Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
Benjamin Franklin instinctively knew the power of marshmallows in explaining success. Yes, marshmallows. A 40-year-old marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel of Stanford University brought Franklin’s words to life: “Educate your children to self-control…and you have done much to abolish misery from their future.” Mischel’s now famous 1970’s marshmallow experiment testing the self-control of 4-year-old children and his 1989 follow-up analysis of those same kids will get a fresh airing when his new book titled The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control is released on September 23, 2014.
Mischel’s original test (see video for a reenactment of the marshmallow test provided below) on delaying self-gratification was seminal for recognizing the role of innate or natural self-control in determining a child’s level of success not only in school but in their future career, health and even relationships. As Mischel wrote in the abstract of his 1989 study: “Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow effective self-regulation early in the course of development. The experimental results, in turn, specified the particular types of preschool delay situations diagnostic for predicting aspects of cognitive and social competence later in life.” Ever since Mischel’s test and subsequent analyses, some parents, teachers and scholars have focused upon developing character traits such as determination and grit to help with self-control. The importance of character development has been popularized in the last couple of years by Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit and Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed.
A 2012 study from the University of Rochester by Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin, however, has found that another factor plays an important role in a child’s demonstrated level of self-control: the “reliability” or trustworthiness of their environment. In the Rochester experiment, Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin found that only 1 out of 14 children waited to eat their marshmallow in an “unreliable environment” (where the researcher broke 2 promises) while 9 out of 14 children successfully waited in a “reliable environment” (where the researcher kept all promises). In short, a person’s level of self-control is a result of a combination of nature with nurture. While research has demonstrated that the development of self-control occurs (or not) mostly at home, teachers can help their students learn it through a well-organized, predictable and compassionate classroom. In other words, teachers can structure a classroom so that it creates a reliable and trustworthy environment; an environment that can help children develop the “cognitive and social competences” needed to succeed in life and “abolish,” in the words of Franklin, some unnecessary “misery in their future.”
“I walk slowly, but I never walk backward.” I’m pretty sure that President Abraham Lincoln didn’t think that his words describing his position on the abolition of slavery would be applicable to ideas about making education more effective in today’s world; but like many of President Lincoln’s words, they do apply. Two seemingly opposite activities (one focused on movement and the other on slowness) can help create optimal learning environments that decrease disruptive behavior and increase academic performance: playtime and meditation.
Increasing time for movement and play in school, according to Debbie Rhea, will improve “attentional focus, behavioral issues, and academic performance.” Rhea physiologically explains how being active during the day “stimulates the neurons that fire in the brain.” In contrast, she argues that when human beings sit for more than 20 minutes, the brain “falls asleep” because it is deprived of the neuronal fuel of glucose and oxygen. The Finns—always at the top or near the top of international test scores—adopted and adapted the “movement idea” so that students are given a 15-minute break every 45 minutes during the school day. W.R. Klemm supports the idea, in a chapter in Mental Biology called “How Brains Work,” that “Play is crucial for normal development of both higher animals and humans.” He cites studies from the 1970s through 2010s to make the case for the importance of play and ends the chapter citing a 2013 study from Science magazine showing “a correlation with physical activity…and how many new neurons appeared.” Rhea’s pilot program (Innovating Strategies, Inspiring Students—Project ISIS), which promotes recess time and physical education in schools (two areas where time has decreased in schools), is not only supported by cutting edge neuroscience but should be combined with social-emotional learning (SEL).
Social-emotional learning “is based on the idea that emotional skills are crucial to academic performance” and its goal is “to instill a deep psychological intelligence that will help children regulate their emotions.” From the Hawn Foundation’s MindUp curriculum (for which I am on the Advisory Board) to programs such as Second Step and Ruler, SEL options for schools have multiplied over the last few years. Meditation plays a role in many SEL programs. Meditation has been used by Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 businesses to help their employees focus and achieve more at work; even the Pentagon has joined the business ranks by awarding two $1 million grants on meditation to improve the focus of soldiers this past year. If the top businesses in the world are using meditation to enhance better performance and focus and succeeding at it, why shouldn’t our schools? Besides, meditation is a less intrusive and more constructive way to address “The ADHD Explosion” occurring in the United States than medicating our children. One of the paradoxes of education is that slowing down helps students to speed up academic achievement; slowing down a classroom creates a low stress environment, which neuroscience has shown increases learning potential. Moving forward with increasing playtime while slowing down with daily meditation will create schools that have more effective learning environments.
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Intellectual and emotional success comes from nature interacting with nurture. Understanding how nature interacts with nurture should be the cornerstone for building intellectual and social development of all children. The traditional debate of nature versus nurture is a red herring that inhibits the making of constructive policies that strengthen our communities.
Researchers who focus upon the gene known as DRD4 (a dopamine processing gene) show that there is a reciprocal relationship between a person’s biological makeup (nature) and his or her environmental surroundings (nurture). DRD4 researchers label children with the “long variant” (low production of dopamine) of the gene as “orchids” and others as “dandelions.” While dandelion children can adapt and develop in any type of cultural and socio-economic environment, orchid children are “context-sensitive,” according to an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Bruce J. Ellis and W. Thomas Boyce, in that their “survival and flourishing is intimately tied, like that of the orchid, to the nurturant or neglectful character of the environment.” 
Various peer-reviewed studies clearly demonstrate that negative and uncompassionate home and school environments hurt the social-emotional and intellectual development of orchid children but have minimal to no effect on dandelions. However, the studies also show an amazing effect that compassionate and positive (compasitive) homes and schools have on both orchids and dandelions: while both orchids and dandelions succeed in a compasitive environment, the orchids thrive to such an extent that they surpass the dandelion children in social-emotional and intellectual learning. In other words, compassionate and positive home and classroom environments help all children succeed and they turn a potential learning deficit into an asset. Research in the field of child development not only shows that the nature versus nurture debate is not useful but that a combination of nature with nurture can unlock hidden potential in every child.
Reading recent articles in The New York Times and The Economist about the establishment of curfews in American cities as well as the spread of “bratophobia” in various parts of the country where children are being “barred” from bars and restaurants immediately brought to mind the studies of DRD4 researchers. The articles remind me of the American tendency to react rather than prevent problems from arising. DRD4 research, in contrast, highlights the role that science can play in helping us to create policies that avoid problems. While we tend to think that some children are naturally “brats” and others are naturally “good,” DRD4 studies clearly show that we can create conditions where all children flourish. Imagine, for example, classrooms where learning happens in a compasitive environment rather than classrooms as testing centers where darkened ovals are considered the measure of an education. Should we be focused on developing policies that exclude or include children? Which is better for strengthening our communities?
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The bratophobia and curfew articles are:
For popular press coverage of orchid and dandelion children, please see:
“Give and Take” by Adam Grant is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of achievement and success in our highly interconnected world. Although many parts of Grant’s business oriented book are applicable to education, the discussion about “the strength of weak ties” (p. 47-49) is especially important because the success of our students partially depends upon how well our schools and classrooms nurture “the strength of weak ties.”
Where Grant defines strong ties as “close friends and colleagues” that we trust, weak ties consist of “our acquaintances, the people we know casually.” Mark Granovetter, a Stanford sociologist studying the success and failure of people attempting to change jobs, was the first to observe that weak ties were more likely than strong ties to yield new opportunities. “Strong ties provide bonds,” according to Grant, “but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information.” Weak ties are what children have mostly experienced in our country’s classrooms and schools but the “bridges” are slowly being deconstructed by the mechanization of education.
Grant’s book is centrally about how society’s “givers” as opposed to “takers” succeed more in the long run because the former can connect and “reconnect” to strong and weak ties. (Grant defines “givers” and “takers” along with “matchers” on pages 4-5 with this synopsis: “Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.”) Grant provides a couple of reasons why givers rather than takers can reconnect to strong and weak ties. In addition to the karmic idea that “what goes around comes around,” he focuses upon the skills of his model giver—Adam Rifkin—by stating that “His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable patience.” Isn’t that what our classrooms should be about? In order to strengthen and reconstruct the “bridges” of weak ties in our schools we need to promote classrooms filled with thoughtful questioning and listening rather than standardized testing.
Because of our unmitigated focus on standardized testing, we have forgotten the importance of taking time to thoughtfully question. Striving to attain a bureaucratically derived standardized test score has become more important than learning how to ask the right questions. The skill of taking tests is useful for succeeding at one day exams such as the SATs and GREs but the skill of developing thoughtful questions is useful for everyday success throughout our working and personal lives. If we want our children to be able to provide answers in school, work and life, we must help them learn how to ask the right questions. In the words of E.E. Cummings: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
In a society where listening to react has replaced listening to understand (i.e., watch any of the cable news networks and the growing polarization of our political system), the ability to “listen with remarkable patience” is truly remarkable. Our children grow up in the culture that we construct: in and out of school. They are the reflections of what we model and teach them. When we emphasize that the purpose of school is to recite one right answer (i.e., standardized tests), are we teaching them to patiently listen for the possibility that there may be a variety of answers for a wide range of problems? Listening to different perspectives is crucial for strengthening weak ties and we are teaching it right out of them. We need to heed the Native American proverb “Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.”
A 27 April 2014 article in the New York Times highlighted the importance of strengthening weak ties for our society, as a whole, when it summarized the results of a research project stating “Even the bit players in our lives may influence our day-to-day well being.” The authors of the article contend that a simple “fleeting glance” has shown to increase a person’s well being. “The social norm of avoiding eye contact seems harmless,” according to the authors of “Hello Stranger,” “but it might not be.” In schools, over the last decade, our children have learned more about how to fill in bubbles and less about how to learn together; more about darkening ovals and less about understanding each other. Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, in The ADHD Explosion argue that it isn’t a coincidence that there has been a 41% increase in ADHD diagnoses of school children over the last decade; that is an estimated 6.4 million children with over two-thirds of them receiving prescription drugs.
Grant’s book came to mind again yesterday when I finished reading T.M. Luhrmann’s New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Our Flinching State of Mind.” Luhrmann writes that we cannot “stop the slight flinching expectation of the possibility of carnage we feel as we walk into a school or office building” because of (1) the way the media portrays incidents such as the Isla Vista rampage as events that will inevitably reoccur and (2) the belief that in society “now everybody is alone.” Grant’s “givers” clearly show that we are not alone and that when we are networked together, we can achieve “beautiful” solutions to seemingly daunting problems. Let’s put away the smartphones and URLs a little more often than we do and connect eye-to-eye via IRL (in real life) in an effort to strengthen weak ties. The strength of weak ties is important not only for building a healthy “state of mind” throughout American civil society but for teaching our children to thoughtfully question and listen to understand.
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On subway platforms around the world from New York to Brazil to London to Thailand, the words “watch the gap” or “mind the gap” appear as a warning to passengers not to step into the space between the platform and train when boarding. It is always easy to tell the difference between veteran riders who are used to the gap and board as though there is no space and the “newbies” who step over the gap as though it was a deep chasm of no return. In the month of March journalists from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal have written about several types of gaps in the United States that I believe offer lessons for our education system: the income gap, “The Compassion Gap” and even a new form of missile gap.
From The Wall Street Journal’s story about the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) “warning that rising income inequality is weighing on global economic growth and fueling political instability” (14 March 2014) to The New York Times articles focused upon how differences in income have led to stark differences in “life chances” as well as significant decreases in life expectancy—18 years for men and 12 years for women—for America’s poor (16 March 2014 & 14 March 2014), the dire consequences of the income gap have been front and center for anyone payingattention. The level of inequality in the United States, according to the IMF, “has returned to levels not seen since before the Great Depression.”
While the income gap has many meanings for education (i.e., see the 28 March 2014 piece in The New York Times entitled “Project to Improve Poor Children’s Intellect Led to Better Health, Data Shows”), my focus is upon the recent Senate hearing on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, especially on chairman Senator Tom Harkin’s statement: “Right now, if you are a high-income, low performance student, you have an 80 percent chance of going to college. If you are a low-income student, but high-performing with a B or better average, you only have a 20 percent chance of going to college” (NPR, 27 March 2014).
Combining Senator Harkin’s statement with the February 11th Pew Research Center’s findings regarding the importance of attaining a college degree produces a ‘threat advisory color code of red‘ for America’s education system and socio-economic strength. The Pew Research Center reported: “On virtually every measure of economic well-being and career attainment…young college graduates are outperforming their peers with less education. And when today’s young adults are compared with previous generations, the disparity in economic outcomes between college graduates and those with a high school diploma or less formal schooling has never been greater in the modern era” (PewResearch Social & Demographic Trends, 11 February 2014). The income gap has clearly widened the inequality of opportunity in the United States. The income gap lessons for America’s entire education system—from the importance of providing funding for pre-K programs to supporting the Common Core to accessing a quality college education—are so numerous and diverse that the best way of encapsulating all of them is through the words of Mark Twain: “We believe that out of the public schools grows the greatness of a nation.”
Another gap that Nicholas Kristof highlighted in a 2 March 2014 op-ed in The New York Times was the appropriately titled “The Compassion Gap.” Compassion, for me, has been one of the characteristics that define the “greatness” of our nation. Unfortunately, “A professor at Princeton found that our brains sometimes process images of people who are poor or homeless as if they were not humans but things.” America has historically stood and fought against dehumanization around the world. It appears as though it is time to re-strengthen our self-compassion. Our children should be learning not only concepts in school but values such as compassion. The byproducts of such curriculum are all positive: reducing the levels of bullying and other violence as well as creating more conducive learning environments to name just a few. “Educating the mind without educating the heart,” according to Aristotle, “is no education at all.”
The missileer gap has been covered by almost every media outlet available to Americans. The missileer gap is about the absence of honor where most Americans expect it to be in overwhelming amounts. The gap is centered upon the conduct of Air Force officers “entrusted with the launching of intercontinental ballistic missiles” and the levels of cheating they engaged in for the sake of their own promotions. The short story of the cheating scandal is best described by the secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James, when she stated that “a culture of cheating had taken hold among missile launch officers” because their “careers” are determined by whether or not they achieved “100 percent on their monthly tests” (The New York Times, 28 March 2014). The officers seemingly have forgotten their Sophocles: “I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.” The lessons for our educational system is that an overreliance on standardized tests (i.e., No Child Left Behind mandated yearly tests) has more detrimental consequences to our society than testing proponents acknowledge. Einstein couldn’t be clearer than when he stated: “I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.”
Let’s not become used to the gaps so that we ignore them “feel[ing] no pressure to act on these issues” (The Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2014). The gaps are currently being ignored to the point that America may be stepping into an inequality gap for which our educational system will have a difficult time reclaiming the title of ‘best in the world.’ We need to “mind the gaps” so that we can achieve our “greatness of a nation” together while avoiding a fall into a “great depression” that is between the platform of education and the track of economic prosperity.
After four decades of eating apples, I learned how to eat my “red delicious” correctly; that is from the bottom-up. Eating an apple from the bottom-up eliminates waste because you eat the core (click here to see video) and, according to one of my students, the apple tastes better. The Common Core in education is similar: it comes from the bottom-up, it tries to eliminate the waste of ignorance and it is adaptable to each school district’s academic ‘tastes.’
From the highly publicized February 4th debate between a scientist and a creationist (Bill Nye and Ken Ham) to the newly released biennial National Science Foundation (NSF) report on the state of science in the United States and world, we are presented with weekly reminders of why we need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS): too many basic concepts and facts are not commonly known. “Many Americans,” according to the NSF report, “provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts.” For example, when asked to provide a “true” or “false” answer to “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” only 48 percent of Americans responded “true.” When asked whether “The universe began with a huge explosion” less than 40 percent of Americans correctly answered “true” while nearly 70 percent of South Koreans did. The Common Core tries to address the ignorance of facts that appears to be spreading throughout society.
The origin of the Common Core is more aptly described as bottom-up rather than top-down. The nickname of Obamacore for the Common Core by its critics misrepresents it as a federal program. The reality regarding its origin is that researchers, educators and state representatives from throughout the country, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief of State School Officials, constructed CCSS. The Common Core is not a federal program either in its origin or in its practice.
The CCSS is made so that each school district can assign texts it deems appropriate for its students in their quest to achieve the standards. One of the best examples of local ‘tastes’ being used to achieve the CCSS has occurred in the Pueblo of Jemez school district in New Mexico. The Pueblo of Jemez is a Native community in north-central New Mexico that has created and instituted a curriculum “rooted” in the Jemez culture “and aligned to the common core.” CCSS mandates a set of skills and knowledge that students are expected to master each year but does not mandate what is taught in any school. For instance, while all third graders are required to “Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text…[and] describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections,” CCSS leaves the decision about any texts to be used to the local school districts. An explicit purpose of the Common Core is to develop student skills that help them with “college and career readiness” and not to indoctrinate.
I started out as a skeptic of the Common Core and have, through research and practice, become an advocate of CCSS. I began as a skeptic because I did not want my three young boys to suffer through another No Child Left Behind program. I became an advocate because CCSS requires that all American students learn important educational skills while providing the freedom to localities to choose the books they want to use for achieving the Common Core objectives. High standards applied to all and the freedom to choose how to reach those standards; that is as American as apple pie.
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