Everyone’s heard the saying that “nice guys finish last” but reality and evolutionary science show that compassionate people finish on top…together. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man written 140 years ago to current neuroscience research showing that our brain’s structure is hardwired to be kind, generous and social rather than mean, selfish and asocial, the evidentiary support for compassion as the strongest instinct for evolutionary success in both the animal and business worlds as well as for creating vibrant academic and civic communities is wide and deep. Any doubt or skepticism for the idea does not come from science but from our popular culture; we commercialize “survival of the fittest” when science and reality show that it is really “survival of the kindest” that leads to more durable success.
We popularize, propagate and celebrate independent achievement above all other values and the cost of such exclusiveness has been hinted upon in newspaper headlines and academic studies over the last five years. “Almost 80 percent of [middle and high school] students,” according to a 2014 study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “ranked achievement or happiness over caring for others.” The authors of the report highlight a “rhetoric/reality gap”—a mismatch between what parents and teachers say is important and what our children and students see us do—as the “root” cause of the student rankings. Another study from 2009 in a journal of business and economics reached the following conclusion after surveying the values of business students: “This evidence suggests that business school curricula that focus on acting ethically because it is the right thing to do may be ineffective. Our results indicate it may be important to openly discuss ethical behavior in a cost-benefit framework with the costs and benefits clearly defined.” The authors’ conclusion offers clear insight into the ideological undercurrent of the 2008 economic tsunami that swept over all of us.
The headlines show why we need to strive to be more than just achievers and why we need to weave compassion into learning environments at all levels of education. “Any healthy civil society,” as the Harvard Graduate School of Education report states, “also depends on adults who are committed to their communities and who, at pivotal times, will put the common good before their own. We don’t seem to be preparing large numbers of youth to create this society.” Do we really want a society of self-centered and self-absorbed achievers who answer ethical questions on a broad range of issues from a personal cost-benefit analysis? The idea that there has to be a choice between achievement and caring for others is a false dilemma. There is a better model for success that strengthens society as it strengthens the individual. We can prepare our children, students and employees to be compassionate achievers.
A compassionate achiever is someone who can apply their knowledge and skills to problems and opportunities in ways that strengthen themselves as well as others. A compassionate achiever is really a successful learner who thinks beyond him- or her-self; for learning is the process of acquiring knowledge and skills so that they can be applied with efficiency and effectiveness to problems and opportunities. The issue with education is that it has become a process of gathering and knowing facts to be recalled…period. While gathering and knowing facts is important, we should not be treating it as the ‘landing zone’ of education (via standardized tests). Rather, knowing facts should be the ‘launching pad’ for learning.
The ‘launching pad’ for learning perspective is used to achieve success in everything from business to sports. Knowing the fundamentals in sports, for example, is important but learning how to apply them on the court/field is ‘everything’ when it comes to success. Although a basketball team might have three of the best players in basketball, it doesn’t mean that they will “win it all.” While the 2013 Miami Heat arguably had three of the best basketball players on their roster, the San Antonio Spurs beat them in the 2014 National Basketball Association’s Championship because the Spurs were better at applying the fundamentals as a team rather than simply as individuals. The Spurs had a better understanding and sense about where and what each of their teammates would be and do in a given situation than the Heat. The soccer legend Pele has been saying for decades that such an understanding is the key to success. Success is not a solo/asocial endeavor but a connected/social experience (neuroscience has shown that this is also how the brain successfully learns). Alexander Graham Bell, known for his inventive genius and deep compassion, knew this when he said “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” Compassionate achievers not only learn this early and continually but they live it daily and consciously and that is why they finish on top…together.
COMPASSIONATE SCHOOLS CONFERENCE:ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014)
Steven R. Cox, Kathy Parkison and Dianne M. Roden, “A Case for Teaching Business Ethics in a Cost-Benefits Framework: Are Business Students More Discriminating in Their Decision Making?: Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Economics Vol. 10 (2009)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013)
Rick Weissbound, Stephanie Jones, Trisha Ross Anderson, Jennifer Kahn and Mark Russell, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending about Values,” Making Caring Common Project (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014)
Albert Einstein and Mark Twain didn’t experience ‘it.’ Most of us, however, believe in ‘it’ and many teachers continue to strive to make ‘it’ real in our classrooms. The ‘it’ is an education based on learning. Where Einstein said “the only thing that interferes with my learning is my education,” Twain stated that “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” While Einstein and Twain said it differently, they said the same thing: school-education was not based on learning. Neuroscience research over the last few decades, however, has provided a series of ideas and paths that can guide us into creating school environments where learning is at the center of education. Simply stated, neuroscience provides insights into how the brain learns. The weaving of neuroscience with pedagogical and social science research offers numerous ways to improve learning and develop more effective education policies.
Neuroscience research has recently shed light on how to improve learning; some have characterized their findings as exploring the powers of the social brain. ‘Social’ is used, such as in the title of Matthew Lieberman’s book on the brain, to highlight the fact that we learn best through connections; social-emotional and conceptual. Because all information and memories are immediately broken into fragments and spread throughout the surface of the brain’s cortex, connections (or reconnections) are at the core of learning (the brain’s storage faculty is not like any recording device or computer but more like a cooperative/coordinated event similar to a flash-mob of the brain). If we connect, we learn.
We learn by connecting ideas and emotions. Recent research has found that emotional connections are the keys for unlocking learning potential. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, explains in his book Brain Rules that an emotionally charged event (called an emotionally competent stimulus—ECS) creates a kind of chemical Post-It note (written in the ink of dopamine) on the brain for remembering information. An ECS can be something as simple as using paradoxes (i.e., less is more) in class to create associations between concepts for enhancing memory and learning. Neuroscience shows that connecting ideas and emotions is a key part to knowing and learning and we should be incorporating ECS Post-It notes in our classrooms.
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study by Schmitz, De Rosa and Anderson clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” The reason, in part, is that we see with our brains, not with our eyes. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions help define our vision of reality. In short, the type of classroom that a teacher constructs (positive or negative) matters more than we have given it credit for. Incorporating the learning of values such as compassion into classrooms can broaden the realm of possibilities for our students—both literally and figuratively.
The realm of possibilities for our students, however, should not be confined by the walls of classroom. Academic success, according to neuroscientists and education researchers, is also linked to playground and recess time. From this week’s (4-8 August 2014) National Public Radio series on the importance of play in schools to analyses about the role of Finland’s “unstructured outdoor play” in achieving high standardized testing scores, the role of physical activity in aiding intellectual achievement is well documented (physical activity generates brain fuel such as oxygen and glucose). Medina says it best: “Cutting off physical exercise—the very activity most likely to promote cognitive performance—to do better on a test score is like trying to gain weight by starving yourself.” Education policymakers throughout the United States should be increasing time for recess and physical activity for students and not decreasing it, which is the current trend in many school districts. It makes no sense that America is trying to move up the international ladder of standardized test scores by making its test takers stand still.
But is standardized testing the best way to learn or measure learning? Even the debates over the most cutting edge theories of neuroscience offer insights into how to address highly controversial education policies such as testing. The neuroscience view, for instance, that the brain is a quantum environment and governed by the processes of quantum mechanics offers a strong critique of America’s current use and focus on standardized tests for learning. Although quantum physics is widely known for the idea that a particle can be in two different places at the same time, it is the not-so-well-known Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE) that provides the source of strength for the standardization critique. QZE maintains that “when any system is observed in a sufficiently rapid, repetitive fashion the rate at which that system changes is reduced.” In other words, QZE is explaining that the more a quantum system is monitored, the less decay occurs. If the human brain operates in a quantum environment (a recent discovery of quantum vibrations in the brain was announced in January 2014) and we, as educators, want the process of learning to be locked in and not decay, we should be instituting the “regimen of regular low- or no-stakes” testing of my schoolboy days and the type of quizzing that Peter Brown, Herny Roediger III and Mark McDaniel recommend in their book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. The problem with an emphasis on standardized testing, from the perspective of quantum mechanics, is that there is too much information being tested too infrequently for learning to “stick” or stabilize in the brain. This idea of quantum learning supports Roediger’s recommendations outlined in The New York Times: “We need to change the way we think about testing. It shouldn’t be a white-knuckle finale to a semester’s work, but the means by which students progress from the start of a semester to its finish, locking in learning along the way…Standardized testing is in some respects a quest for more rigor in public education. We can achieve rigor in a different way. We can instruct teachers on the use of low-stakes quizzing in class. We can teach students the benefits of retrieval practice and how to use it in their studying outside class. These steps cost little and cultivate habits of successful learning that will serve students throughout their lives.”
Einstein and Twain’s comments regarding the broken education-learning link are, in essence, quantum quotes; they say the same thing in two different ways. Einstein, however, also provided us with a way to repair or bridge the broken link via his idea of “combinatory play,” which calls for combining aspects of several disciplines when looking for solutions. The development of solutions to the Einstein-Twain quantum quote quandary (say that fast 5 times) will come from combining facets of neuroscience, education and social science research. We can improve learning in education if we follow the same type of path the brain uses to learn: a connected path.
ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014)
“Discovery of Quantum Vibrations in ‘Microtubules’ Inside Brain Neurons Supports Controversial Theory of Consciousness,” Science Daily (January 16, 2014)
W.R. Klemm, Mental Biology (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 73 & 76
Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013)
John Medina, Brain Rules (Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008)
National Public Radio, Series on Education and PlayL Where the Wild Things Play (August 4, 2014)
Debbie Rhea, “More Play, Better Focus,” Education Week Vol. 33, no. 22 (February 26, 2014): 21
David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz, “The Neuroscience of Leadership” Strategy+Business Issue 43 (Summer 2006)
Henry L. Roediger III, “How Tests Make Us Smarter,” The New York Times (July 18, 2014): SR 12
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009): 7199-7207
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