The Importance of Social Development in Kindergarten

This week's article summary is The Importance of Social Development in Kindergarten.

In our admission open house presentations, Brad and I talk a lot about how Trinity shapes our students’ academic and character foundation. As we delve deeper into just what character means at Trinity, Brad and I emphasize basic core values like empathy and integrity but spend the bulk of talking more generally about the importance of inter/intrapersonal skill/habit development. 

As you’ll see in this article, while there is a correlation between a student’s GPA and future success (job, salary, etc.), GPA is not only a result of a kid’s intelligence. In fact, a child’s EQ/Executive Function skills (attention, self-regulation of emotion, rationale decision-making) and relationships with others (cooperation, conflict resolution) play a much larger role than intelligence in overall success.

Furthermore, while IQ is more fixed, inter/intrapersonal skill development is malleable and teachable and very much influenced by home and school environment.

We know this at Trinity, hence the reason why we employ cooperative learning, emphasize a growth mindset (the power of ‘yet’), and ask our students to self-reflect and evaluate their progress in learning. 

Sadly to me, I still see non-educators focus too much on a child’s intelligence, rather than his/her attitude, flexibility, and willingness to work and adapt with others.

Any chance I get, I talk to our parents and other non-educators about the importance of a child’s EQ and its impact on his/her future.

Joe

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From an early age, we're led to believe our grades and test scores are the key to everything — namely, going to college, getting a job, and finding that glittery path to lifelong happiness and prosperity. 

But a recent study showed that when children learn to interact effectively with their peers and control their emotions, it can have an enormous impact on how their adult lives take shape.

In the study, kindergarten teachers evaluated the kids the Social Competence Scale by rating statements like "The child is good at understanding other's feelings" on a "Not At All/A Little/Moderately Well/Well/Very Well" scale. The research team used these responses to give each kid a "social competency score.” When each kid turned 25, the researchers gathered information about the now-grown-ups and analyzed whether these early social skills held any predictive value.

Here are the results:

Those good test scores we covet? They still matter, but maybe not for the reasons we thought: Traditional thinking says that if a kid gets good grades and test scores, he or she must be really smart, right? After all, there is a proven correlation between having a better GPA in high school and making more money later in life. But what that test score doesn't tell you is how many times a kid worked with a study partner to crack a tough problem, or went to the teacher for extra help, or resisted the urge to watch TV instead of preparing for a test. The researchers behind this project wrote, "Success in school involves both social-emotional and cognitive skills, because social interactions, attention, and self-control affect readiness for learning." That's a fancy way of saying that while some kids may just be flat-out brilliant, most of them need more than just smarts to succeed.

Skills like sharing and cooperating pay off later in life: We know we need to look beyond GPA to figure out which kids are on the right path. That's why the researchers zeroed in so heavily on that social competency score. What they found probably isn't too surprising: Kids who related well to their peers, handled their emotions better, and were good at resolving problems went on to have more successful lives. What's surprising is just how strong the correlation was. An increase of a single point in social competency score showed a child would be 54% more likely to earn a high school diploma, twice as likely to graduate with a college degree, and 46% more likely to have a stable, full-time job at age 25. The kids who were always stealing toys, breaking things, and having meltdowns? More likely to have run-ins with the law and substance abuse problems. 

Social behaviors can be learned and unlearned — meaning it's never too late to change: The researchers called some of these pro-social behaviors like sharing and cooperating "malleable," or changeable. Let's face it: Some kids are just never going to be rocket scientists. Turns out there are physical differences in our brains that make learning easier for some people than others. But settling disputes with peers? That's something kids (and adults) can always continue to improve on. And guess what? For a lot of kids, these behaviors come from their parents. The more you're able to demonstrate positive social traits like warmth and empathy, the better off your kids will be.

The bottom line? We need to do more than just teach kids information. We need to invest in teaching them how to relate to others and how to handle the things they're feeling inside. Ignoring social skills in our curricula could have huge ramifications for our kids down the road.

Why Repeating Yourself is a Good Thing

This week's article summary is  Why Repeating Yourself is a Good Thing.

A few years ago, I began to start most all-school meetings with a slide of Trinity’s mission. I figured framing all-school meetings with a reminder of why Trinity exists and what we believe would better focus our discussion and work—basically, how we “cherish childhood while shaping our students’ academic and character foundation.”

There have been times when I questioned if I need to continue doing this. Everyone knows our mission, right? If not the exact words, definitely its essence. 

Yet I still find myself putting the mission as the first slide in my presentations.

Well, Adam Grant (many of you read Think Again last summer) in his article below confirms my intuition: repetition is important and a great teaching technique.

When I taught 7th and 8th grade, I spent the bulk of my time on student study/organization skills and inter/intrapersonal development. (Academic content was ironically a distant third goal.) I would sometimes grow weary with all the times I had to repeat myself about how my students could organize themselves at school, in the classroom, at home. It seemed the more I repeated myself, the less impact I had on my students. 

But looking through the lens of repetition, I understand that I was providing my students with what they needed as emerging adolescents who were now expected to be independent learners as the complexity and volume of material presented was intensifying. They needed constant repetition about study and organizational skills. And almost all of them ended up being very successful students (and great people) in high school, college, and beyond.

Similarly, whenever my family—a core of about 10 people—gets together, we inevitably repeat the same family stories over and over. Over the holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, we regale one another with family stories we’ve heard over and over. While redundant, these stories in essence define the Marshall family history—what my great grandparents, grandparents, parents, siblings, kids, and now grandkids did. Even though we’ve heard these stories —now greatly exaggerated—no one ever comments when a family member says, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

So whenever frustration mounts when you find yourself repeating yourself over and over in school and at home, rest assured that repetition is an essential part of the learning process!

Joe

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In the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was preparing his speech for the March on Washington. When he asked his advisors for feedback on a direction he was considering, they shot it down. “You’ve used it too many times already.”

King took their advice and scrapped his idea.

Many people have an allergic reaction to repetition. When politicians repeat their stump speeches on the campaign trail, we judge them as inauthentic. When colleagues repeat their ideas in meetings, we tune them out. When our spouses repeat their favorite stories, we doze off.

But it turns out that repeating yourself is vital to effective communication. Psychologists have long demonstrated that with repeated exposure to ideas, we start to like them more. As the saying goes, the greatest barrier to communication is the illusion that it occurred. Reinforcing a message makes it more familiar and more memorable.

Yes, it’s possible to overdo it. But current research shows that it’s better to overcommunicate and be seen as redundant than to undercommunicate and miss the mark.

Although they’re less likely to be penalized for saying too much, leaders err on the side of saying too little. In an analysis of thousands of 360 feedback assessments, leaders were over nine times more likely to be criticized for undercommunicating than overcommunicating. In an experiment, people who undercommunicated were judged as unqualified to lead because they lacked empathy. When you hesitate to repeat your ideas, you don’t just fail to get your point across—you also come across as if you don’t care.

Martin Luther King Jr. came to that realization. When he took the stage at the March on Washington, his script didn’t have the familiar lines that his advisors had discouraged. Partway through his speech, he changed his mind and decided to repeat himself. In front of 250,000 people, he left his prepared comments behind and recited the lines he’d delivered many times before.

The phrase he repeated was “I have a dream…”

If King hadn’t repeated those lines, his speech might have never changed the world.

It didn’t matter that he’d said it in other speeches on other stages. In the span of two minutes that day, he repeated “I have a dream” eight times. It became the title of his speech, and it became the refrain for a watershed in civil rights.

Great communication is like a song. It isn’t enough to hear it once. You don’t know the melody until you hear it multiple times. You don’t know the chorus by heart until you’ve repeated it many times.

If you want to be heard, it helps to spell out your idea more than once. If you want to move people, you have to say it more often. If people aren’t telling you you’re repeating yourself, you might not be communicating enough.

Does Grit Really Help a Student Improve

This week's article summary is Grit Has Been Called the Secret of Success: New Science Suggests It Isn't and it's a complement to the previous summary.

Angela Duckworth is the guru of the importance of grit in school (and life) in success. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick even hired her a number of years ago to develop a grit assessment for potential draft selections to identify college football players with high levels of mental toughness and fortitude.

But just as the Patriots have had a pretty spotty track record with their draft picks, Duckworth’s work and research on grit are being questioned more and more.

One of the biggest criticisms is that while grit, resilience, and effort are important to success, ability and intelligence play important roles as well. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never throw a baseball 90 MPH or understand the writings of Stephen Hawking—trust me on this, as I’ve tried to do both many times.

What does this mean for schools?

We need to be careful not to over promise students that they can do and be anything with effort and perseverance alone. Succeeding involves many factors, including self-reflection, re-strategizing, guidance from mentors, and support from others.

Like much research, educators excitedly grabbed onto Duckworth’s research, hoping emphasis on grit would be the magic answer to success for every student.

But as we all know, it takes a lot more than persistence to thrive and flourish.

Joe

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University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth earned more than 23 million views as a TED speaker and glowing headlines by touting grit. This concept, she insisted, helped predict who would get ahead in life and can be cultivated if you want to increase your odds of success. 

No wonder the media went wild. There are few things the public wants to hear about more than shortcuts to success. But according to writer Jesse Singal, author of the new book, The Quick Fix, there's a big problem with Duckworth's ideas about grit -- they don't actually appear to be true. 

"Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success but Duckworth is the one who found it," raved Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's in his blurb for Duckworth's book, Grit. With hype like that, how could Singal resist investigating? But as he dug into the research, Singal realized the evidence for grit doesn't match the enthusiasm. 

In fact, he uncovered three major problems with Duckworth's claims. 

First, grit seems to overlap significantly with conscientiousness, one of the Big Five Personality traits that measures how likely people are to do the things they commit to doing. Duckworth says that grit differs subtly from conscientiousness, but research hasn't backed that up. Which makes grit look a lot like a shiny new name for a well-known idea. 

Second, even if you accept grit is somehow distinct from conscientiousness, it doesn't seem to be all that powerful a predictor of success. A 2020 study found that "intelligence contributes 48-90 times more than grit to educational success and 13 times more to job-market success," 

And finally, even if grit were a real thing and it did matter a lot for success, there is basically no evidence that we know how to intervene to change how much a person has.

Both Singal's article and his book offer a deeper dive into the topic, but the basic takeaway of his work is clear-- be skeptical of anyone, offering shortcuts to success. 

People have been chewing over life's biggest, gnarliest challenges for millennia and haven't found any magic bullets yet. No blogger or professor is likely to suddenly uncover a way to avoid the hard work of achieving great things or becoming a better person anytime soon.