article summary is Too Many Structured Activities May Hinder Children's Executive Functioning.

Just as last week’s summary dealt with direct instruction versus self-discovery debate, this one focuses on another big topics in education:  student unstructured time versus adult structured activities.

Research shows that kids benefit more from unstructured, child-directed time. When kids have opportunities to think and decide for themselves, they develop vital executive functioning skills that are key to subsequent success and happiness in school and life.

From 7^th-12^th grade I went to an independent-private school. My wife attended the local public school. Our school experiences were very different and resulted in very different adjustments to college.

I had small classes. The teaching style was some lecture but a lot more open discussion. As we read and studied novels and textbooks, we learned to take our own notes, form our own opinions, and share our questions and thoughts during class. Exams were mostly essay, so we learned how to write by writing, including how to support and substantiate our ideas.

My wife had much bigger classes that were primarily lecture-based. She never had to read a full novel (instead reading snippets in anthologies—remember Norton Anthologies?). She took some notes in class but often just had to copy an outline the teacher had written in chalk on the blackboard (again, I’m dating myself, I know). Homework was mostly worksheets and tests were for the most part multiple choice questions.

When we got to college, I breezed through my freshman year not because I was smart but because my school experiences had helped me develop the study/organizational skills and personal responsibility needed for college. My wife, on the other hand, struggled mightily because she hadn’t had those same opportunities in middle and high school; it wasn’t until her junior—even senior--year that she began to understand and then implement what was needed to succeed in college.

Like the direct instruction/self-discovery debate, the pragmatic reality is kids need both structured and unstructured learning opportunities. The key for us as educators is to make sure we provide the full range of opportunities to optimize habit, skills, and attitude foundation building and student learning.

Joe

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When children spend more time in structured activities, they get worse at working toward goals, making decisions, and regulating their behavior.

Kids learn more when they have the responsibility to decide for themselves what they're going to do with their time.

Psychologists at the University of Colorado studied six-year olds and found that the kids who spent more time in less-structured activities had more highly-developed self-directed executive function.

Self-directed executive function develops mostly during childhood, and it includes any mental processes that help us work toward achieving goals—like planning, decision making, manipulating information, switching between tasks, and inhibiting unwanted thoughts and feelings. It is an early indicator of school readiness and academic performance, according to previous research cited in the study, and it even predicts success into adulthood. Children with higher executive function will be healthier, wealthier, and more socially stable throughout their lives.

The researchers conjecture that when children are in control of how they spend their time, they are able to get more practice working toward goals and figuring out what to do next. For instance, the researchers write, a child with a free afternoon ahead of her might decide to read a book. Once she's finished, she might decide to draw a picture about the book, and then she'll decide to show the drawing to her family. This child will learn more than another child who completes the same activities, but is given explicit instructions throughout the process. 

“Structured time could slow the development of self-directed control, since adults in such scenarios can provide external cues and reminders about what should happen, and when," the researchers write in the study. "The ability to self-direct can spell the difference between an independent student, who can be relied upon to get her work done while chaos reigns around her, and a dependent, aimless student. When we reduce the amount of free playtime in American preschools and kindergartens, our children stand to lose more than an opportunity to play house and cops and robbers."

Direct Instruction Versus Self Discovery

This week’s article summary is The Effects of Telling First on Learning and Transfer.

A pedagogical conundrum for teachers is how often do we directly instruct students and how much to we let them self-discover.

While I support the ideal of self-discovery, I must admit I often struggled to provide enough of it in my classes as a history teacher.

About 7 or 8 years ago, I visited a public high school that had totally committed to self-discovery and project-based learning. Teacher lecturing was frowned upon. I visited a few classes—science/math combos—in which the students were tasked with completing group projects with minimal background information or explanation from teachers. Teachers moved around the classrooms observing student groups working on projects and often offered comments, but they weren’t supposed to share their expertise with the students. It was pretty evident the students were frustrated: they knew where the project was supposed to go (if I remember correctly, it was something to do with determining how to land a space craft on Mars) but they were adrift with how to get there (they didn’t know the requisite math or physics). I saw a lot more blank stares than idea generation. I finally asked a student how she enjoyed this new type of self-discovery, DIY, project-based learning teaching, and she whispered conspiratorially so not to be overheard, “I wish the teacher would call the whole class together and give us some direction. I miss lectures and I’m probably going to transfer to the district’s other high school.”

As teachers we all know that prior knowledge is a significant asset in supporting subsequent learning, and sometimes it’s the teacher who has to supply that background content in order for students to then acquire new knowledge.

As such, I’ve always been skeptical of project-based learning as a means of learning new knowledge. It is often fun and can be used to apply what you’ve learned, but to me it’s always seemed an inefficient and ineffective way to learn new content.

With all that said, I was surprised by the findings in the article below that reveals that self-discovery in fact does support long-term learning better than direct instruction. The article provides a number of reasons why which to me all involve the learner being more actively engaged.

Due to confirmation bias, it going to take more than one research study for me to change my opinion, but this article did make me reconsider my thoughts on self-discovery.

Joe

The most common pedagogical sequence in U.S. schools it to tell students the important principle or skill up front and then have them practice on a set of well-designed problems. This approach is a convenient and efficient way to deliver accumulated knowledge.

Nevertheless, many scholars are working on instructional alternatives, for instance, having students wrestle with a problem through a project, inquiry, or guided discovery and only then revealing the “answer” or underlying principle. The mechanics of these alternatives withhold didactic teaching at first lest it undermine the processes of discovery. The theory is that students first need to experience the problems that render told knowledge useful.

But is the experience-first approach effective?

In a recent study, researchers compared eighth-grade teachers who used telling-first and those who used an experience-first approach. Students’ initial recollection and test performance was the same in both groups, but long-term transfer was significantly better in the experience-first group. Why?

The researchers believe it’s because:

• Telling-and-practice pedagogy prompts students to apply solutions, one problem at a time, which reduces their chances of seeing similarities across cases.
• Giving students the end-product of expertise too soon short-cuts the need to find the deep structure that the expertise describes.
• Without an appreciation of deep structure, students are less likely to see the structure in new situations that differ on the surface, and they will fail to transfer.”

That said we aren’t in favor of frustrating students with uncertainty. There is definitely a time for telling.  It’s important for teachers to help students tolerate the short-term ambiguity of not being told the right answer. The effort to find and characterize the structure can improve learning and test performance in the long run.