Perspective by Maryam Abdullah Washington Post October 24, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
When my son was a preschooler, I welcomed his string of “whys” as a way to help him make sense of the world. But now that he’s a bit older, his questions have gotten more sophisticated, complex and even daunting — sometimes I’m at a loss for how to respond.
But I’ve come to understand, thanks to a growing amount of research, why I don’t always have to have the answers.
Saying “I don’t know” to our kids can make parents feel like we’re failing. We might assume that they find it reassuring to believe that we know everything, or maybe we think there’s something inherently noble about always being right.
Despite our best intentions, though, this approach may not be best for our children’s long-term success and well-being. In fact, research suggests that these unrealistic expectations can undermine our kids’ ability to learn and form meaningful relationships, particularly with people who don’t share their worldview.
We can help set kids up for academic success and better relationships by modeling an open mind, the ability to admit when we don’t know or are wrong about something, and a recognition of our limitations — what researchers refer to as “intellectual humility,” or our ability to essentially recognize that what we know is limited or might be misguided and then learn from that.
At the University of California at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, my colleagues and I have been working to understand the science of intellectual humility and its implications. As a mother, I have found how impactful this can be for our parenting.
The benefits of intellectual humility
Research on intellectual humility highlights why it’s important to be open to rethinking our attitudes and beliefs, and to help our kids do the same, for ourselves and for the greater good.
Compared to people with low intellectual humility, research shows that people with high intellectual humility tend to investigate and scrutinize misinformation more often, be more discerning of the strength of an argument, are intrinsically motivated to learn and are more engaged with feedback — all crucial skills for academics and for life. They tend to be more supportive of free speech rights even for groups they don’t like and more forgiving of people with whom they’ve had conflict. They are also more inclined to uphold values that benefit others, like empathy, gratitude, altruism and benevolence. These are great skills to have in a friend.
On the other hand, less intellectually humble people tend to belittle or disparage their opponents’ intelligence and character and are often unwilling to “friend” or follow them on social media, according to research.
In these ways, intellectual humility can help counter today’s trend of hyperpolarization: Nurturing open-mindedness can encourage kids to be better citizens by engaging in dialogue with people who seem different from themselves.
Why humility is hard for adults and kids
If intellectual humility has so many benefits, then why can it be so hard to see and declare that we have gaps in our knowledge? Researchers have identified several obstacles that can get in the way of our humble selves.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
It turns out we’re not deliberately trying to be “know-it-alls” — we’re wired to affirm our first thoughts. “When thinking through an issue, we tend to look for evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true,” says Tenelle Porter, assistant professor of psychology at Rowan University. In research published in the journal Nature Reviews Psychology, Porter and colleagues found that we are more inclined to find evidence that corroborates our initial thoughts instead of evidence that challenges us to revise them. Our kids may also discover that people judge them if they change their beliefs or opinions, like when politicians whose views evolve over time are criticized as “flip-floppers.”
Another roadblock to being humble is our tendency to overestimate what we think we know. “People tend to believe they know the causal underpinnings of the world around them in far greater detail and consistency than they really do,” says Frank Keil, professor of psychology and linguistics at Yale University. That means we tend to misjudge how well we can explain the way complex things work, which doesn’t help our children when they are looking for a good answer. For example, we might describe to our child how a toilet flushes. But when faced with their follow-up questions, we might realize that we really don’t know as much as we thought we did. At times, this can dissuade us from seeking to understand something in a deeper way because we believe we already know enough. And, naturally, the way our children learn will mimic the way we model it to them.
Social pressures can also stifle our ability to humbly revise our ideas, says Elizabeth Connors, assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. “People tend to adopt the political views, values and feelings of those around them because it looks good to do so.” Our social groups shape the way we interpret information and play an important role in our attitudes and beliefs, like our positions on gun control or climate change. We witness this during elections, the horrors of war, school board meeting and in our own neighborhoods.
How we can foster intellectual humility in our children
Create opportunities to discover a variety of viewpoints. “Keeping books that represent different — even disagreeing — perspectives can encourage exploration and discussion,” Porter says. Make it easy for kids to learn about topics and attitudes from assorted frames of reference. For example, encourage your kids to find diverse books during bookstore or library visits. In a similar way, as parents, we can try reading or listening to different legitimate news sources so we go beyond our own bubbles and outside our echo chambers.
Reflect on positive experiences of rethinking. “Consider a time when changing your mind improved your life,” says Daryl Van Tongeren, researcher and author of the book “Humble: Free Yourself from the Traps of a Narcissistic World.” Helping our children recognize when this happens to them — even in small moments — can show them how flexible thinking is a superpower. It can be as simple as our younger kids sharing how they’ve noticed changes in their first impressions about spiders — from fear to fascination — or the taste of mushrooms — from disgust to deliciousness. We can also help our teens share a time when a person with whom they didn’t seem to share anything in common later became a good friend.
Take turns exposing the hollowness of a long-held belief. In his book “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know,” researcher Adam Grant recommends that we “have a weekly myth-busting discussion at dinner” to help kids become more comfortable recognizing beliefs that were flawed and reshaping them when they have new information. For example, we can explore with our kids some common myths about microwave ovens or the cleanliness of dogs’ mouths. These conversations are bound to provide plenty of opportunities to not only admit what we don’t know to our kids, but also to grow together.
Embracing what we don’t know opens us up to a range of possibilities we hadn’t imagined before. Being humble about our ideas helps us detect our biases and be less self-critical when we’re wrong. When parents show their kids that they’re open to uncertainty, it can be a force for good — in their kids’ lives and in the world.
Maryam Abdullah is a developmental psychologist and the parenting program director at the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley.
Illustration by Eugenia Mello, Art Direction by Shikha Subramaniam.
In the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress sent $190 billion in aid to schools, stipulating that 20 percent of the funds had to be used for reversing learning setbacks. At the time, educators knew that the impact on how children learn would be significant, but the extent was not yet known.
The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in math and reading back by two decades and widened the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children.
These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs out in 2024. Economists are predicting that this generation, with such a significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country against this threat are not.
It will take a multidisciplinary approach, and at this point, all the solutions that will be needed long term can’t be known; the work of getting kids back on solid ground is just beginning. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be immediate action.
As a first step, elected officials at every level — federal, state and local — will need to devote substantial resources to replace the federal aid that is set to expire and must begin making up lost ground. This is a bipartisan issue, and parents, teachers and leaders in education have a role to play as well, in making sure that addressing learning loss and other persistent challenges facing children receives urgent attention.
The challenges have been compounded by an epidemic of absenteeism, as students who grew accustomed to missing school during the pandemic continue to do so after the resumption of in-person classes. Millions of young people have joined the ranks of the chronically absent — those who miss 10 percent or more of the days in the school year — and for whom absenteeism will translate into gaps in learning.
In the early grades, these missing children are at greater risk of never mastering the comprehension skills that make education possible. The more absences these students accumulate, the more they miss out on the process of socialization through which young people learn to live and work with others. The more they lag academically, the more likely they are to drop out.
This fall, The Associated Press illustrated how school attendance has cratered across the United States, using data compiled in partnership with the Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee. More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year, up from 15 percent before the pandemic. That means an additional 6.5 million students joined the ranks of the chronically absent.
The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.
The Times reported on Friday that preliminary data for 2022-23 showed a slight improvement in attendance. However, in some states, like California and New Mexico, “the rate of chronic absenteeism was still double what it was before the pandemic.” The solutions are not simple. There is extensive evidence that punitive measures don’t work, so educators may need a combination of incentives and measures to address the economic and family issues that can keep children away from school.
Researchers have long known that American students grow more alienated from school the longer they attend — and that they often fall off the school engagement cliff, at which point they no longer care. This sense of disconnection stems from a feeling among high school students in particular that no one at school cares about them and that the courses they study bear no relationship to the challenges they face in the real world.
These young people are also vulnerable to mental health difficulties that worsened during the pandemic. Based on survey data collected in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this year that more than 40 percent of high school students had persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness; 22 percent had seriously considered suicide; 10 percent reported that they had attempted suicide.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many parents and educators have been raising the alarm about the effects of grief, isolation and other disruptions on the mental health of their children. In addition to reconnecting these young people to school, states and localities need to create a more supportive school environment and provide the counseling services these students need to succeed.
The State of Virginia took a big swing at the problem of learning loss when it announced what is being described as a statewide tutoring program. But high-impact tutoring is labor intensive and depends on high-quality instruction. It is most likely to succeed when sessions are held at least three times a week — during school hours — with well-trained, well-managed tutors working with four or fewer students at a time. Such an effort would require a massive recruitment effort, at a time when many schools are still struggling to find enough teachers.
While tutoring is a step in the right direction, other measures to increase the time that students spend in school — such as after-school programs and summer school — will be required to help the students who have fallen furthest behind. In some communities, children have fallen behind by more than a year and a half in math. “It is magical thinking to expect they will make this happen without a major increase in instructional time,” as the researchers Tom Kane and Sean Reardon recently argued.
A study of data from 16 states by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University shows that the most effective way to reverse learning loss is to increase the pace at which students learn. One way is by exposing them to teachers who have had an extraordinary impact on their students. The center proposes offering these excellent teachers extra compensation in exchange for taking extra students into their classes. Highly trained, dedicated teachers have long been known to be the most reliable path to better educational outcomes, but finding them at any scale has always been difficult. If creative solutions can be found, it will help reverse learning gaps from the pandemic and improve American education overall.
The learning loss crisis is more consequential than many elected officials have yet acknowledged. A collective sense of urgency by all Americans will be required to avert its most devastating effects on the nation’s children.
Before the pomp even really began, Maryland’s inaugural class of Service Year members wore broad smiles and streamed past red-lipped cheerleaders with pompoms to celebrate the country’s first state-run service year program.
Inside the University of Maryland’s Armory on Friday, the pep-rally vibe kicked into a higher gear, sending 280 participants into community-centered jobs across the state, roles meant to help them find a career and give back to the state.
Some will work with legal aid, others in after-school programs for Baltimore City teenagers. Service Year members will work with nonprofits doing environmental work, with huge corporations such as BG&E and in scores of other roles tailored to their interests, state officials said.
The effort is a key step toward one of Democratic Gov. Wes Moore’s signature campaign promises: to eventually create a pathway for every recent high school graduate to spend a year in the workforce in jobs that serve the greater good.
Participants in this year’s pilot program will earn at least $15 an hour and receive a $6,000 stipend for finishing the program, which state officials hope to expand to 2,000 people per year within four years. Service Year members also receive job and financial literacy training, mentorship and career counseling.
“What’s important about Maryland is it’s allowing us to innovate,” said Michael D. Smith, chief executive of AmeriCorps, the federal agency for service and volunteering that gives Maryland $20 million per year. Standing outside the event, Smith said “the nation is watching” Maryland’s experiment with a state-backed option to funnel willing high school graduates into service-centric paths.
Inside the Armory, a color guard presented the Americanflag to a crowd of several hundred. A 20-piece band in full regalia blared as the participants — mostly young people in their late teens or early 20s sporting red polos that said “Service Year Option” — assembled to hear top Maryland leaders praise them. The participants had already completedabout a week of orientation at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus in College Park.
“You are the first wave of showing us a better way, showing us it’s still possible to see the humanity of all people, even across differences,” said Paul Monteiro Jr., Secretary of the Department of Service and Civic Innovation, a new Cabinet-level post Moore created shortly after his inauguration.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
Monteiro told the crowd a key piece of the program is “recognizing the value that each person has, the talents that each of you bring that we’re going to refine over the course of this service term to give all of you a tangible way to build a life and find your power through service.”
Employers pick up some of the tab of the weekly wages, and the state pays for others through either grants or tax dollars. A legislative analysis estimated the entire new department would cost $16.4 million in the current budget year.
Moore focused his State of the State speech on the value of service to bridge political divides and frequently says “service will save us” during public remarks. During a speech that lasted more than 15-minutes, Moore laid out lofty goals for the program: “We will build civic bonds. We will restore a spirit of community. We’re calling on all our fellow Marylanders to get to know each other again.”
Truth Burney, 23, said she graduated from Howard University with a prelaw major, but wasn’t landing any of the paralegal or legal assistance jobs she applied for. Now through the Service Year option, she’s working at the Community Law Center in Baltimore, helping with legal-aid cases.
“Fresh out of college, I didn’t really have a work background in legal work, and I believe this will allow me to get those jobs I wasn’t getting before,” she said.
On the 1790 Census, Col. Zadok Magruder reported he had 26 people enslaved on his property. Now, about 200 years after his death, Montgomery County Public Schools could change the name of the high school named after him when it opened in 1970.F
A petition filed in February by people in the Magruder High School community says the school’s namesake “does not meet the acceptable criteria for a school name” and cites Magruder’s history as an enslaver.
The unwanted legacies of slavery and racism live on in the names of schools across the country.Several schools across the Washington region have shed namesakes in recent years. In 2021, the D.C. Council voted to rename Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington to Jackson-Reed High School. Several residents sought to change its name because of Wilson’s discriminatory policies that led to the displacement of some of the city’s Black residents. In October, the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia voted to begin the process of renaming W.T. Woodson High School, which is named after an early schools superintendent who opposed school desegregation.ADVERTISING
And the Montgomery school system has done it before too. In 2019, community members and the County Council president called for Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring to be renamed. Lee was a large-scale developer and skilled politician who attached his properties to racially restrictive covenants that limited who could live there. The school was later renamed Odessa-Shannon Middle School, in recognition of the first Black woman to be elected to the school board.
After the county school system received the request about Magruder, it sent a survey to several families and alumni asking whether the name should change. It hired the consulting group Coaction Collective to run six virtual and in-person forums in which people shared their perspectives of the school’s name. Those sessions ended earlier in November. A report is expected to be delivered to the school board before the winter holiday season.
Born in 1729, Magruder became an influential figure during the American Revolution, according to a report from Montgomery History. Hewas a part of the group that wrote a 1774 proclamation called the Hungerford Resolves in support of Boston when the British cut off the city’s port after the Boston Tea Party.
“It was quite early revolutionary sentiment,” said Ralph Buglass, a volunteer researcher for Montgomery History and the writer of the Montgomery History report.
Magruder went on to serve as a colonel in the Maryland militia during the Revolution. When Montgomery County was formed in 1776, Magruder organized its government with six others. He is considered a founding father of the county.
Like other influential county colonial figures, Magruder was an enslaver. When he was about 20 years old, he inherited 600 acres of land and “one Negro man and one Negro boy,” according to Buglass’s report. The 1790 Census is the last known census in which Magruder reported he enslaved 26 people before he died in 1811, Buglass said. Only 25 other county residents had as many or more people enslaved.
“The vast majority of the holdings were one or two people,” Buglass said in an interview. “When we’re talking about Magruder owning 26 … those were exceptions.”
Buglass added that at its height, about 4 in 10 of the county’s population were enslaved.Share this articleShare
Magruder’s family home, called “The Ridge,” is located on Muncaster Road about three miles north of where the high school in Derwood stands today. It is the only school in the United States to be named after Zadok Magruder, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. (Magruder Elementary in Williamsburg, Va., is named after Confederate Gen. John Bankhead Magruder.)
Derwood is a diverse community. At Magruder High School, the student body is 42 percent Hispanic/Latino, 21 percent White and 18 percent Black.
Montgomery school officials began reviewing all of their current school names to see if they were “appropriate candidates for school facilities” in 2019 while facing pressure to rename Lee Middle School, according to a memorandum from the school board.
A report by a committee of school system employees, Montgomery County historians and student researchers from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County found six schools were named after enslavers: Magruder, Thomas S. Wootton and Richard Montgomery high schools in Rockville; Montgomery Blair High and Francis Scott Key Middle schools in Silver Spring; and John Poole Middle School in Poolesville. Buglass has since identified one other school, Julius West Middle School in Rockville, making the total seven. The other six school communities haven’t started a name change process.
Mark Simonson, who is White and a parent of a junior at Magruder High, learned about Magruder’s history for the first time during an October 2022 Zoom session hosted by the school system. The session was scheduled to educate parents about the renaming process. Simonson recalled listening to Buglass speak and show the 1790 Census.
“It was just one of those things that really resonated with me,” said Simonson, 60. “The name is now synonymous to me as someone who enslaves others. … I thought, ‘I would like to pursue things to where Magruder High School is renamed as soon as possible.’”
Simonson worked with other parents to collect signatures for a petition to the board of education. He couldn’t recall the exact number of people who signed but estimated it was “a couple hundred.” There is some opposition to a name change, Simonson said, but attempts to reach objectors were unsuccessful.
Magruder is the only school to initiate the renaming process, said Frances Frost, an assistant to the associate superintendent for well-being, learning and achievement. Since the process began, there’s been “opinions from all across the board on how and whether to do this,” she said.
Some people are adamant the school name needs to change, she continued. Others want to leave it alone because it’s a part of the county’s history. And there’s another group who are okay with a name change on the condition that it still starts with the letter “M.”
The report to the school board will share the results from the survey and listening sessions, Frost said. It will also include estimates for costs on a school renaming. It won’t include suggested new names.
The board of education has sole authority on whether it should drop the school’s name. If it chooses to do so, that would start a separate process to find a new name.
By Nicole AsburyNicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland. Twitter
If you ever saw the old movie “Fiddler on the Roof,” you know how warm and emotional Jewish families can be. They are always hugging, singing, dancing, laughing and crying together.
I come from another kind of Jewish family.
The culture of my upbringing could be summed up by the phrase “Think Yiddish, act British.” We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types. I’m not saying I had a bad childhood; far from it. Home was a stimulating place for me growing up. At Thanksgiving, we talked about the history of Victorian funerary monuments and the evolutionary sources of lactose intolerance (I’m not kidding). There was love in our home. We just didn’t express it.
Whether it was nature or nurture, I grew into a person who was a bit detached. When I was 4, my nursery schoolteacher apparently told my parents, “David doesn’t always play with the other children. A lot of the time he stands off to the side and observes them,” which was good for a career in journalism but not for emotional availability or a joyous life.
If you had met me 10 years out of college, I think you would have found me a pleasant enough guy, cheerful, but a tad inhibited — somebody who was not easy to connect to. In truth, I was a practiced escape artist. If you revealed some vulnerable intimacy to me, I was good at making meaningful eye contact with your shoes and then excusing myself to keep a vitally important appointment with my dry cleaner.
Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the normal blows that any adult suffers — broken relationships, personal failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself. I learned that living in a detached way is a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but also from yourself.
I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.
I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance. The issue is that we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.
I see the results in the social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.
I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected: Black people feeling that the systemic inequities that afflict their daily experiences are not understood by whites, people who live in rural areas feeling they are overlooked by coastal elites, people across political divides staring at one another with angry incomprehension, depressed young people who feel misunderstood by their parents and everyone else, husbands and wives who realize that the person who should know them best actually has no clue about who they are.
So over the past four years I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.
I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons. If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.
I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons. If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.
Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival. We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
I’ve noticed along the way that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others. They explored almost every possible explanation — educational background, position in the company — and came up empty. Then they noticed a quirk. Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.
Here are some of the skills illuminators possess, the ones that are essential for seeing people well:
The gift of attention.
A few years ago, I was having a breakfast meeting in a diner in Waco, Texas, with a stern, imposing former teacher named LaRue Dorsey. I wanted to understand her efforts as a community builder because of my work with Weave, an organization I co-founded that addresses social isolation by supporting those who connect people. I was struck by her toughness, and I was a bit intimidated. Then a mutual friend named Jimmy Dorrell came into the diner, rushed up to our table, grabbed Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders and beamed: “Mrs. Dorsey, you’re the best! You’re the best! I love you! I love you!”
I’ve never seen a person’s whole aspect transform so suddenly. The disciplinarian face Mrs. Dorsey had put on under my gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted 9-year-old girl appeared. That’s the power of attention.
Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
The first point of my story is that you should attend to people in the warm way Jimmy does and less in the reserved way that I used to do. But my deeper point is that Jimmy is a pastor. When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.
You may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew or something else, but casting this kind of reverential attention is an absolute precondition for seeing people well. When you offer a gaze that communicates respect, you are positively answering the questions people are unconsciously asking themselves when they meet you: “Am I a person to you? Am I a priority to you?” Those questions are answered by your eyes before they are answered by your words. Jimmy is a classic illuminator.
Accompaniment.
Ninety percent of waking life is going about your business. It’s a meeting at work, small talk while picking up your kids at school. Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life. We’re most familiar with the concept of accompaniment in music: The pianist accompanies the singer. He is in a supportive role, sensing where the singer is going, subtly working to help the singer shine.
If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being. I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.
Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there. I had a student named Gillian Sawyer whose father died of pancreatic cancer. She was later the bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding. When it came time for the father-daughter dance, Gillian thought of her own dad and excused herself to go to the restroom to have a cry. As she emerged, she saw that all the people she’d been sitting near, many of whom were friends from college, were standing in the hallway by the bathroom door. She gave me permission to quote from a paper she wrote describing that moment: “What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug and headed back to their table. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”
The art of conversation.
If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:
Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories. I have a friend named Andy Crouch who listens as if he were a congregant in a charismatic church. He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.
Storify whenever possible. I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values. People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories. And the conversation is going to be warmer and more fun.
Do the looping, especially with adolescents. People are not as clear as they think they are, and we’re not as good at listening as we think we are. If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.
Turn your partner into a narrator. People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story.
Don’t be a topper. If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.
Big questions.
The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions. Kids are phenomenal at asking big, direct questions. I have a friend named Niobe Way who was one day teaching a class of eighth grade boys how to conduct interviews. She made herself their first interview subject and told them they could ask her anything. Here’s how it went:
Student A: Are you married? Niobe Way: No. Student B: Are you divorced? Way: Yes. Student C: Do you still love him? Way: [Deep gasp of breath] Student D: Does he know that you still love him? Does he know? Way: [Tears in her eyes] Student E: Do your children know?
As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.
So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds. I once asked a group, “What’s your favorite unimportant thing about you?” I learned that a very impressive academic I know has a fixation on trashy reality TV.
After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above. These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs. Other good questions include: If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about? Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
Peter Block, who has written books about community, is great at coming up with questions: “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?” “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?” Or “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using? Monica Guzman is a journalist who asks people: “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.
Recently at a dinner party I asked a question that would have sounded pretentious to me a decade ago: “How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.
Stand in their standpoint.
Whether I intend to or not, I walk into rooms carrying a lot of elite baggage — I write for elite publications. I used to teach at Yale. People on the left and the right may see me embedded in systems that they feel disrespect them or keep them down. There is often criticism, blame and disagreement in our conversations. I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”
I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
In their book “Crucial Conversations,” Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler point out that every conversation takes place on two levels. The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.
If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate. We won’t talk to understand but to pummel. Everything we say afterward will be injurious and hurtful and will make repairing the relationship in the future harder. If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.
We sometimes think that really great people perform the sorts of epic acts of altruism that might earn them Nobel Peace Prizes. But the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.
My view of wisdom has changed over the years I’ve been working on this project. I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.
The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.
The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings. They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved. They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.
By now you’d think I’d be a regular Oprah, enveloping people in a warm beam of attention, encouraging them to be themselves. I’m not, and I don’t. I enter into a conversation vowing to be other-centered, then I have a glass of wine, and I start blabbing funny stories I know. My ego takes the wheel in ways I regret afterward. But there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.
I’ll close with a final example of one group of people profoundly seeing one another. I came across it in Kathryn Schulz’s recent memoir, “Lost & Found.” Schulz’s dad, Isaac, was apparently a cheerful, talkative man. He was curious about everything and had something to say about everything — the novels of Edith Wharton, the infield fly rule in baseball, whether apple cobblers are better than apple crisps.
Isaac’s health gradually failed him during the last decade of his life, and then, toward the very end, he just stopped talking. One night, as he was fading toward death, his family gathered around him. “I had always regarded my family as close, so it was startling to realize how much closer we could get, how near we drew around his waning flame,” Schulz writes. That evening, the members of the family went around the room and took turns saying the things they didn’t want to leave unsaid. They each told Isaac what he had given to them and how honorably he had lived his life.
Schulz described the scene: “My father, mute but seemingly alert, looked from one face to the next as we spoke, his brown eyes shining with tears. I had always hated to see him cry, and seldom did, but for once, I was grateful. It gave me hope that, for what may have been the last time in his life, and perhaps the most important, he understood. If nothing else, I knew that everywhere he looked that evening, he found himself where he had always been with his family: the center of the circle, the source and subject of our abiding love.”
Our heartfelt thoughts are with our students and their families, who may be experiencing the impact of the deeply disturbing and tragic violence in Israel and Gaza in a variety of ways.
Our schools must be welcoming, safe, and secure places for all students. The resources below are intended to help students who may be experiencing trauma, anxiety, and stress as a result of these events. Additional resources have been shared with school and instructional leaders to leverage with their communities. Students and families may have ties to the region or may be subject to anxiety based on what they see in the news.
This tragic series of events may also come on top of emotions triggered by other recent events. This is a time to come together and support one another. As we lift one another up, there is no place for hate, bias, or bullying in our schools.
At any time, students can speak with a trusted adult to access counseling, mental health resources, or additional resources. Resources for Families
● How to Talk to Kids About Violence, Crime, and War: Common Sense Media gathers tips and conversation starters to help you talk to kids of different ages about the toughest topics.
● Resilience in a time of war: Tips for parents and teachers of teens: This article from the American Psychological Association can help adults guide their adolescent children beyond fear and to resilience.
● National Child Traumatic Stress NetworkProvides resources that can be filtered by topic or keyword and by audience with a focus on how adults can identify traumatic responses in young people and how to support them.
Every year, we start a new team, and like them, we are full of good intentions. There is a need to be met among stuggling students who need another caring adult in their lives. There are inspired and generous adults who have applied to join the Project CHANGE team and are signed on. The story is meant to go from there, onward and upward, to the “Happy ever after” ending.
But then, life happens. Someone gets sick. Someone realizes that the 40 minute commute in peak hour traffic every morning is just too much. Someone has a family emergency and has to pivot to meet an unexpected need. Most of the time, the program can adjust. We can make best allowances to ensure a win-win, because we need our members to feel confident in their role. They too have real needs that they must attend to, if they are to be able to serve the needs of the students. But keeping the balance can be complex at times.
When the program feels that the member’s time and energy has somehow been diverted, or they are not showing up for the students they pledged to serve, then one has to start a conversation about what is happening.
One might think it could be a disciplinary hearing, a wrap on the knuckles, a warning, but it should not have to come to that. Smething more important than discipline or commitment needs to be faced. Has the member’s own needs become more their priority, for whatver reason? And is that state of play likely to continue for a significant part of the service year? If so, then the program will advise the member to take time out and sort their own needs out. We do not want them to try and stretch between what they need to do for themslves and what they promise to be for the students. That is a situation that is a short trip to burnout. Plus, it is unfair on students who need to count on those who profess to be their champions. To promise and not show up is worse than not promising at all.
To serve for a year on Project CHANGE, you have to be someone whose life is stable enough and predictable enough to be assured you are able to meet your own needs, and you are not constantly struggling. That way, you are in the best situation to serve your students. Even more important, you are not relying on them to meet your needs. You are able to withstand their crises, and their adolescent judgments, even of you at times.
If a mid schooler says he does not like you, that is not going to send your self esteem into a nose dive. You know yourself. You know the kids you are dealing with. You expect their moods, their tantrums at times, their being unresponsive or unmotivated. You have your own support team, in friends and family and the AmeriCorps team, to bounce back from a hard day at work.
But when your own life is not working out, it becomes doubly hard to serve students whose own lives might also not be working out. One thinks of a football game when a player suffers a bad concussion. The coach is not going to allow him to go back to the field, even though the player assures the staff he is alright. The same applies to the life of service. It is vital we respect our own health and needs, and not play the hero or the martyr. You have needs, like we all do, and you must do them justice.
If life gets in the way of us showing up, we best declare that. If we just disappear from our commitment, we leave our supervisors and team mates guessing. If they feel let down, or if people are relying on you and you prove to be unreliable, you are losing control of your story.
Humans cannot long tolerate gaps in meaning. If something does not seem right, we are apt to make up a reason, regardless of what facts we have to hand. Someone is not at the program again, and we have no word as to why, then we supply the why, and that can go downhill pretty quick. We are going to jump to conclusions about commitment and care. We are going to turn “not showing up” and “not telling anyone” into an explanation about “he is always like that.” or “he doesn’t really care” People soon start to second guess motive and intention. This is not necessarily the fault of those left to cover the absence. They have to do extra duty because their team member is not there. They will feel it is unfair, especially if it is allowed to go on.
The member who does not show and does not tell, is losing control of their story, and feeding a reputation that does not augur well for any future, whether it be employment, or even getting a good reference. Reputation is like gold, and we all have to slowly build it, particularly in new situations. Then we need to protect it. If we are cavalier about it, it sends the wrong signal to the program and to the team. It is then that the directors need to step in and say Enough. Do justice to what you need. Otherwise, everyone loses out, you, the students, the program.
It might mean AmeriCorps is not going to work out. That might be sad, but it could be the best favor your do yourself and save everybody the drama. Or you take a Time Out and get your act together, and restore the balance to a healthy equilibrium.
4 Ways To Incorporate Learning Science Research Into SEL Teaching
As educators, staying updated on the best ways to support our students’ learning experiences can be difficult, especially given all of our other responsibilities. Luckily, the field of learning sciencehas taken on that important mission for us by translating theory and research findings into practical tips, techniques, and pedagogies that we can implement every day in the classroom. Most learning science research takes place in the authentic, chaotic, and noisy environments we call our classrooms, which makes it relevant and practical. Simply put, the goal of learning science is to help teachers teach better and learners learn better, and that certainly applies to the domain of social emotional learning (SEL). This blog aims to present several best practices from learning science research that you can use in your classroom when teaching SEL.
1. Make FeedbackSPARK
Feedback provides students with a better understanding of what they know and what needs to be given another look. Feedback is all about making informed decisions and implementing changes: it should enable students to revisit their understanding and update their work accordingly.
As educators, we are constantly providing feedback. Following some research-based best practices enables us to communicate more effectively with our students:
1. Students often want to know the right answer after making a mistake, but the best kind of feedback engages them in a productive struggle to error-correct on their own rather than giving them the solution upfront.
Try “let’s brainstorm other ways to share toys peacefully” instead of “grabbing the toy from your friend is not a good solution, and you should ask them nicely instead.”
2. Students tend to ignore feedback outright when it is accompanied by an external motivator (such as a letter grade, score, or other marking). Studies show that feedback is implemented more often when it is provided independently and references the work rather than the student.
“Great job drawing what a happy reaction looks like. Next time, how might you make the angry and scared faces look more different from one another?”
3. Feedback is taken up more frequently when it is given immediately rather than delayed.
For example: if groups of students are acting out role playing scenarios, provide feedback to each group about what went well and how they can improve before moving on to the next group’s scenario
It is helpful for both teachers and students to have a framework for giving and receiving feedback. One popular method is the SPARK method, which gives guidance on how to structure feedback for students. Here are some examples of how to give SPARKly feedback in SEL scenarios for young students:
Specific: feedback connects to a particular point in the work or conversation
“Your solution to take turns playing with the toy for 5 minutes each seemed very smart to me.”
Prescriptive: feedback offers a potential strategy that can be implemented for improvement
“Next time, we can try taking a deep breath before talking to someone about why we are angry.”
Actionable: feedback clearly indicates tangible steps for improvement to the student
“When you talk to your friend, try starting your sentences with ‘I feel…’ to communicate your emotions.”
Referenced: feedback is grounded in the skills or criteria needed for success
“Part of being a good classmate is treating others with respect and not hurting our friends’ feelings. It seems like you hurt Annie’s feelings when you ripped the toy away from her.”
Kind: feedback is encouraging and never puts students down
“Even though it didn’t go the way you wanted it to, I’m proud of you for the effort you gave.”
By celebrating student effort, SPARK feedback shows students how to be supportive of each other and themselves. When students receive kind and constructive feedback, they begin to view themselves in that same positive light. In that way, SPARK feedback helps students develop self-compassion and a supportive inner voice.
Other feedback frameworks are explored here. If you are interested in digging deeper into feedback research, reading work by Dylan William is a good place to start.
2. Incorporate Embodied Learning
Embodied learning theory centers the physical body and movement as key to learning. Research shows that manipulating our bodies actually can have effects on the way we think (our cognitive processes). In other words, movement helps shape our construction of meaning and conceptual understanding. One common form of embodied learning is gesturing; we all use gestures to make connections between things (pointing) and represent inner states (with a thumbs up). Gestures allow us to provide information to students in more than one way simultaneously, deepening their comprehension.
Embodied learning is especially powerful for students learning social emotional skills such as identifying emotions. Having students mirror facial expressions and body language associated with certain emotions helps them recognize those emotions in their own bodies. Similarly, recreating physiological reactions that occur during stressful moments (shaky hands, tensed muscles, dilated pupils) helps students more quickly identify those triggers when they occur in real time. Some sample questions to ask your students involving embodied learning:
What does your body look like when it is angry? Afraid?
How do you know when you are angry?
Squeeze your muscles really tightly and shake your hands. How does that make you feel?
Are there other times you have felt yourself having this kind of reaction?
For an active break between lessons or during transition time, have your students do “emotion dances” with their bodies:
How does your body move when it is happy? Afraid? Stressed?
What does your “sad dance” look like? What about your “angry dance?”
The possibilities for emotions are endless and your students will have fun moving around and exploring the connection between their bodies and their emotions. When your students play the Body Language or Physiological Responses activities in Wisdom: The World of Emotions, have them try acting out the body language and reactions they see on screen to incorporate embodiment into their learning.
Lastly, virtual and augmented reality are other forms of embodied learning that use technology to help students make conceptual connections. For example, the augmented reality feature in Wisdom can teach students how focusing on their breath in stressful situations will calm them down.
3. Encourage Collaboration
Facilitating productive teamwork is hard. It requires steady monitoring of many teams at once, and it can be difficult to ensure that all students participate fully and understand the task at hand. Here are some things research says about collaboration:
Collaboration is different from cooperation, in which students have shared goals, but divide and conquer the completion of tasks individually.
Productive collaboration occurs when group members are aligned in their goals, tasks, and processes. For that reason, collaboration is really an exercise in social awareness.
Productive collaboration coincides with joint attention, which is when students are visually attending to the exact same stimulus or object.
How can we use these findings to support effective collaboration for our students? First, ensure that all students have an awareness of what their group will be doing together. Taking a few extra moments to clarify that everyone is “on board” will smooth things out in the long run. Appointing roles for collaboration (such as the question asker, idea recorder, etc.) helps students stay aligned as a team and gives individuals specific areas to be a leader in. As conflict naturally arises during group work, emphasizing the social awareness component is crucial so that students can be empathetic to their peers’ thoughts, emotions, and experiences.
One of the best forms of collaboration in SEL is to have students practice their conflict resolution and coping skills with each other. Students can mirror each others’ emotions and play “emotion guessing games” where they try to guess what emotion their partner is feeling based on body language or facial expressions. The same can be done with voice intonations or physiological reactions. Working together in these ways builds up that crucial collaborative skill of social awareness.
Lastly, there is another form of classroom collaboration called knowledge-building. In a Knowledge Building Classroom, the whole class creates a concept map together demonstrating what they have learned about a particular topic. Using concept maps helps students synthesize knowledge, form theories about why something is, and raise questions about what they would like to know more about.
Knowledge Building concept maps can be extremely useful during SEL as students form connections between different competencies and skills. (See CASEL’s 5 SEL competencies for more information.) Even more, this kind of activity allows students to share what they have learned with others, celebrate the diversity of ideas and experiences their classmates have, and form a tighter-knight classroom community.
For young students, one example of a helpful concept map is to have everyone draw pictures of themselves experiencing a particular emotion. The class can collaborate to place the pictures on the concept map, exploring the similarities and differences between each of the drawings and establishing a shared understanding of what that emotion looks and feels like for different people.
4. Introduce the Brain
Even our youngest students can benefit from learning about how their brains work. Equipping students with the basics on the brain empowers them to take an active role in identifying, managing, and regulating their emotions. This also builds up students’ belief and self-confidence that they are able to take control of their emotions, thoughts, and actions.
Dr. Daniel Siegel’s “Flipping the Lid” model is an approachable way to teach young students about the connection between parts of their brain, emotions, reasoning, and decision-making:
(Image courtesy of Lindsay Braman)
Using this model, students are able to visualize how their fists can form a representation of their brains. When they feel overwhelmed, anxious, or afraid, the “decision-making” prefrontal cortex represented by their fingers flips up, exposing the amygdala represented by their thumbs, which is the hub of our emotional system.
If you are using the Wisdom SEL curriculum, Lesson 4 provides a simple activity for students to learn more about how their brain works.
If your students are not ready to learn about all the names for different parts of the brain, that is okay. Simply making them aware of the connection between their emotions, actions, and brains is a great start on their journey to learning about self-awareness and self-management.
We wrote about one more research-based practice, skill modeling, in a previous blog post, which you can check out here. These are just a few of the ways you can incorporate learning science research into your SEL classroom. We hope you and your students will benefit from these evidence-backed approaches to teaching and learning. Do you use any other research-based practices in your classroom during SEL time? We want to hear about them! Fill out this check-in form to reflect and let us know.
Ben recently graduated from Duke University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Learning Design and Technology at Stanford University. He is passionate about bringing learning science into the development of educational technology products. Outside of school, he enjoys solving crossword puzzles and playing tennis.
In the opening pages of the recent best-seller, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, the book’s authors note that we as teachers tend to make a lot of assumptions about how students learn—and, therefore, about what counts as effective teaching—on the basis of our own experiences, wisdom passed down by our mentors, and our sense for what’s intuitive. Intuition, of course, can be a powerful byproduct of long-term engagement with a set of concepts or skills. But it also has its risks: not only is it hard to interrogate practices that “just feel right,” it can be especially hard to let go of and revise those sorts of practices, even in the face of counterevidence.
For example, when students and teachers are asked about the effectiveness of reading a text only once versus reading it several times, they tend to intuit rightly that “only once” isn’t the best approach. But when asked about the effectiveness of reading a text several times versus reading it a few times, with time and self-testing between each reading, teachers and students alike tend to inuit wrongly that the mere repetition of readings will lead to better comprehension and long-term retrieval. The dissonance between what our intuition tells us and what cognitive science can show us isn’t limited to this example. As Make It Stick argues, “It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teaching and students isn’t serving us well…” (9). The good news, however, is that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL, has shed considerable light on the science of learning in recent decades, yielding insights about a wide range concrete, practical strategies for instructors in all disciplines.
How Memory Works
Memory is the ongoing process of information retention over time. Because it makes up the very framework through which we make sense of and take action within the present, its importance goes without saying. But how exactly does it work? And how can teachers apply a better understanding of its inner workings to their own teaching? With a basic understanding of how the elements of memory work together, teachers can maximize student learning by knowing how much new information to introduce, when to introduce it, and how to sequence assignments that will both reinforce the retention of facts and build toward critical, creative thinking.
Communication and comprehension are the giving and receiving of knowledge, and until knowledge has been received by a student, it’s fair to say that it hasn’t truly been communicated by a teacher. The challenge for teachers, of course, is how to get knowledge out of their own heads and into someone else’s—and how to know it’s there. This challenge is compounded by the fact that teachers and students confront something more than the everyday adventures that greet individuals trying to understand, relate to, negotiate with other individuals. On top of that, they also face a paradox at the heart of teaching and learning: on the one hand, the more expert you are, the more knowledge you have to offer a novice; on the other hand, the more expert you are, the less “like” a novice you’ve become and the less attuned you might have grown to how novices experience their learning. This gap between novices and experts needn’t become an impasse, however.
One of the most common issues teachers face is keeping their students motivated and aware of their own cognitive processes during learning experiences. This is because student comprehension becomes more difficult if students lack the motivation to remain present and engaged in the construction of their knowledge. If left unaddressed, this lack of motivation can lead to poor academic performance. Another factor that can impact student comprehension and performance is metacognition. Metacognition refers to an individual’s awareness and critical analysis of their own thought processes and cognitive ability. It is an important determiner of student performance, because if students are aware of their own comprehension and cognitive processes, they are better positioned to revise or discontinue them when needed.
If learning is the goal, student engagement may not be sufficient, but in most cases—whether they’re in the classroom or studying on their own—it is necessary. When considering how to promote the greatest likelihood of engagement, a number of internal and external factors come into play. Students need to be actively attentive, for example—and often to maintain that attention over an extended period of time. Internal factors such as alertness (How much sleep did my students get?) and distraction (What sorts of family matters are on my students’ minds? Why does it sound like there’s a jackhammer in the room above us right now?) are, as every teacher knows, often completely outside of our control. That being said, whether you’re talking about classroom settings—where teachers can more directly regulate many, if not all, aspects of the learning environment—or dorm rooms and libraries—where students must do their own regulating—cognitive science on how attention works offers a range of practical applications for improving student engagement.
Maya Soetoro-Ng, professor, nonprofit founder and former president Barack Obama’s half sister, talks about her new children’s book, ‘The First Day of Peace,’ her life’s work and her mother’s influence on her efforts
The neighboring agrarian communities in the new children’s book “The First Day of Peace” are not at war. The mountain people stay atop their high ridges, drinking from the lake that flows below to quench the valley people. Neither share their crops, which dwindle as heat waves and heavy rain startle their land into vacuity, and they squabble at the border. Not at war but not quite at peace.
Until — “A wise and brave mountain girl said, ‘We need to help.’ From house to house, her idea spread. Love catches on.”
The idea that peacecan begin with the small actions of individuals and communities permeates the work of Maya Soetoro-Ng, a professor at the University of Hawaii, an activist, the half sister of former president Barack Obama and the co-author, with Todd Shuster, of “The First Day of Peace,” which will be released Sept. 21, the United Nations-declared International Day of Peace.
In 2019, Soetoro-Ng and Shuster founded the Peace Studio, a nonprofit group that trains storytellers in “conflict transformation,” or the construction of new narratives that combat the emotional and interpersonal impacts of a violent world. They wrote “The First Day of Peace” as part of that mission, hoping, as Soetoro-Ng notes in the book’s afterword, to encourage children to “imagine a better world and begin to make it real.”
We spoke recently with Soetoro-Ng, 53, who is also a programming adviser to the Obama Foundation, about storytelling as a tool for connection, the links between environmentalism and peace-building in the face of climate change, and how her mother’s work abroad influenced her life choices.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: Why did you set out to write “The First Day of Peace”?
A: So adults can speak to children about difficult topics like climate change and share the lessons of the book, namely that children are powerful, that you don’t have to be of a specific age to participate in a movement, helping others and working to better your community. Peace is something that we all have to commit to building with whatever resources, networks, ideas and creativity that we have, day after day and year after year. It’s not so much for children to explore on their own, but for adults to be facilitators of conversations that enable young people to think about their own capacity to help someone on the playground or to create peace in their own communities, to feel strong.
Q: The book links environmentalism and peace-building. How should we think about that connection in our own world?Share this articleShare
A: By 2050, nearly all of the world’s children, over 2 billion of them, will be exposed to extreme, frequent heat waves each year. We need to tell stories about the climate crisis that are not frightening but are empowering, and that enable us to think about what we can do to engage community solutions, especially in front-line communities, how young people can connect across their differences to help build social movements that allow for shared resources for circular economies rather than just hoarding resources. We need to think about the ways we can engage in mutual support and refamiliarize ourselves to nature and to one another to prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis. Communities that demonstrate positive peace-building repair more readily.Advertisement
Q: You also wrote the children’s book “Ladder to the Moon,” published in 2011. Do you see yourself writing more?
A: I’d love to. I don’t anticipate leaving my work as an educator, but this is one way that I would love to continue to bring pedagogical principles to young people embedded in stories. So I have a book that I’ve written. I’m just doing final edits on it. It’s a young adult novel called “Yellowwood.” It has a lot of the principles of positive peace-building and a philosophy of restorative justice and conflict transformation in there. Hopefully it’s not pedantic. Hopefully people like it and want to read it. But I always think that we learn best when we care about the characters and we feel empathy for their journeys. And storytelling is the best way to accomplish that. That creative connection that we can forge through narrative is such a beautiful thing, and I hope to be able to do that for the rest of my life.
Q: What is “Yellowwood” about?
A: It imagines a world and a girl who is in the in-between. She’s in liminal space. Her father comes from one culture and her mother from another. It uses a lot of the Hindu and Buddhist principles and stories of my childhood in Asia and weaves them in with a Western narrative construction. She’s a healer, and there’s some magic and young romance, and she endeavors to end a war. So she’s a peace builder.
Q: Was this taken from multicultural experiences in your own life, growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii?
A: I utilize a lot of the experiences and the images and stories of my childhood in Indonesia, and I think that Indonesia gave me a sense of and commitment to bridge-building. There’s syncretism and interfaith imagery and art there. Mom[Stanley Ann Dunham] worked as a consultant, building microfinance programs in the Asia-Pacific. I would go with her to these villages where she worked with weavers and tile makers and shadow-puppet makers and blacksmiths. And in these villages she would sit in a circle, and she would become family with many of these artists, and there was this spirit of collaboration that I witnessed.Advertisement
And in 2013, I went to Mount Bromo [in East Java, Indonesia] after the devastating volcanic eruption. They were, as a community, creating microfinance programs because their fields were scorched. They were building each other’s homes. They had built 200 homes for one another voluntarily. Over the course of three years, they were using high-tech solutions to guard against the lahar (mudslides), but also doing all this gorgeous community mapping so that everyone knew their responsibility and would take care of each other. Those lessons are lessons that I have taken with me for the rest of my life, and I’m really dedicated to sharing them.
Q: Your fiction deals with the same subjects, such as peace education and connection in the face of climate catastrophe, that you engage with in your nonprofit and academic careers. Do you see it as a tool to continue that work?
A: It is. And I don’t know that I’m the best at it. But I know that in creating a world and drawing from all that I cannot only see but also imagine, and making meaning in ways that are helpful to me, is an antidote to despair for me. You know, this idea of being able to make meaning of the tough stuff, of sorrow and of difficulty. That’s the whole idea of Peace Studio, that there are so many storytellers, many of them more clever and innovative than me who are out there and who cannot only make meaning for themselves in creative storytelling that draws from both reality and imagination, but can also help us to make meaning and make sense of the world around us.
Posts by Paul Costello1
