Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
‘Work hard, play hard’ and ‘work hard or go home’ are bumper sticker slogans that may help achieve success on the field but not in the classroom. Recent research and books on learning suggest editing the first slogan to ‘work hard, play harder’ if we want to create academic environments that help students succeed. In America’s education system, however, we have focused exclusively on work to such an extent that play is being excluded from school. Most American school districts have either reduced or eliminated recess, phys-ed and other playtime to allocate more time for work focused on studying and taking standardized tests.
The importance of play in successful learning has been highlighted and demonstrated by ancient scholars (i.e., Plato), modern neuroscientists (i.e., William Klemm) and the top test scoring countries in the world (i.e., Finland). American education leaders have ignored the evidence for the play-learning nexus by placing their heads in the proverbial sand when they should be building more sandboxes for students at all academic levels. Learning sandboxes range from wooden sandboxes at recess time for elementary schoolchildren to Makerspaces for middle and high school students to virtual online sandboxes for college students. “Play,” according to Diane Ackerman (the public science writer of The Human Age and 23 other books), “is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”
Our brain’s favorite way of learning is being removed from American schools. “When I was in elementary school,” states Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Live), “in the 1950s, we had six-hour school days: two hours of outdoors playing per day, half hour in the morning, half hour during lunch, and a full hour in the afternoon.” Today, the national average is twenty-six minutes of recess and Connecticut, my home state, only “recommends” 20 minutes (in addition, my three boys—ages 7, 9 & 11—are given less than 20 minutes for lunch each school day). There are less than a handful of states that even require daily recess. In contrast, Finland—always at the top or near the top of international test scores—provides a 15-minute break every 45 minutes for students during the school day.
The demise of play in American schools has been linked by Peter Gray and others to a decline in cognitive and social skills as well as an increase in mental disorders. William Klemm, professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University, recently summarized several studies on the importance of play writing that “When members of a play-oriented species [such as humans] are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults…Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions…In this respect, the ‘good old days’ really were the good old days.” Elementary school students need their play for cognitive and social-emotional learning and we, as a society, need to provide them with the playtime necessary for their development into functional adults. Increasing time for recess is not only healthy for our children but our communities.
“Do not,” Plato said, “keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” Yes, even Plato knew about the importance of play in education. One of the most creative ways to “keep children to their studies by play” is to build time into middle and high school curricula for using a Makerspace (a.k.a. Hackerspace). A Makerspace is an area where students learn through experimental play with technology and ideas under the guidance of teachers and other experts in the community. It is a space where students play with concepts learned in the classroom for the purpose of bringing their ideas to life via a 3D printer, software code, plasma cutter and other tools. In the words of the Makerspace Playbook: “Making is innovative and resourceful. Makers build off the idea of others and choose the best tools for the job…They identify their own challenges and solve new problems. Making provides ample opportunities to deeply understand difficult concepts. Makers seek out STEM content to improve their projects, and they cross disciplines to achieve their goals, rather than staying within one specialty.” A Makerspace is where Einstein’s idea of combinatory play is figuratively and literally brought to life.
If a community or school district does not have the resources to immediately setup a Makerspace, a relatively inexpensive way of incorporating play into the curriculum is by gamifying parts of classes. Game-based learning occurs through low-tech ways such as the collaborative geography game called Galactic Mappers (seen in the video via Edutopia noted below) to high-tech options such as Statecraft.sim, which I used in my International Relations course this past semester. Assessing student learning is not only more enjoyable for the students as compared to standardized tests but my experience shows that their learning is deeper and more enduring.
The U.S. education system is using sand exclusively for building sand timers (for tests) rather than using it to build imaginations and engage students in learning. The system is focused on turning over sand timers rather than turning on students to learning. Since I’m at the tail end of the argument, let’s go back to one of the bumper sticker slogans I started with to sum it all up: ‘go hard or go home.’ School leaders will have to ‘go’ a little harder to work play into their curricula or send their students ‘home’ knowing that they are less cognitively, emotionally and socially prepared for the real world than they could and should be.
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson, “Nixing Recess: The Silly, Alarmingly Popular Way to Punish Kids,” The Atlantic (October, 2013).
Edutopia, “Building Formative Assessment into Game-Based Learning,” YouTube (May 13, 2014).
Klemm, William, “The Neuroscience of Why Children Play,” Psychology Today blog, Memory Medic (December 12, 2014).
Klemm, W.R., Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014).
Korbey, Holly, “Despite Benefits, Recess fro Many Students is Restricted,” MindShift, KQED blog (July 26, 2013).
Makerspace Playbook: School Edition (Spring 2013).
Solomon, Andrew, “Go Play Outside,” New York Times Book Review of A Country Called Childhood by Jay Griffiths (December 14, 2014): p 26-27.
Compassionate achievers—successful people who are other-focused and have stronger internal (i.e., looking for meaning in work) rather than instrumental (i.e., looking for money in work) motives—reach higher levels of success than self-centered achievers. Internal or intrinsic values “are those we uphold regardless of the benefits or costs” and instrumental values are those we support because they directly benefit us. Compassionate achievers are people who follow intrinsic values that have positive instrumental consequences; the consequences, however, are not part of their motives. A recent study of over 11,000 West Point cadets concluded: “Helping people focus on the meaning and impact of their work, rather than on, say, the financial returns it will bring, may be the best way to improve not only the quality of their work but also—counterintuitive though it may seem—their financial success.” Learning to be a compassionate achiever increases a person’s success not only at school and home but work.
A Wall Street Journal article outlining tips on “How to Get Ahead ” provided this general advice: “Top executives are attracted to people who lift their heads up from their desks and understand the impact their assignments might have on other departments—not just their own teams.” Employees that help each other are the engines of successful companies and top execs know it. Understanding what others need or need to avoid and then acting on that understanding is at the heart of what compassion is and what a compassionate achiever does. How do you foster compassionate workplaces and achievers? Shawn Achor—author of The Happiness Advantage: the Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work—provides one way with his idea of social investment.
Social investment (building and strengthening the relationships of our social support network) in the people around us is one of Achor’s seven principles for fueling success and performance at work. Success is dependent on the quality of our connections to the people around us and compassion improves the quality. Achor talks about how positive social connections release a specific hormone — oxytocin — that increases our focus and attention while reducing anxiety. The more employees socially invest, the more oxytocin there is around the office. And the more oxytocin, the greater chance for success. In a section of Achor’s book called “Glue Guys,” he writes “The people who actively invest in their relationships are the heart and soul of a thriving organization.” Glue guys, as the Wall Street Journal describes, is baseball speak for players who “quietly [hold] winning teams together…Statisticians don’t buy that they exist, but psychologists do. And players and managers swear by them…They’re the reliable guys…players who are greater than their statistics indicate…If you have some outstanding role models who deal with pressure effectively, that glue is going to spill out of the bottle and help everyone.” Social investment is about spreading the glue so that success will stick.
So how do you invest? You can become a giver. Givers, according to Adam Grant (professor at The Wharton School and author of Give and Take), are people who “are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them” as opposed to takers who are exclusively self-focused. Grant warns, however, against becoming a selfless giver who becomes a doormat to others. Rather his type of giver is someone who balances the concerns of others with concern for themselves. A giver helps others without selflessly sacrificing their own interests; it is otherish as Grant likes to say. He cites Tania Singer’s neuroscience work on compassion to highlight the difference between who his givers are and those who empathize to a fault. Model givers not only help people network together and address otherish needs, but they ask thoughtful questions and patiently listen to colleagues and employees. An added benefit of being an otherish-giver is that it helps with self-compassion (concern for oneself) and that facilitates creativity. An office with more creative people is an office where innovation is constantly generated. Is it any wonder that top executives are attracted to employees who lift their heads off their desks to understand how their work affects others? Compassion brings meaning to work and, therefore, success to individuals, departments and companies. When employees find meaning in their work, they are three times as likely to stay with their company, they “report 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and are 1.4 times more engaged at work.” Compassion adds to the bottom line without even trying, something compassionate achievers intrinsically know.
ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Crown Business, 2010).
Jessica Amortegui, Why Finding Meaning at Work is More Important than Feeling Happy, FastCompany (June 26, 2014)
Darren Everson, “Baseball’s Winning Glue Guys,” The Wall Street Journal (July 16, 2009).
Adam Grant, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (New York: Penguin Group, 2013).
Melissa Korn and Anita Hofschneider, How to Get Ahead As a Middle Manager: Try These Tips: The Wall Street Journal (August 8, 2013): B5.
Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz, The Secret of Effective Motivation: The New York Times (July 4, 2014): SR9.
Darya L. Zabelina and Michael D. Robinson, Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself: Self-Compassion Facilitates Creative Originality Among Self-Judgmental Individuals: Creativity Research Journal 22, no.3 (2010): 288-293.
“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.
ARTICLES:
America’s socioeconomic strength and health are why we would be wise to pay more attention to the headlines about the lack of trust in the U.S. than to the alarmist headlines about the international education scores known as PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). Let’s start with the 2012 PISA scores that were just released in early December. A 3 December 2013 Wall Street Journal article titled “Students Slip in Global Tests” states that American 15-year-olds “fell further in the rankings, reviving a debate about America’s ability to compete in the global economy.” Unfortunately, American students have never been the top scorers since international tests began in the mid-1960s (see Diane Ravitch’s National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide for an overview of international tests). Fortunately, while the U.S. educational system does not produce the best test takers in the world, the system has produced citizens with the creativity and inventiveness to become the world’s leading entrepreneurs and innovators when seen through traditional economic statistics and patents granted. As a matter of fact, in a widely cited 2007 article titled “Are International Tests Worth Anything?” Keith Baker clearly shows that “the higher a nation’s test score 40 years ago, the worse its economic performance” has been in terms of per capita gross domestic product. He counter-intuitively demonstrates that economic strength is sacrificed when a country is focused on achieving the world’s top test scores. Baker concludes his argument by stating:
“a certain level of educational attainment, as reflected in test scores, provides a platform for launching national success, but once that platform is reached, other factors become more important than further gains in test scores. Indeed, once the platform is reached, it may be bad policy to pursue further gains in test scores because focusing on the scores diverts attention, effort, and resources away from other factors that are important determinants of national success.”
Paul Tough (in his book How Children Succeed) and others have highlighted grit, curiosity, creativity and character as the “other factors that are important determinants” of success. In short, the PISA rankings and “America’s ability to compete in the global economy” have nothing to do with each other.
A factor that does play a role in America’s economic vitality is highlighted in the 7 December 2013 article “Why Americans are so Angry” of The Economist: trust. Although the author convincingly shows that the United States is not yet a “low-trust” country, the article outlines how America’s political and racial divisiveness are moving it solidly in that direction. While many scholars such as Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama have explained the important role that trust or “social capital” plays in the political and socioeconomic development of a country, Paul Zak has recently shown in The Moral Molecule how the economics of a country are literally intertwined with the biology of trust of its people. Without trust, civil society withers and without civil society, a country’s political and socioeconomic health deteriorates. America the melting pot, where people were fused together to make this country stronger, is slowly shape shifting into something much more divisive and cold—an ice tray—which would make our country more fragile and breakable.
What is the “loom” (threat) of today’s weave and what is its “thread” of hope? While the “loom” of today’s weave is that trust between Americans may be slipping, an educational system that provides a core level of academic achievement while developing character, creativity, curiosity and grit in every student can act as the “thread” that unites us in our own success.
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