5 Things to Know About Empathy

This week's article summary is 5 Things to Know About Empathy, and it's a follow up to last week's.

We hear a lot about the need for more empathy in the world. At Trinity, we stress to our students how important it is to be empathetic.

However, as you’ll see in the article, empathy is somewhat innate while also requiring much conscious effort.

During Preplanning, I talked about how human beings need and crave to belong but are much less forthcoming when it comes to accepting others. Unfortunately, our go-to instinct is to exclude. 

To resist excluding others, we need to be hyper aware of this predilection to protect ourselves and our group at the expense of others.

As we all know, exclusion at school can happen anywhere—in the classroom, at recess, in the Dining Hall, in the hallways.

Most of the time our students aren’t being bad, immoral, or unethical when they exclude. Rather, they are just letting their innate instincts direct them versus their rationality. 

Being more empathetic and more accepting are skills and habits that must be cultivated, practiced, and reinforced. Over time they can become more automatic. 

In many ways we as teachers—and parents—need to be our students’ conscience in treating others with care, concern, and acceptance. Kids are adept at saying the right things (let’s share, include, and be nice to everyone), yet we also know in application they can be selfish, exclusive, and insensitive. 

We need to be ever vigilant of their behavior to peers and continuously reminder them why being inclusive and accepting is so important. 

Joe

-----

A tortoise lies on its back, legs waving in distress, until a second tortoise crawls up to turn it over. Millions have watched this scene on YouTube, with many leaving heartfelt comments. “Great sense of solidarity,” says one. “There is hope,” says another.

The viewers are responding to what many interpret as empathy — a sign that even in the animal world, life isn’t just dog-eat-dog. Alas, they’re probably wrong. As one reptile expert observed, the second tortoise’s motives were likelier more sexual than sympathetic.

Consider it a cautionary tale for our times, in which politicians urge us to cultivate more empathy, and scientists churn out volumes of work on the subject. For all its popularity, empathy isn’t nearly as simple as so many blogs and books make it seem.

Several experts to help elucidate this surprisingly elusive concept. Here are the top take-aways:

Empathy is primitive… Evidence of the most basic sort of empathy — emotional contagion, or the sharing of another being’s emotions — has been found in many species, suggesting it’s innate in humans. Abundant evidence exists for emotional contagion in animals. Rats that watch other rats suffer electric shocks show their shared fear by freezing in place. Rats will even avoid pressing a lever dispensing a sugar pellet if it means another rat won’t get shocked, in what scientists suggest is an effort to avoid that shared fear and pain. That vicarious sense of pain is evident in humans as well: Even newborn infants will cry reflexively on hearing another infant cry. Empathy evolved because of all the ways it served our ancestors. The ability to feel others’ feelings helps parents be more sensitive to the needs of their children, increasing the chance that their genes will endure. This basic sort of empathy also inspires us to take care of friends and relatives, encouraging cooperation that helps our tribe survive.

But empathy isn’t automatic: Despite its deep and ancient roots, the quality of human empathy can vary, depending on the context. Some studies have suggested that we get less skillful at empathy as adulthood progress. That may be because empathy demands cognitive skills such as paying attention, processing information and holding that information in memory, all resources that usually become scarcer with age. Older adults can perform equally well in those skills, however, when a topic of conversation is more relevant or pleasant for them — in other words, when they care more, which presumably increases their willingness to invest those resources. The nature of empathy also appears to have changed throughout human history. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues that our ability to empathize with others has expanded over the past several centuries, due to trends such as increasing literacy and global commerce that make people more interdependent.

Empathy is often selfish: Empathy itself tends to be selfish, in that it’s usually directed toward those we care about the most — reflecting those evolutionary drives to care for children, relatives and others similar to ourselves. Empathy’s bias toward those nearest, dearest and most familiar is its preference for individuals over groups. Donations from all over the world flooded to refugee aid organizations after the publication of a photo of a drowned Syrian toddler on a Turkish beach. Yet they leveled off after six weeks, even as the media continued to report on the deaths of many other would-be migrants.

Empathy can be learned: Despite the controversies over empathy, most people say they want to be more empathetic. The good news is that they can be. The first step is believing that empathy is a skill that can be improved. People who believe they can grow their empathy will spend more time and effort expending empathy in challenging situations, such as trying to understand someone from a different political party. Through the years, studies have found that readers of fiction tend to be more skilled in empathy. The idea is that reading about other people helps us extend empathy to a wider circle.

Empathy only goes so far: In its simplest form, as emotional contagion, empathy may fail to lead to altruistic action, because altruism often demands some sort of sacrifice. Instead of more research on empathy, we need to see more work on understanding what he says are more powerful moral drivers, such as anger, disgust, contempt, guilt, the joy many people feel in helping others, and solidarity, the sense of agreement among people with a common interest. Amid today’s renewed concern about racial justice, it’s less helpful for a white person to tell a Black person: “I feel your pain,” than to say something like: “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be you. I see what’s happening and will not stand for it.”

How Kids Learn Right From Wrong

This week's article summary is  How Do Kids Learn Right From Wrong.

As we settle into the second half of the school year, it is important to re-establish classroom norms and procedures and re-set boundaries of acceptable behavior.

As we’ve discussed before, kids benefit from the new 3 Rs of education (routines, repetition, relationships). After a long holiday break, they’ve gotten into new routine and habits and need a number of reminders about how they are expected to behave at school in general and in your classroom in particular. 

This article is also a reminder that while teachers out of necessity often need to resort to discipline/consequences to handle student misbehavior in the short term, we always need to keep our longer-term goals in mind as well: developing in our students an internal, intrinsic sense of right and wrong, which the article calls internalization.

As you’ll see, there are certain strategies teachers—and parents as well—can use to help kids better see how their misbehavior adversely affects others. Similarly, the overarching philosophy and techniques of Positive Discipline help students begin to see that community members need on one another and that there are consequences for misbehavior.

These first few weeks of the second half of the school year are just like the first weeks of school. Taking the time to remind students of the promise we made at our first TTT to ‘care for one another’ will help re-establish behavior expectations for the rest of the year.

Joe

-----

As parents, our short-term goal is to get our children to listen to us and follow the rules and limits we set for our family. 

Yet, our long-term goal is to raise children who truly understand why we have created these rules and limits and develop an internal motivation to be kind and do the “right” thing.

In other words, we want them to follow rules because they care about being a kind, moral person, not just because they are scared they might get in trouble. 

This is referred to as internalization.

So how do we make sure we are working towards this long-term goal? Could our short-term discipline strategies be interfering with this long-term goal? 

A recent study found that when parents used specific discipline strategies they were more likely to have children who showed early signs of internalization of the rules than parents who used different strategies.

What strategies helped children to internalize the rules? 

Logical consequences instead of punishments. Logical consequences are consequences that are related to the child’s actions, such as taking away a toy that your child threw at their sibling, ending meal time because they are playing with their food, making your child clean up a mess that they made or leaving the playground when they aren’t following the rules. These types of consequences are more likely to result in children actually taking responsibility for the problem they created and helping children to understand the importance of the broke rule. 

Practicing “autonomy-supportive” parenting instead of “controlling” parenting. Autonomy-supportive parenting includes acknowledging your child’s feelings about a rule or limit, giving them some sort of choice or involvement in the decision-making around rules and limits, and providing the rationale behind the rule or limit. Controlling parenting often involves threats and punishment to make your child behave or trying to induce guilt or fear. Autonomy-supportive parenting helps children to internalize the rules, while controlling parenting makes children more likely to behave to please parents or avoid getting into trouble. 

How does internalization happen? This study, along with previous research, finds that, when children feel less anger and more empathy in response to their parents’ rule-setting, they are more likely to find the rule or limit acceptable. The more children accept the rule or limit, the more likely they are to appreciate and internalize the values that underlie the rule or limit. Anger in response to a parent’s discipline strategy may interfere with internalization since it makes children think more about how unfair the discipline is rather than the values their parents are trying to teach. Any parent discipline strategy that increases empathy is likely to enhance the internalization process. Logical consequences and autonomy-supportive parenting are effective because they help to reduce anger and increase empathy in the context of rule- or limit-setting. 

So how do parents apply this research?

• Gently remind your child of a rule or limit before using any type of discipline. For example, if your child is throwing sand at the playground, remind them “We will have to leave the playground if you keep throwing sand” before following through on this logical consequence.

• Acknowledge their feelings if they are not happy about the limit you are setting. It is so important to remember that you can hold the limit while still acknowledging they might not like it. For example, “I know you don’t like being buckled into your car seat. It feels uncomfortable for you, but it is the only safe way for us to ride in the car.”

• Use logical consequences instead of punishments when possible. Logical consequences are consequences created by parents that are related to the behavior and make logical sense following from the behavior. For example, if your child hits their brother, you ask them to stop playing to go get him an ice pack. If they make a mess, they have to clean it up instead of watching a movie with the rest of the family. A punishment is a negative consequence that is usually unrelated to the behavior and intended to be aversive to the child so they do not repeat the challenging behavior. For example, taking away screen time when they hit their brother or yelling at a child for making a mess. Research finds that logical consequences are more acceptable to children, which makes them less likely to cause anger and more likely to increase empathy. 

• Give them a chance to make some type of choice or participate in decision making or problem solving in some way. If your child is having difficulty with a limit or rule you set, give them a chance to make a choice. For example, you can say something like: “We need to leave the playground now, you can either walk or skip to the car.”

• Explain the rationale behind the limit, focusing on the impact on others when possible. Explaining the rationale (translation: giving them the reason for the rule rather than just saying “because I said so”) helps to reduce children’s anger about the rule, which then increases their likelihood of internalizing the rule. In addition, focusing on how the rule impacts others can help to build empathy, which is also key for internalization. For example, you can say something like: “We have to clean up our toys otherwise someone could trip over them and get hurt” or “When you grabbed that toy from your brother’s hands, it hurt his hands and interrupted his play”. 

• Avoid threats (“If you don’t clean up your toys, I am going to throw them away”) or anything that is meant to induce fear or guilt (“Why are you always so mean to your baby brother?”). These approaches might be effective in the moment but can come off as controlling to children and increase anger, which ultimately reduces the chances of internalization. 

  

Why Some Children Skip Traditional Kindergarten

This week's article summary is Many Kids Are Skipping Kindergarten.

While the Covid pandemic is in our rear view mirror, its effects linger. During the pandemic, Trinity, like most other private-independent schools, had the resources and flexibility to provide in-person schooling for the vast majority of our students the vast majority of the time. However, this was not always the case for public schools. Many of them had to resort to online learning throughout much of the pandemic. And, as we all experienced, online learning is ineffectual pedagogy for most students, particularly those in elementary grades. 

As you’ll see in the article, due to dissatisfaction with virtual learning, a lot of parents (principally public school) have now begun to question whether the early years of education are that important to their child’s education. Their thinking is their kids didn’t benefit much if at all from virtual learning and now seem fine in second and third grade. Consequently, these parents are delaying starting their younger child’s formal schooling until First Grade.

While I recognize that online schooling for most kids, particularly young ones, didn’t maximize their learning needs, that’s not a valid reason to postpone a child’s schooling until First Grade. 

I worry for those children who are skipping preschool and kindergarten to remain at home or in day care.

As all of us know, a strong academic and character foundation (what parents, after all, want for their children) is shaped progressively, with each previous year supporting the next one. A foundation with a weak base is wobbly. Sadly to me, a societal bias continue to prevail that early education is not essential and that kids ‘will eventually catch up after a few years.’ 

Clearly, Trinity’s Early Learners, PreK, and Kindergarten grades provide our students with both a strong cognitive and, perhaps more importantly, social-emotional head start! 

Joe

------

Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she started first grade. After spending her kindergarten year at an alternative program that met exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to being inside a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and was not printing her letters clearly.

Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says it was the right decision to skip kindergarten. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a kid. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.

The number of kindergartners in public school plunged during the Covid pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families delayed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to schooling of some kind, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment has continued to lag.

Some parents like Levy don’t see much value in traditional kindergarten. For others, it’s a matter of keeping children in other child care arrangements that better fit their lifestyles. And for many, kindergarten simply is no longer the assumed first step in a child’s formal education, another sign of the way the pandemic and online learning  upended the U.S. school system.

Kindergarten is considered a crucial year for children to learn to follow directions, regulate behavior and get accustomed to learning. Missing that year of school can put kids at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, a former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Those children are sometimes behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 even before starting school, she said.

But to some parents, that foundation seems less urgent post-pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn’t seem to work for their lives.

Students who disengaged during the pandemic school closures have been making their way back to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained down 5.2% in the 2022-2023 school year compared with the 2019-2020 school year. Public school enrollment across all grades fell 2.2%.

Kindergarten means a seismic change in some families’ lifestyles. After years of all-day child care, they suddenly must manage afternoon pickups with limited and expensive options for after-school care. Some worry their child isn’t ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think whatever their child misses at school can be quickly learned in first grade.

Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten this fall at her neighborhood school in Oakland, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she would need to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.

“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut my hours, and I basically wouldn’t have a good income for me and my kids,” said Engram, a preschool teacher and a mother of two.

Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a state child care subsidy that helps her pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is 6 and must enroll in first grade.

Compared with kindergarten, she believed her daughter would be more likely to receive extra attention at the child care center, which has more adult staff per child.

“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABC’s. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated that she can’t do something, her frustration overtakes her. She needs extra attention and care. She has some shyness about her when she thinks she’s going to give the wrong answer.”

Many would-be kindergartners are among the tens of thousands of families that have turned to homeschooling.

Some parents say they came to homeschooling almost accidentally. Convinced their family wasn’t ready for “school,” they kept their 5-year-old home, then found they needed more structure. They purchased some activities or a curriculum — and homeschooling stuck.

Others chose homeschooling for kindergartners after watching older children in traditional school. Jenny Almazan is homeschooling Ezra, 6, after pulling his sister Emma, 9, from a school in Chino, California.

“She would rush home from school, eat dinner, do an hour or two of schoolwork, shower and go to bed. She wasn’t given time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and pressures her kids might face at school to act or dress a certain way.

To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a preschool teacher. Most days, the children’s learning happens outside of the home, when they are playing at the park, visiting museums or even doing math while grocery shopping.

“My kids are not missing anything by not being in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I’m not saying public school is bad. It’s not. But for us, this fits.”

Kindergarten is important for all children, but especially those who do not attend preschool or who haven’t had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director for the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.

“The question actually is: If you didn’t go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?” he said.

Hannah Levy chose the Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter’s education, in part because she valued how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons on nature. She pictured traditional kindergarten as a place where children sit inside at desks, do worksheets and have few play-based experiences.

“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” daughter Aylah said.

But the appeal of a suburban school system had brought the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.

Early this fall, Levy recalled Aylah coming home with a project where every first grader had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible print. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.

“It was interesting to me because it was the moment I thought, ‘What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?’” she said.

 In a conference with Levy, Aylah’s teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said anything Aylah was behind on, she has caught up to the point that she would never differentiate that Aylah didn’t go to Cornell for kindergarten as well,” Levy said.

The Most Significant Education Studies of 2023

This week's article summary is The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2023.

For me, the common thread in these studies is the teaching techniques we learned during our schooling and from our own classroom teaching experiences are very often validated by quantitative research. Sometimes old wives’ tales turn out to be true and evidence-based!

Some highlights from last year’s research studies:

• Heightened student academic performance results when teachers get to know their students as unique individuals as well as create a classroom culture of trust, support, and purpose
• Students’ storing and retrieving content from long-term memory is strengthened through frequent low-stakes assessments and from demonstrating their understanding in multiple ways
• Proficient reading comprehension requires both structured and systematic skill building and background knowledge
• To reduce stress, anxiety, and depression in students, adults (parents and teachers) need to give kids more opportunities to be independent and autonomous—too much adult supervision is contrary to kids’ growth and self-confidence
• AI will never replace the emotional needs and support students get from their teachers. 

It’s always affirming to see education research confirm Trinity’s program and pedagogy!

Joe

-------

A NEW THEORY ABOUT THE TEEN MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS: Parents, teachers, and medical professionals are wringing their hands over the alarming, decades-long rise in teenage mental health issues, including depression, feelings of persistent hopelessness, and drug addiction. The root causes remain elusive—cell phones and social media are prime suspects—but a recent study offers another explanation that’s gaining traction: After scouring surveys, data sets, and cultural artifacts, researchers theorized that a primary cause is “a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.” Scholarly reviews of historical articles, books, and advice columns on child rearing depict an era when young children “walked or biked to school alone,” and contributed to their “family’s well being” and “community life” through meaningful chores and jobs. Risky play and unsupervised outdoor activities, meanwhile, which might “protect against the development of phobias” and reduce “future anxiety by increasing the person’s confidence that they can deal effectively with emergencies,” are often frowned upon. That last point is crucial, because dozens of studies suggest that happiness in childhood, and then later in adolescence, is driven by internal feelings of “autonomy, competence, and relatedness”—and independent play, purposeful work, and important roles in classrooms and families are vital, early forms of practice. Whatever the causes, young children seem to sense that something’s off.

MORE EVIDENCE FOR MOVING PAST “FINDING THE MAIN IDEA”: In the United States, the teaching of reading comprehension has ping-ponged between skills-based and knowledge-based approaches. In 2019, things appeared to come to a head: While reading programs continued to emphasize transferable skills like “finding the main idea” or “making inferences,” the author Natalie Wexler published The Knowledge Gap, an influential takedown of skills-based methods, and a large 2022 study concurred, noting that “exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and law” taught reading more effectively than skills-based approaches. Now a pair of new, high-quality studies—featuring leading researchers and encompassing more than 5,000 students in 39 schools—appears to put the finishing touches on a decades-long effort to push background knowledge to the forefront of reading instruction. In a Harvard study, 3,000 elementary students participated in a yearlong literacy program focused on the “knowledge rich” domains of social studies and science, exploring the methods used to study past events, for example, or investigating how animals evolve to survive in different habitats. Compared to their counterparts in business-as-usual classes, the “knowledge based” readers scored 18 percent higher on general reading comprehension. Background knowledge acts like a scaffold, the researchers explained, helping students “connect new learning to a general schema and transfer their knowledge to related topics.” The other study examined the impact of the “Core Knowledge” program on 2,310 students in nine Colorado charter schools from kindergarten to sixth grade. The approach improved reading scores by 16 percentile point. The pendulum is swinging, but the researchers caution against overreach: There appear to be “two separate but complementary cognitive processes involved in development and learning: ‘skill building’ and ‘knowledge accumulation,’” they clarified. We may have the balance out of whack, but to develop proficient readers, you need both.

A FASCINATING GUIDE TO BETTER QUIZZING: A study sings the praises of virtually every kind of test, quiz, and knowledge game, asserting that such assessments should be frequent, low-stakes, highly engaging, and even communal. Their rationale: When properly designed and stripped of dread, tests and quizzes dramatically improve “long-term retention and the creation of more robust retrieval routes for future access,” a well-established phenomenon known as the testing effect. The study is a fascinating, granular look at the mechanics of testing and its impacts on learning. Here are some of the highlights: 

HOW TONE OF VOICE CHANGES CLASSROOM CULTURE: Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, subtle shifts in a teacher’s tone of voice—a sharp rise in volume or a sudden barrage of repeated instructions born of frustration—can be the first sign that something’s awry in the classroom, disturbing a fragile equilibrium and leading students to clam up or act out. Researchers observed as teens and preteens listened to instructions given by teachers—“I’m waiting for people to quiet down” or “It’s time to tidy up all of your belongings,” for example—delivered in warm, neutral, or controlling tones. While the effect was unintended, an authoritative tone often came off as confrontational, undermining students’ sense of competence and discouraging them from confiding in teachers. Warm, supportive tones, on the other hand, contributed to a classroom environment that reinforced learning across multiple social and academic dimensions like sense of belonging, autonomy, and enjoyment of the class. 

MATH PICTURE BOOKS WORK: A review of 16 studies concluded that math books improved student engagement and attitudes toward math; strengthened kids’ grasp of math representations like graphs or physical models; and boosted performance on tasks like counting to 20, understanding place value, and calculating diameters. In early childhood, in particular, math picture books worked wonders—one study found that young students “tend to anticipate and guess what will happen next, resulting in high engagement, aroused interest in understanding the problems, and curiosity in finding solutions”—but even middle school students seemed mesmerized by math read-alouds. Importantly, math picture books weren’t a substitute for procedural fluency or mathematical practice. Typically, the authors noted, teachers bracketed math units with picture books, introducing a mathematical concept “in order to prepare students for the upcoming practice and activities,” or, alternatively, used them to review material at the end of the lesson.

A TRULY MASSIVE REVIEW FINDS VALUE IN SEL—AGAIN: It’s déjà vu all over again. The researcher Joseph Durlak, who put social and emotional learning on the map with his 2011 study that concluded that SEL programs boosted academic performance by an impressive 11 percentile points, was back at it in 2023. He published a comprehensive meta-analysis that surveyed a 424 studies involving over half a million K–12 students, scrutinizing school-based SEL programs and strategies such as mindfulness, interpersonal skills, classroom management, and emotional intelligence. The findings: Students who participated in such programs experienced “improved academic achievement, school climate, school functioning, social emotional skills, attitudes, and prosocial and civic behaviors,” the researchers concluded.

TO IMPROVE STUDENT WRITING, REDUCE FEEDBACK (AND PUT THE ONUS ON KIDS): It’s hard to move the needle on student writing. Without guidance, revisions tend to be superficial; students might correct typos and grammatical mistakes or make cursory adjustments to a few ideas, but leave it at that. A promising, time-saving alternative is to deploy rubrics, mentor texts, and other clarifying writing guidelines. In the study, high school students were graded on the clarity, sophistication, and thoroughness of their essays before being split into groups to test the effectiveness of various revision strategies. Students who consulted rubrics that spelled out the elements of an excellent essay—a clear central thesis, support for the claim, and cohesive overall structure, for example—improved their performance by a half-letter grade while kids who read mentor texts boosted scores by a third of a letter grade. Rubrics and mentor texts are reusable, “increase teachers’ efficient use of time,” and “enhance self-feedback” in a way that can lead to better, more confident writers down the line, the new research suggests.

DIRECT INSTRUCTION AND INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING ARE COMPLEMENTARY: It’s an often-fiery but ultimately dubious debate: Should teachers employ direct instruction, or opt for inquiry-based learning? At its core, direct instruction often conveys information “by lecturing and by giving a leading role to the teacher,” explained a recent study examining the evidence supporting both approaches. Critics typically focus solely on its passive qualities, a straw-man argument that ignores activities such as note-taking, practice quizzes, and classroom discussions. Opponents of inquiry-based learning, meanwhile, characterize it as chaotic, akin to sending students on a wild goose chase and asking them to discover the laws of physics on their own—though it can actually unlock “deep learning processes such as elaboration, self-explanation, and metacognitive strategies,“ the researchers say. Both sides misrepresent what teachers actually do in classrooms. Instructional models are “often combined in practice,” the researchers note, and inquiry-based learning is usually supported with direct instruction. Teachers might begin a lesson by leading a review of key concepts, for example, and then ask students to apply what they’re learning in unfamiliar contexts. Teachers already know that factual fluency and the need to struggle, flail, and even hit dead-ends are integral to learning. Teaching is fluid and complex and spools out in real time; it resists every effort to reduce it to a single strategy or program that works for all kids, in all contexts.

BRAINS THAT FIRE TOGETHER WIRE TOGETHER: In 2021, we reported that as students progressed through a college course, the learning material left neural fingerprints that mirrored brain activity in other students. A study this year using electroencephalography (EEG) largely confirms those findings. High school science teachers taught groups of young adults fitted with electrodes. Researchers found that stronger “brain synchrony” between peers predicted better academic performance. Together, these studies underscore the importance of scholarly expertise and direct instruction, but also the power of peer-to-peer and social learning. As knowledge passes from teachers to learners—some students grasp material quickly, others more slowly—an opportunity to distribute the work of learning emerges. When advanced students are paired with struggling peers, assisted by nudges from the teacher, groups of students might eventually converge around an accurate, common understanding of the material.

AI MAY CUT AN EDUCATOR’S PLANNING TIME DRAMATICALLY: Concern that the end of human teaching is one software release away is premature: Studies we’ve reviewed suggest that AI still requires a lot of fine-tuning, and in July researchers concluded that without human intervention, AI is atrocious at mathematics, performing poorly on open-ended problems and routinely flubbing even simple math calculations. To be useful, it turns out, AI may need us more than we need it.

What Emotionally Intelligent People Don't Do

This week's article summary is 7 Things Emotionally Intelligent People Don't Do.

It’s an apt reminder at the start of the second half of the school year about the importance of emotional intelligence in the classroom.

As we all know, everyone has both IQ and EQ. Even though IQ historically has gotten most of the attention, there’s been more focus on the importance of EQ over the past 10-15 years because, realistically, if you can’t get along and work well with others, your level of intelligence is of little importance.

EQ is just as important in the classroom. 

As we all settle back into the routines of school, some of us will easily readjust to basic expectations while others need guidance and reinforcement.

After an extended holiday break, we all benefit from a reminder of classroom and school norms that have guided us since the start of the school year—important qualities like self-regulation, growth mindset, care and respect for others, and personal responsibility.

Let’s make the second half of the school year a great one!

Joe

------

The restaurant manager who speaks with poise and grace to the patron complaining loudly about the wait service. The partner who angers rarely, forgives easily, and assumes accountability for their actions. The successful CEO who balances her profession, her family responsibilities, and her personal hobbies with equal measures of calm and confidence.

What do these people have in common? In two words: Emotional Intelligence. 

According to Psychology Today, Emotional Intelligence is defined as an aptitude for identifying and managing emotions, and the emotions of others. It consists of three primary skills: the ability to analyze interior emotions and the feelings of those around them; the capacity to apply emotions to tasks; and the facility to take control of emotions — whether it’s managing their own before they veer out of control, or having the strength and capability to make another person smile, settle down, or handle a situation appropriately.

Those with high Emotional “IQs” have been proven to enjoy more prosperity in life. Whether they’re in a social or professional environment, they thrive. Their personal lives aren’t train wrecks, precisely because they’re lived from the point of thoughtful — and meaningful — decisions. They outperform others, excel at their jobs, are happy in their relationships, and consistently work towards attaining positive results in all aspects of life. 

So, the question is, what don’t they do? Here are 7 things emotionally intelligent people, as a rule, avoid:

They don’t get caught up in other people’s drama: One of the hallmarks of Emotional Intelligence is empathy. But there’s an enormous difference between displaying empathy towards a friend or loved one and allowing another person’s rage or misery to incense, dominate, or merely influence one’s well-being. Think of the histrionic behavior of your co-worker who is “distraught” not because she’s going through a break-up but because her friend is. Emotionally intelligent people listen carefully, provide gentle, loving, but authoritative advice, and offer assistance. But they don’t permit others’ lives and reactions to rule their own.

They don’t complain: Whining and grumbling implies two things — one, that we are victims, and two, there are no solutions to our problems. Rarely does an emotionally intelligent person feel victimized, and even more infrequently does an emotionally intelligent person feel that a solution is beyond their grasp. Instead of looking for someone or something to blame, they immediately think of how to constructively address the dilemma.

They don’t always say yes — to others and themselves: Like empathy, self-control and conviction are sure signs of an emotionally solid person. Emotionally intelligent people are aware that an invite to go on a spontaneous weekend rendezvous will detract them from fulfilling their preexisting commitments. They are definitive about their decisions, rather than saying “I don’t know, maybe?” which invites doubt — and with that, possibly heightened anxiety. The more often emotionally intelligent people exercise their right to say no, and the more frequently they rely on their willpower, the freer they are to concentrate on their ambitions and overall well-being.

They don’t gossip: Emotionally acute people sidestep gossip as determinedly as they skirt drama. To involve themselves in scandalous talk, they know, is to shame another for a supposed error — and an emotionally intelligent person understands that all humans are equally deserving, and that what others might perceive as a mistake is an opportunity for improvement.

They don’t count on others for happiness or confidence: Emotionally intelligent people are self-sufficient in all manners of life, including their contentment and peace of mind. They have learned that to bank on someone else making them feel joyful or worthy is to put themselves at risk for disappointment and hopelessness. Rather, they take their emotions in their own hands and find hobbies that delight them, strive for achievements that will lead to a sense of self-worth, and search within for love and acceptance.

They don’t engage in negative self-talk: While few of us are entirely immune to thinking (or saying) pessimistic statements that begin with “I” e.g., “I should have done better,” emotionally intelligent have the ability to curb cynical thoughts before they fall down the proverbial rabbit hole. Instead, they rely on facts to come to conclusions. For some, it’s a mere glance at their experience and accomplishments outlined on their resumes; for others, it’s the appearance of a clean and organized house, or an internal analysis of what they’ve done right. After all, emotionally intelligent people acknowledge that negative thoughts are just that — thoughts .

They don’t dwell on the past: People who exist more in their past than in their present are susceptible to a barrage of mental and spiritual grievances, from regret and nostalgia to agitation and trepidation. Emotionally intelligent people honor their pasts — the people they have loved, the mistakes they have made, the opportunities they’ve eschewed — but are mindful of the importance of living squarely in the here and now. By learning from the past (instead of dwelling on it), the emotionally intelligent have the power to inform their present — without diminishing their ability to advance or harness three of the most vital emotions of all: Self-satisfaction, gratitude, and hope.