Empathy Can Be Taught

This week’s article summary is Can You Teach People to Have Empathy.

One of our goals as an elementary school is to help our students develop a sense of belonging.  It feels good (it’s in our ancestral DNA as a crucial need for survival) to be a part of a group.

Yet also in our ancestral DNA is the tendency — through omission and commission — to exclude others, especially those who are different from us.

Last week’s article highlighted that some of us naturally possess and demonstrate social skills and competencies in kindergarten while others need much practice and guidance in being able to work get along, and cooperate with others. 

Similarly, some of us are more naturally empathetic than others. 

The point of the article below is that empathy can be taught—thus, trumping any natural tendency we may have to exclude others or to be wary of difference.

Like learning academic skills, we all need to learn, practice, and be constantly reminded of social skills, including empathy. 

The article has a link to an interesting test: seeing how well you can determine a person’s mood just from looking at his/her eyes. My guess is most of you will score above the average (26). I scored a 29—although my wife insists I must have cheated as all too often I don’t correctly read her!

Look in class for any opportunity to help your students practice and display empathy.

Enjoy the weekend and thanks to all for making the start of school so special for your students and their families!

Joe

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Empathy is a quality that is integral to most people's lives - and yet the modern world makes it easy to lose sight of the feelings of others.

But almost everyone can learn to develop this crucial personality trait.

Open Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird and one line will jump out at you: "You never really understand another person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

Human beings are naturally primed to embrace this message.

According to the latest neuroscience research, 98% of people (the exceptions include those with psychopathic tendencies) have the ability to empathise wired into their brains - an in-built capacity for stepping into the shoes of others and understanding their feelings and perspectives.

The problem is that most don't tap into their full empathic potential in everyday life.

You can easily find yourself passing by a mother struggling with a stroller on some steps as you rush to a work meeting, or read about a tragic earthquake in a distant country then let it slip your mind as you click a link to check the latest sports scores.

The empathy gap can appear in personal relationships too - like when I find myself shouting in frustration at my six-year-old twins, or fail to realize that my spouse is doing more than her fair share of the housework.

So is there anything you can do to boost your empathy levels?

The good news is that almost everyone can learn to be more empathic, just like we can learn to ride a bike or drive a car.

A good warm up is to do a quick assessment of your empathic abilities.

Neuropsychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has devised a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes in which you are shown 36 pairs of eyes and have to choose one of four words that best describes what each person is feeling or thinking - for instance, jealous, arrogant, panicked or hateful. The average score of around 26 suggests that the majority of people are surprisingly good - though far from perfect - at visually reading others' emotions.

Going a step further, there are three simple but powerful strategies for unleashing the empathic potential that is latent in our neural circuitry.

Make a Habit of ‘Radical Listening’: "What is essential,' wrote Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist and founder of Non-Violent Communication, "is our ability to be present to what's really going on within - to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing at that very moment."

Listening out for people's feelings and needs - whether it is a friend who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer or a spouse who is upset at you for working late yet again - gives them a sense of being understood.

Let people have their say, hold back from interrupting and even reflect back what they've told you so they knew you were really listening. There's a term for doing this - "radical listening".

Radical listening can have an extraordinary impact on resolving conflict situations. Rosenberg points out that in employer-employee disputes, if both sides literally repeat what the other side just said before speaking themselves, conflict resolution is reached 50% faster.

Look for the Human Behind Everything: A second step is to deepen empathic concern for others by developing an awareness of all those individuals hidden behind the surface of our daily lives, on whom we may depend in some way. A Buddhist-inspired approach to this is to spend a whole day becoming mindful of every person connected to your routine actions.

So when you have your morning coffee, think about the people who picked the coffee beans. As you button your shirt, consider the labor behind the label by asking yourself: "Who sewed on these buttons? Where in the world are they? What are their lives like?"

Then continue throughout the day, bringing this curiosity to who is driving the train, vacuuming the office floor or stacking the supermarket shelves. It is precisely such mindful awareness that can spark empathic action on the behalf of others.

Become Curious About Strangers: I used to regularly walk past a homeless man around the corner from where I live in Oxford and take virtually no notice of him. One day I stopped to speak to him.

It turned out he had a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford. We subsequently developed a friendship based on our mutual interest in Aristotle's ethics and pepperoni pizza.

This encounter taught me that having conversations with strangers opens up our empathic minds. We can not only meet fascinating people but also challenge the assumptions and prejudices that we have about others based on their appearance, accents or backgrounds.

It's about recovering the curiosity everyone had as children, but which society is so good at beating out of us. Get beyond superficial talk but beware interrogating people. Respect the advice of oral historian Studs Terkel - who always spoke to people on the bus on his daily commute: "Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer."

As the psychologist and inventor of emotional intelligence Daniel Goleman puts it, without empathy a person is "emotionally tone deaf".

It's clear that with a little effort nearly everyone can put more of their empathic potential to use. So try slipping on your empathy shoes and make an adventure of looking at the world through the eyes of others.

Social Skills in Kindergarten

This week’s article summary from the Washington Post is the one I referenced at the opening faculty/staff meeting: a twenty-year study on how social skills demonstrated in kindergarten predict future success in school and life.

I’ve highlighted one particular sentence (in the second to last paragraph) that gave me pause. The sentence states that kindergarten students with more developed social competencies continued in subsequent grades to get along well with classmates and teachers, which then led to success beyond school—in other words, a positive snowball effect.

I couldn’t help but think about the kindergarten students who for whatever reason didn’t demonstrate those those important kindergarten social competencies: What happened to them in subsequent school years?

I was fortunate as a student in that I did demonstrate those social competencies in kindergarten and in later grades. Based on the research study below, because social skills came easy to me, so did school. Yet I needed a lot of help and support in others areas of school: my lack of interest in reading and writing (not unusual with boys), ineptitude with anything related to art or music, reluctance/shyness asking questions in class. 

All of us were shaped by great teachers who built upon our strengths and innate gifts but who, more importantly, saw our weaknesses/deficiencies and who then pushed, urged, supported, nurtured, and challenged us.

As teachers we have the exciting but daunting responsibility to guide all our students—those with innate abilities and qualities and those who need support, guidance, and scaffolds.  

Regardless of where I went to school, I would have most likely become a friendly, nice, socially-adjusted adult, but the teachers who impacted me the most helped me become an avid reader and confident writer and an unabashed questioner—I still, however, fall short in music and art (no matter how great my teachers, my artistic inability and limited aptitude won out). 

Especially as we close our first week of school and continue to get to know our new students, let’s commit to supporting all of them, particularly those who will need your help, support, guidance, and care in order to succeed and thrive. 

To me, a better ending for the article below is that all the kindergarten kids in the study — even those with poor social skills in kindergarten — ultimately flourished in school and life because of the teachers they had!

Joe

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According to a new study, kindergartners who share, cooperate and are helpful are more likely to have a college degree and a job 20 years later than children who lack those social skills. Kids who get along well with others also are less likely to have substance-abuse problems and run-ins with the law.

The research, which involved tracking nearly 800 students for two decades, suggests that specific social-emotional skills among young children can be powerful predictors for success later in life.

These are skills that probably portend their ability to do well in school, to pay attention and to navigate their environment.

The study suggests that early-childhood education programs and schools should identify children with weak social skills early on, when they are still very receptive to learning how to behave differently.

The study is based on data collected beginning in 1991 at schools in Nashville, Seattle, rural Pennsylvania and Durham, N.C. Teachers of 753 kindergartners were asked to rate each student’s skill level in eight areas:

·      Resolves peer problems on his/her own.

·      Is very good at understanding other people’s feelings.

·      Shares materials with others.

·      Cooperates with peers without prompting.

·      Is helpful to others.

·      Listens to others’ point of view.

·      Can give suggestions and opinions without being bossy

·      Acts friendly toward others.

Researchers then tracked those students for two decades, using police records, reports from parents and self-reports from the children. They then used statistical models to filter out the effects of factors such as a child’s socio-­economic status, family characteristics and early academic ability to isolate the impact of early social skills on life outcomes.

Children who scored “well” on social competence were four times as likely to get a college degree by age 25 as those who scored “a little.”

Children who scored higher were also more likely to have a full-time job by the time they were 25. 

Similarly, children who scored on the lower end of the scale were more likely to have negative interactions with the police and spend time in juvenile detention. They also had a higher chance of being arrested, of recent binge drinking and of being on a waiting list for public housing.

The research does not say that the ability to share causes one’s life to go more smoothly or that refusing to share causes one’s life to be difficult. But coupled with the growing body of research on social-emotional skills, it provides more evidence for what seems like common sense: Children who interact well as kindergartners are more likely to make friends and get positive feedback from teachers and, therefore, are more likely to like school and stay in school.

The children in the study represented a cross-section of society, with a somewhat higher proportion of at-risk children than the general population. Of the sample, about half were white, 46 percent were black and 4 percent were from other ethnic backgrounds. Fifty-eight percent were boys.

What Lies in the Heart of a Great Teacher

This week’s article summary is a list of qualities from an article I read this summer entitled “What Lies in the Heart of a Great Teacher” (sorry, no link available to the actual article).

As we complete our preplanning days, move into and get adjusted to our wonderful new Learning Commons, prepare for Visitation Day on Monday, and are poised to embark on a new school year, it’s important to remember the tremendous impact and influence all of us will have on students—and colleagues, parents, and others.

The list below reminds me to take stock of what I aspire to be every day, not only at school but in everything I do.

Some may want to put these qualities on your desk, laptop notepad, etc. and periodically ask yourself how well you show these qualities that  are “simple to understand  but not easy to achieve.”

I want to thank all of you for very productive (and fun and collegial) preplanning days—where I saw the qualities of a great teacher on full display!

Enjoy your last weekend of summer vacation and let’s make the 2015-16 school year  special and memorable for our students, their families, our colleagues, and ourselves!

Joe

What lies in the heart of a great teacher?

You are kind: A great teacher shows kindness to students, colleagues, parents, and those around him/her. Being a kind teacher helps students feel welcomed, cared for and loved.

You are compassionate: Teaching is a very humanistic profession, and compassion is the utmost feeling of understanding, and showing others you are concerned about them. A compassionate teacher models that characteristic to students with his/her actions.

You are empathetic: Empathy is such an important trait to develop in ourselves and our students. Being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes and see things from their perspective has a powerful impact on our decisions and actions.

You are positive: Being a positive person is not easy. Staying positive during trying situations has a tremendous, positive impact on students and everyone around us. Looking on the bright side always seems to help make things better.

You are a builder: A great teacher bridges gaps and builds relationships, friendships, and a community. Building a community is something a great teacher seeks to do in the classroom and extends that to the entire school and its community.

You inspire: Everyone looks at a great teacher with the result if wanting to be a better students, a better teacher, a better parents, a better person.

Grant Wiggins and the Challenge of Trying to Teach Everything

For those of you who are new to Trinity, every Friday during the school year I send out  a summary of an interesting, provocative article I’ve recently read.

I also post this on my blog site, yet more people seem to prefer getting the article summary via email. 

The purpose is to have the articles be a catalyst for thinking about why and how you teach and what your philosophy of education is. Sometimes you might agree completely with an article’s premise, recommendations, or conclusions—other times you might passionately disagree. Some of the articles will resonate with you—others won’t. It’s not ‘required reading’ but I hope most of you most of the time find the weekly article interesting.  

As we close out a great first week of preplanning, the article below--which was originally published in 1989 but was recently re-published in memory of Grant Wiggins (Learning by Design curriculum guru) who died last spring--is a good example of the vital balance I discussed on this week between the educational extremes of knowledge acquisition and student empowerment. 

The article is entitled The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance. 

Wiggins influenced me as a teacher by posing a challenging scenario: Pretend you only have one hour with your students. What would you share with them and have them learn (in my case it was 8th grade history) in that hour that you normally have an entire year to cover.  

This question helped me to see that I had been teaching history as an endless list of facts and concepts. I then focused my class on discussions around open-ended questions. 

In class we debated questions like ‘ Are humans innately selfish or selfless’, ‘Is the study of history about the study of mankind’s continuous progress?’, ‘Is democracy the best form of government?’ My students loved debating these questions and used evidence from history to support and substantiate  their ideas.  Rather than have history’s facts be the outcome, students used them to justify their opinions. History class was much more fun, interesting, relevant, and interactive for my students — and for me!

As we continue to plan for a new school year, think about Wiggins' sage advice below about the danger of trying to teach so much content.

Thank you all for a productive first week of preplanning: I am always awed by the amazing talent and creativity you all posses.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

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What’s worth learning by high-school graduation.

Those who would treat schooling as designed to educate students on all important subjects are doomed to encounter the futility that faced Sisyphus: the boulder of ‘essential content’ can only come thundering down the (growing) hill of knowledge.

The inescapable dilemma at the heart of curriculum and instruction must, once and for all, be made clear: either teaching everything of importance reduces it to trivial, forgettable verbalisms or lists; or school is a necessarily inadequate apprenticeship, where ‘preparation’ means something quite humble: learning to know and do a few important things well and leaving out much of importance.

The negotiation of the dilemma hinges on enabling students to learn about their ignorance, to gain control over the resources available for making modest dents in it, and to take pleasure in learning so that the quest is lifelong. They must leave school with the passion to question, without the fear of looking foolish, and with the knowledge to learn where and how the facts can be found.

My concern is that curriculum coverage, committee-written textbooks, didactic teaching, and short-answer tests turn education into Trivial Pursuit. Under this regime, it’s very difficult for students to acquire solid habits of mind and high standards of craftsmanship and understand that some ideas are much more important than others – touchstones of such power that our own worldviews must change as a result of encountering them.

The acid test for modern curriculum is whether it enables students, at any level, to see how knowledge grows out of, resolves, and produces questions.

In short, the aim of curriculum is to awaken, not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.

Curriculum should therefore be organized around essential questions to which content selection would represent (necessarily incomplete and always provocative) ‘answers.’

Some examples:

-   What is a “great” book?

-   Is “history” the same as “progress”?

-   Does art imitate life or vice versa?

-   What is an adequate proof?

-   Is there a fixed and universal human nature?

-   Are there really heroes and villains?

We need to rethink and reorganize the curriculum, spelling out clear inquiry priorities in each course that help organize and give meaning to the facts.

This calls into question the traditional lesson plan, since teachers and students should be following the essential questions where they lead within the syllabus, using textbooks as reference books, not as the curriculum. Like the music or athletic coach and the vocational education teacher, the classroom teacher’s job is to help the student ‘play the game’ of the expert, using content knowledge, as contextually appropriate, to recognize, pose, and solve authentic knowledge problems.

Much more important than accumulating facts is acquiring these intellectual virtues:

-   Knowing how to listen to someone who knows something you don’t know

-   Perceiving which questions to ask to clarify an idea’s meaning or value

-   Being open and respectful enough to imagine that a new and strange idea is worth paying attention to

-   Being inclined to ask questions about pat statements hiding assumptions or confusions

Knowledge’ remains a forgettable patchwork of adult sayings in the absence of our own questioning and verifying. The ultimate test is whether an idea illuminates student experience or provokes new thought. Anything that doesn’t do that clutters up the curriculum.

Curriculum needs to make students more thoughtful about what they know and don’t know:

The most essential habit of mind we can provide students is the ability to suspend disbelief or belief as the situation may warrant. For example, one school prompted students to ask, From whose point of view did that argument originate? What is the evidence and how credible is it? How do things fit together? What if? Could it have been otherwise? What are the alternatives? What difference does it make? Why should I care?

All students don’t need to learn the same things. This comes from the painful realization that there are far more important ideas than we can ever know. The teacher should be an intellectual librarian constantly making it possible for students to be challenged anew to pique their curiosity and raise their standards and expectations.

If teachers say everything is important, then nothing will seem important to students. Teachers need to abandon adult logic, specialized priorities, and coverage and ask:

-   What must my students demonstrate to reveal whether they have a thoughtful (as opposed to thoughtless) grasp of the essentials?

-   What will successful student understanding actually look like?

The ultimate test is when students say, without adult prompting, This is important! A sign of successful curriculum and instruction, where priorities are clear, can be found in the students’ ability to anticipate the final examination in its entirety and provide accurate self-assessments of their finished work.

Curriculum is inseparable from assessment. Standard school tests don’t challenge students. What’s needed are authentic performance tasks in which students show what they know in real-life situations – sometimes in idiosyncratic ways. Craftsmanship and pride in one’s work depend on ‘tests’ that enable us to confront and personalize authentic tasks.

The essentials are not the basics. We should teach the minimum basic content necessary to get right to essential questions, problems, and work, within and across disciplines. Pride in one’s work leads to greater care for the basics; pride depends on authentic and engaging work, and a product ‘owned’ by the student.

Summer Wish: Happines and Kindess

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s meeting, I try to have my final article summary of the school year focus more on us the personal rather than on the professional level. While teachers are incredibly selfless and giving to their students, we need to take time to take care of ourselves. 

The two articles below focus on the insights from experts on the keys to finding happiness and spreading kindness. 

Just as we are help our students develop a sense of self and belonging, we adults are on the same quest. 

Using the articles as a springboard, ask yourself two existential questions: Am I happy? Am I kind?

As I discussed Wednesday, I purposely left the questions Hemingway-esque, i.e., a simple sentence with few adjectives or modifiers. I’ll leave it up to you to reflect on the two questions and, if needed, add more detail. Am I more happy at home than at school? Am I kind some of the time? Etc.

Obviously, some of us are more predisposed to be happy and/or kind; for others it takes more effort. Yet the goal should be the same for all of us—be happy and be kind.

The first article summary is fifteen suggestions to be kinder to others from being a better listeners, to being less judgmental, to simply smiling more.

The second article is a summary of various TED Talks on what makes people happy (the article contains the links to all the TED Talks and I hope you get the opportunity to watch them this summer). One observation really hit home for me: while most of us believe that happiness precedes gratitude, the opposite is actually true: showing gratitude leads to being happier.

As we talked about on Wednesday, the frenetic pace of a school year’s end often leaves many of us--at least temporarily--unhappy and unkind. I wish that were’t the case as to me happiness ands kindness are controlled by us internally and shouldn’t be influenced by external factors, e.g., stress. 

Summer is a perfect time to reflect and to take stock of ourselves and reflect on what makes us happy and what we can do to be kind to others. 

We’ll discuss this more at back-to-school preplanning.

As we head into the final days of school, let’s celebrate our students, Trinity, and the special comradeship we have all shared this year

I thank all of you for great school year, toast those of you who are leaving Trinity, and wish everyone a relaxing and fulfilling summer!

Joe

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15 Simple Ways to Spread Kindness in Your World Today

“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.” Albert Schweitzer

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” Henry James

Kindness is often a pretty simple thing to spread in the world. 

But we sometimes forget about it. 

Or don’t remember how it can help us all.

Three things to keep in mind to try to be a kinder person:

• I get what I give: Some people will be ungrateful, miserable and not reciprocating no matter what you may do, but most people will over time treat you as you treat them.
• By being kinder to others I am more likely to be kinder to myself: When I am kinder towards others then my self-esteem goes up and I think more highly about myself.
• It creates a happier place to live in: Being kinder simply makes my own little world a nicer and happier place to live in.

So how can you start spreading the kindness in your daily life?

Here are 15 simple ways to do it.

Express your gratitude: Think about what you can be grateful for about someone in your life. Maybe that he is a good listener, that he often is quick to help out, or simply that he held up the door for you. Then express that gratitude in a simple “thank you!” or in a sincere sentence or two.

Replace the judgments: No one likes to be judged. And the more you judge other people the more you tend to judge yourself. So despite the temporary benefit of deriving pleasure from the judgments it is not a good or smart long-term habit. When you feel the urge to judge ask yourself: what is one kind thing I can think or do in this situation instead?

Replace the un-constructive criticism: Try encouragement instead of excessive criticism. It helps people to both raise their self-esteem and to do a better job. And it will make things more fun and more light-hearted in the long run.

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes: It is quite easy to resort to unkindness when you see things just from your perspective. Two questions that help me to see and to better understand other viewpoints are: How would I think and feel it if I were in his or her shoes? What parts of this person can I see in myself?

Recall how people’s kindness made you feel: Just sit down for a few minutes and try to recall one time or a few times when other people’s kindness really touched you and helped you out. Then think about how you can do those very same things for someone in your life.

Express kindness for something you may often take for granted: It is easy to remember and to feel motivated to express kindness when someone is having a rough time or have just finished an important project. But also remember to express kindness for being on time every day and doing their job well and keeping deadlines.

Hide a surprising and kind note: Leave a small note with a loving or encouraging sentence in your partner’s or child’s lunchbox, hat, tea-container or book that he or she is reading right now. That minute of your time will put a smile on her face and joy and motivation in her heart.

Just be there: Listen – without thinking about something else – when someone needs to vent. Just be there fully with your attention. Or have a conversation and help someone find his or her way out of fear and to a more constructive and grounded perspective.

Remember the small acts of kindness too: Let someone into your lane while driving. Let someone skip ahead of you in a line if he’s in a real hurry. Hold up the door for someone or ask if they need help when you see them standing around with a map and a confused look.

Give someone an uplifting gift: Someone in your life may have a bit of a tough time right now. Then send him or her an inspirational book or movie. Or simply send an email with a link to something inspiring or funny that you have found like a blog, article or a comic.

Help someone out practically: Give them a hand when moving or with making dinner or arrangements before a party. If they need information, then help out by googling it or by asking knowledgeable people that you know.

Help the people in your life see how they make a difference in their lives: When you talk to someone about his/her day or what has been going on lately then make sure to point out how he/she also has spread kindness and given value. People are often unaware of the positive things they do or they minimize them in their own minds. So help them to see themselves in a more positive light and to improve their own self-esteem.

Remember the 3 reasons for kindness at the start of this article: It will help you to be kinder even when you may not always feel much like it. If you like, write those reasons down on a piece of paper and put that note where you can see it every day.

Pay it forward: When someone does something kind for you – no matter how big or small – then try to pay that forward by being kind to someone else as soon as you can.

Be kinder towards yourself: Then you will naturally treat other people with more kindness too. It is truly a win-win habit. A simple way to start being kinder toward yourself is to each evening write down 3 things you appreciate about yourself and about what you have done that day in a journal.

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8 Life-Changing Lessons from TED Talks on How to Be Happy

What makes us happy? Thirteen happiness experts, including psychologists, researchers, monks, and the inimitable Malcolm Gladwell, try to shed light on this surprisingly difficult question in a series of TED Talks about happiness.

Over and over, the same two themes emerge.

First, we're usually wrong about what will make us happy--or unhappy, for that matter. 

For example, research has demonstrated that people who win the lottery are no happier about that event one year later than if they'd lost the use of their legs instead.

And second, happiness is largely a matter of choice. Which is good news, because it means we can pretty much all be happier if we want to be.

How can we make this happen? Here's some of what the TED speakers advise:

Don't expect happiness to be one-size-fits-all: In a fascinating bit of product history, Gladwell recounts how the food industry discovered to its astonishment that some people like chunky tomato sauce. And what that discovery means in a broader context--that what makes me happy won't necessarily do it for you, and vice versa.

Stop chasing things like success, fame, and money: Or at least, keep chasing them but don't expect them to make you substantially happier than you are right now. As psychologist Dan Gilbert explains, our brains have a defense mechanism that's hard-wired to make us happy with the lives we have, whatever those may be. Even Pete Best, a drummer best known for getting fired by the Beatles just before they hit it big, now says he wouldn't want it any other way.

Keep challenging yourself: If you love your work, you're good at it, and you've been doing it for a while, you probably have experienced "flow," that state where you get so lost in what you're doing that you forget yourself and everything else. That state of flow is where true happiness lies, says psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and we can also find it when doing something creative, or even something recreational. But only so long as we keep challenging ourselves. Boredom is the opposite of flow.

Be generous: Connecting with other people and feeling part of something larger than ourselves takes us a long way toward happiness. Social scientist Michael Norton recounts a fascinating experiment that proves--contrary to popular belief--that money can buy happiness, so long as you spend it on someone other than yourself. Not only will you have made someone else happy, you'll have made yourself happy too, a happiness buy-one-get-one-free special.

Be grateful: We tend to expect that being happy will make us feel grateful, but actually it's the other way around, explains Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast--being grateful is what will make us feel happy. And gratitude is a choice, he says. How can we remember to be grateful? By reminding ourselves of all the gifts in our lives. Even something so simple as a water faucet was a true occasion for gratitude for Steindl-Rast after a stint in Africa where drinking water was scarce.

Train your mind: The way to do this is by meditating on compassion, says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. It takes time, he says, but it's worth doing. Brain scans show that monks who are practiced at such meditation show happiness activity in their brains that is "off the charts" compared with everyone else. Though he doesn't mention it, Ricard himself is the poster child for this approach.

Smile: It sounds too simple to be true, but research actually shows that if you smile, you'll have better health, a better marriage and other relationships, and increased life expectancy, says HealthTap founder Ron Gutman. So if you haven't smiled yet today, what are you waiting for?

Tell the truth: In a highly personal talk, Eve Ensler recounts the epidemic of worldwide violence against women she learned about as a result of her hit show, The Vagina Monologues. For a while, these stories threatened to overwhelm her. But then she found herself at the head of a movement to end that violence and give young girls in Africa a refuge from violence she herself had lacked as a child. And then she says, she learned, "this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action; it exists in telling the truth...and giving away what you want the most." That's the kind of happiness all of us can reach for.

The Importance of Emotional Intelligence

 This week’s article summary is Why You Need Emotional Intelligence to Succeed

Over the past thirty years or so, there has been much research highlighting the importance emotional intelligence in school, career, and life success. In many ways, EQ trumps IQ and (as the article points outs) personality, which are both in essence constant, with only EQ being malleable, hence teachable.

There is a lot here for kids and parents to understand and for schools to emphasize and develop in their students. It’s why cooperative learning, project-based learning, and even unstructured recess time are important ways kids develop social management and awareness.  And by giving kids more voice and choice in their learning, we help them develop personal competence.  

Joe

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When the concept of emotional intelligence was introduced to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. 

This anomaly threw a massive wrench into what many people had always assumed was the sole source of success: IQ. 

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

Emotional intelligence is the "something" in each of us that is a bit intangible. 

It affects how we manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results. 

Emotional intelligence consists four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies: personal competence and social competence.

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and manage your behavior and tendencies. Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions and stay aware of them as they happen. Self-management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and positively direct your behavior.

Social competence is made up of your social awareness and relationship management skills. Social competence is your ability to understand other people's moods, behavior, and motives to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships. Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on. Relationship management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and the others' emotions to manage interactions successfully.

Emotional intelligence taps into a fundamental element of human behavior that is distinct from your intellect. There is no known connection between IQ and emotional intelligence; you simply can't predict emotional intelligence based on how smart someone is. Intelligence is your ability to learn, and it's the same at age 15 as it is at age 50. Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, is a flexible set of skills that can be acquired and improved with practice. Although some people are naturally more emotionally intelligent than others, you can develop high emotional intelligence even if you aren't born with it.

Personality is the final piece of the puzzle. It's the stable "style" that defines each of us. Personality is the result of hard-wired preferences, such as the inclination toward introversion or extroversion. However, like IQ, personality can't be used to predict emotional intelligence. Also, like IQ, personality is stable over a lifetime and doesn't change. IQ, emotional intelligence, and personality each cover unique ground and help to explain what makes a person tick.

Your emotional intelligence is the foundation for a host of critical skills--it impacts most everything you do and say each day.

Of all the people we've studied at work, we've found that 90% of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence. On the flip side, just 20% of bottom performers are high in emotional intelligence. You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.

The communication between your emotional and rational "brains" is the physical source of emotional intelligence. The pathway for emotional intelligence starts in the brain, at the spinal cord. Your primary senses enter here and must travel to the front of your brain before you can think rationally about your experience. However, first they travel through the limbic system, the place where emotions are generated. So, we have an emotional reaction to events before our rational mind is able to engage. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain.

Plasticity is the term neurologists use to describe the brain's ability to change. As you discover and practice new emotional intelligence skills, the billions of microscopic neurons lining the road between the rational and emotional centers of your brain branch off small "arms" (much like a tree) to reach out to the other cells. This chain reaction of growth ensures it's easier to kick a new behavior into action in the future.

As you train your brain by repeatedly practicing new emotionally intelligent behaviors, your brain builds the pathways needed to make them into habits. Before long, you begin responding to your surroundings with emotional intelligence without even having to think about it. And just as your brain reinforces the use of new behaviors, the connections supporting old, destructive behaviors will die off as you learn to limit your use of them.

Interdisciplinary Schools in Norway

This week's article summary is This School in Norway Abandoned Teaching Subjects 4o Years Ago.

Most of know that Finland is typically touted as having the best educational system (based on international PISA tests) while utilizing progressive, i.e., child-centered, instructional techniques.

A few weeks ago, there were a number of articles about how the Finnish Department of Education was considering eliminating standard subject courses, e.g., math, science, history--and replacing them with an interdisciplinary approach.

The article below highlights one middle school in Finland that has been doing this for years.

What's interesting is that the typical con of a more progressive and interdisciplinary program is that kids won't score well on traditional standardized tests, which in America and most other countries remain a significant part of college (and sadly even high, middle, and elementary school) admissions. Yet this trailblazing Finnish school has very high student standardized test results.

Many Finnish schools (and Finnish teachers) are anxious of moving away from traditional subject classes, yet kids in almost every country bemoan how boring and irrelevant to their lives subject-driven and organized high schools are.

I don't know if Trinity will ever go as far as the Finnish school below, yet as we determine how we can further empower kids in their learning and deepen their learning experiences, we can clearly implement some of the ideas below.

Joe

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Finland has announced that in their new national curriculum, they will emphasize phenomena-based project studies instead of traditional subjects.

The Ringstabekk school—with 425 students aged 13 to 16 years—has been doing this for 40 years with great success.

It all started in the 1970s when the teachers realized that their students were not truly engaged in what they learned at school. These educators were inspired by ideas of cross-curricular project work. 

Although the pedagogy of the school has been developing ever since, the basic idea of learning through multidisciplinary studies has endured.

The lower secondary school is organized in a way that supports this multidisciplinary learning. When teachers are hired at this school, they know very well that they will have to cooperate with other teachers—and that they will have to work in multidisciplinary teacher-teams.

Each teacher-team, consisting of 4-6 teachers, is responsible for the education and growth of 60-75 students. The teachers together craft the students’ schedules from week to week, and make their own plans based on the national curriculum. The school uses different cross-curricular methods, and is constantly refining methods like storyline, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, simulations, etc. The teachers pick up ideas from each other and share their experiences ensuring that all students experience the same learning methods and multidisciplinary themes.

Students in the 8th grade, at age 13, will often study earthquakes, volcanos, and other forces of the earth—topics usually taught in natural science and geography courses. Instead of working with this subject in fixed lessons, teachers have to come up with different storylines that incorporate several different subjects. In one of the storylines, the students pretend that they are going to climb Mount Everest. In preparation, they have to study maps, weather, and climate. As the story moves forward, they are assigned different tasks from the teachers—such as suggesting the best route to the top of Mount Everest, making a list of the equipment they need, calculating the time they will use, making a budget, and applying for funding in English, which is a foreign language to these students. As they solve these tasks, the students have to find a lot of information and discuss their findings within the group.

The students at the Ringstabekk school work in small groups most of the time. This is based on the theory that most of our learning happens when we think, talk, and solve tasks together instead of on our own—and the idea of “learning by doing,” theories developed by Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey.

Another cross-curricular theme, often executed in the 10th grade, focuses on the environment and sustainability. Each group of students is given a unique area of their local municipality to work as consultants. They produce a report and perhaps some models on how one should develop their specific part of the local community—with special focus on transportation, energy, waste, etc. If they are to produce models, they have to work with ratios and other mathematics, as well as design. They will need to investigate different kinds of energy and corresponding pollution outputs—which is part of the natural sciences—and produce and present their report both written and orally. The first year this project was run, the teachers cooperated with a local consultant company that was doing these kind of jobs. The consultants and engineers were impressed when the students, aged 15, were able to inform them of a new technology that they were not aware of.

During cross-curricular work, the students don’t have a fixed weekly plan—one that segregates English to one lesson and science to another. They work on their task through the weeks, receiving guidance and instruction from their teachers.

The Ringstabekk school has to follow the national curriculum and national assessment-systems, so every student still gets individual grades for each traditional subject. They also complete the same national tests and exams as all other students in Norway. On these tests, they are performing on the top national level, indicating that multidisciplinary learning gives students the knowledge and skills they need. Not only that, but it also motivates students to learn for the sake of learning. Students become very engaged in what they do at school—sometimes they don’t want breaks, because they are eager to continue the work they have started.

Most parents are very satisfied with the school—they realize that it actually is preparing their kids for a future working-life, helping them develop necessary competencies both when it comes to skills and knowledge and also when it comes to personal growth. One teacher at the school puts it this way: ”We are not just developing calculators, we are developing human beings.”