FIVE STORIES OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS AND THE THEORY BEHIND THEIR SUCCESSES
Jill Vialet and Playworks. It was a rocky first few months for me as the new principal of an elementary school serving low-income kids in Oakland, California. Virtually every day a teacher would bring pairs of students into my office—the boys for shoving and fighting, and the girls for verbal spats. I tried to the best of my ability to resolve the immediate situation, mete out the right level of discipline and get these kids ready enough to go back to class. What I didn’t know was who, exactly, was the perpetrator and who, exactly, was the target. What I did know was that neither student was emotionally ready to go back to class.
Some of the more complex and deep-seated conflicts could linger for days and weeks, even as we mobilized social workers and psychologists to work with them and their parents and guardians. My staff and I were gerbils on a treadmill.
In my zeal to help individual students, I was blind to where and when these conflicts were taking place. Then it hit me—the sudden realization near the end of my first year that nearly all these incidents occurred on the playground! It was then that I turned to Playworks, the brainchild of the social entrepreneur, Jill Vialet, a nonprofit organization that puts a trained specialist in cooperative play on the playground all day, every day. When the next school year started and with Playworks in place, the steady stream of students coming to my office turned into a trickle. Students, less on edge, began feeling safer and as a result they became better learners. With the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight, the solution to the school’s discipline problem was simple: change the situation to change student behavior. This is an “indirect approach” to change.
And, that’s not the end to the story. The transformation of the playground offered an unseen gift to the students—through joyful play a greater capacity for imagination and creativity—and more systemically it effected a transformation of the school’s culture. With far fewer disciplinary cases to contend with, teachers were better able to address the needs of the whole class, not on a few disrupters. Parents were more eager to volunteer. And we administrators were freed up to be educators. As the school climate improved, another important lesson came clear: change in one area of school life can lead to significant change in another area of school life. All this for just one percent of my annual operating budget. That’s the power of leverage. We merely redirected the energy that was already there.
The story of Jill Vialet and Playworks is one of a number of powerful stories in this book. Her approach to change is both direct and indirect. That individual student’s lives were improved through instruction on the playground is the direct part. That the school as a whole was strengthened is the indirect part.
What follows are stories of other social entrepreneurs who approach changemaking from a variety of perspectives—whether it’s in strengthening students’ inner resources (such as their identity and sense of purpose), in mobilizing a school’s pooled resources (particularly groups as teams) or in uncovering such organizational and “situational” resources as safe spaces and repeated events—all with the objective of achieving significant and sustainable results in the most cost-effective manner.
Turning Negative Peer Pressure into Positive Peer Pressure. Nicholas Carlisle is a “recovering attorney” and the founder of No Bully, a nonprofit organization in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Having been the target of bullying himself growing up in England, he has developed a simple and powerful way to solve the problem that’s being implemented now around the globe: create teams of students, working under the tutelage of a trained adult. The results are compelling: No Bully has a 92% rate of effectiveness in stopping the bully from future incidents. Few, if any, other programs can make this claim.
How can this be? It looks too good to be true. The school takes discipline off the table and the coach runs a series of three short meetings of six to eight students (including the bully and the bully followers) who work together on behalf of a student who has become a target.
Over the course of three meetings the power shifts from the adults to the students themselves, drawing on their natural idealism, their sense of justice and fairness, their natural compassion and sense of empathy to come up with a solution. It is the kids themselves, who are the ones best positioned to solve the problem. Give students a voice and a stake in the wellbeing of fellow students and in their community.
The creation of Solution Teams also reaps other, less direct benefits. The students who participate develop their own leadership skills and hone their skills of empathy and compassion. Moreover, the school benefits, as the Solution Team is a powerful lever for change in a school’s culture. That’s a win-win-win. Well designed and executed groups—once they become teams—can benefit students on both the receiving and the giving ends.
A Metaphor to Live By. Carol Dweck, the noted Stanford psychologist, has developed a very simple and quick way to improve students’ academic performance. Through the delivery of short “interventions” or lessons, she introduced students to a powerful metaphor: intelligence is not something you’re born with (what she calls a “fixed mindset”), but rather it’s a muscle that can be strengthened over time through regular exercise. The mind, therefore, is malleable and “plastic.” If you can learn to internalize and apply this notion to your life, then you can develop a set of attitudes she calls a “growth mindset.”
To prove her theory to the test, she would place elementary and middle school students into two groups: an experimental one that would be taught the physiology and “plasticity” of the brain (the mind-as-muscle-approach); and the other, a control group that learned about study skills. The result: a measurable increase in academic performance for the mind-as-a-muscle group.
What’s revealed through these mindset lessons? The most obvious answer is that the social and emotional well-being of children is a major blind spot in the world of school reform. As David Bornstein, a prominent advocate of social entrepreneurship, told this author, “The most important leverage point in all of school reform is the emotional and social wellbeing of the individual child.”
Carol Dweck focuses on a student’s sense of self, their identity. That’s the power of a subtle shift in cognition. Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia, says it best: “It can be as important to change people’s interpretation of the social world and their place in it as it is to change the objective environment of schools.” This is a “direct approach to change.”
Writing Your Way to College. Nearly twenty years ago J.B. Schramm, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a youth worker in Washington, D.C., realized that many of the young people he got to know were “better than their numbers.” That is, these students did not score well on standardized college entrance tests yet had the potential to grow into successful and responsible adults. To realize their potential he enlisted a creative writing teacher friend to design a curriculum that focused on one thing: guiding his students through the stages of writing their college essay.
His bold idea: utilize the arduous task of writing to help students discover their more authentic selves and their evolving identities. The writing process, in other words, is the catalyst for change, helping students to locate and release the potential trapped within them. Like Carol Dweck’s groundbreaking efforts, J.B. Schramm focuses on students most critical tension point—their evolving sense of self and values.
What’s revealed? It’s never too late, even at the end or high school, for students to have a transformational experience that will give them a firm foundation for success in college an beyond. This is especially so when it comes to such motivational factors as identity—the secret sauce of any teenagers success and the release valve of trapped potential.
The result: Eighty percent of these students went to college, and eighty percent of them would graduate from college. The cost? Four days on a college campus within a small group under the tutelage for a skillful writing teacher. The approach? A combination of direct and group work.
UNDERSTANDING THE PHYSICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
A key take away from these stories of social entrepreneurs is that a change agent can take many forms. A change agent is not only an individual, however heroic and innovative; groups can be change agents, as can social situations themselves. When it comes to social change, an agent—whether and individual, group or situation—channels energy by leveraging the right amount of it—both from within a system and adding it from without.
About Energy and Systems. The first changemaking variable is systemic energy. Changemakers “transform a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity and forges a new stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates suffering and unleashes new value for society.” This is the perspective of two experts in social entrepreneurship, Roger Martin and Sally Osberg, whose work with the Skoll Foundation focuses on on large-scale systemic change and in bringing worthy hand-to-mouth efforts to scale.
A major tenet of this book is that their model is as applicable to making change across a spectrum of domains—from local to international levels—and even within the minds and hearts of individual students.
Where to find trapped potential. There is pent-up energy (aka trapped potential) caught up in any equilibrium, which social scientists call a “contest of opposing forces.” In an unproductive equilibrium, where the forces of decay and entropy win out, this trapped potential is revealed through points of tension and conflict. While such an unproductive equilibrium can appear robust, it can find itself teetering at the cusp of change. In some cases, all it takes is a nudge.
Think of Jill Vialet’s playground as a contest of opposing forces where energy is bottled up and potential is trapped. Over time it settled into an unproductive state, or equilibrium. The teachers on playground duty got complacent or defeated and slowly turned a blind eye to negative behavior. The natural exuberance of children got snuffed out. Over time the playground became joyless and oppressive. And when the playground falls out of balance, so, too, can an entire school. That was our school, a set of Russian nesting dolls: trapped potential within trapped potential.
Think of student social groups as contests of opposing forces where energy is gets bottled up—thus trapped potential that constitute an unproductive equilibrium. When students happen upon a bullying situation, for example, they tend to become bystanders. As more students gather, they form an invisible group with an unstated but powerful norm: don’t get involved. That’s the tension point; and that’s where you can find trapped potential. Yet, all it takes is for one student to come forward and this equilibrium is shattered.
Think, also, of individuals themselves—their inner lives as contests of opposing forces falling in and out of emotional and cognitive balance. For some students there is too much tension in their own personal state of equilibrium, their potential trapped through such “adverse childhood experiences” as neglect or abuse at home or in the frustrations of falling behind academically in school. For other students there may be too little tension, signaling that they’ve given up and are merely going through the motions. In either case, find the right mentor, or experience the right word of encouragement at the right moment, and a negative emotional bubble is burst.
About Channels. The second changemaking variable in any system are “channels”—those organizational and personal pathways that connect one’s intentions with results. Channels are all around us, so ubiquitous as to be invisible. I usually drive to work in my car over a physical channel: surface streets and freeways. Entertainment and news travels along electronic channels into my laptop and TV. Spies and diplomats often work “back-channels.” When it comes to changemaking in education, situations, groups and even a student’s inner life can become a channel, and, of course, there are important channels within channels.
About Leverage. This brings us to the third variable—leverage. That is, by introducing the right amount of energy into the right channel at the right time and place, a state of unproductive equilibrium can be disrupted and the trapped potential within it can get released.
- The playground specialist was just such a catalyst in my school. It only took a couple of weeks before he was able to gain the trust and support of our students, for he applied just the right touch, and in so doing released the negative tensions that had built up over years and redirected the energy into improving the school’s culture.
- The “Solution Coach” is the catalyst in the No Bully system, releasing the potential trapped within student bystander groups and turning negative peer pressure into something very positive and motivating. The Solution Coach is the catalyst that allows power to migrate to the students themselves.
- And even a short lesson in “neuroplasticity”— the notion that the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened and improved through mental exercise—offered by a homeroom teacher in a middle school—is another kind of catalyst. There is profound potential that resides within the mind and heart of every student. All it takes is an accessible metaphor.
HOW A NUDGE CAN START A CHAIN REACTION
Mary Gordon, the founder of Roots of Empathy, has developed an ingenious way to improve elementary and middle school students’ academic performance and reduce the incidents of interpersonal violence and bullying. She focuses her students on accessing their innate capacity for empathy.
Once a month, elementary school students gather around a mother and her baby on a rug in their classroom for forty-five minutes. The students listen, observe and ask questions. Even the most socially and emotionally disruptive among them is riveted. In September the baby is an infant. By mid-year, the baby can turn over and crawl. And, by the end of the school year, the baby has become a toddler. As Mary Gordon says, “through the vulnerability of a baby, students find humanity in themselves and in one another.”
The central question that her story raises is this: How can just a single catalyst, a nudge really—just a mother and her baby meeting with students eight times in a school year—result in such significant change? Here’s a hint: follow the channels through which energy flows. They are the pathways that connect intentions of all types with results.
The social-emotional channel. The first channel Mary Gordon enlists is through the inner lives of her students. The novelty of a new mother and her baby in front of a class gets their immediate attention. Their attention deepens, since the approach is both tangible and nonmoralistic. Students witness a visual and visceral story, not a lecture. From the very beginning the mother and her child suspend the students’ natural disbelief and resistance. In brief, she offers a message that Chip and Dan Heath, authors Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, call “sticky.”
The mother and child are thus able to unleash the trapped potential, not through logic or rational thought but through novelty and curiosity. Skillful teachers and counselors in schools understand this intuitively.
Situational and group channels. Establishing a positive relationship between mother, child and the students in the classroom leads inexorably into the two other pathways that link intentions with results. One is situational. The other is through groups.
Like the playground in Playworks, the classroom as a situational channel becomes a safer gathering place, where students can feel more comfortable in sharing their vulnerabilities and insecurities. The classroom as channel can be especially powerful, since it is “recursive.” That is, mother and baby appear monthly, and the class itself repeats daily.
Furthermore, other channels are enlisted. The faculty and staff who oversee this new curriculum form a team—a curriculum specialist, the school counselor, the principal and other teachers all became more energized in advancing their social and emotional curricula. And, by improving the curriculum, it strengthens further the classroom experience and students’ capacity for empathy and compassion. Further still, these staff members might celebrate their enthusiasm with parents, who in turn celebrate the program with other parents. And so it goes: channels interlocking with other channels.
Channels as reinforcing feedback loops. What turbocharges Mary Gordon’s central message, however, is in the recursive nature of “time channels.” That is, they loop back onto themselves: the repeated appearance of mother and baby every month, reinforced by the daily repetition of the class itself, nearly two-hundred times over the course of a school year.
How in the world can such a nudge result in such major change? The answer, then, is Systems Thinking 101 and “reinforcing feedback loops.” Significant change relies on the lining up of linear channels to be sure, but it is through the positive energy of reinforcing loops that a vicious cycle can get transformed into a virtuous one.
In the case of Roots of Empathy, it all began with a nudge—small incentives for taking action, freely chosen. Authentic internal engagement may be better than external rewards. Less may be more. And through the power of nudges, according to Tom Gilovich and Lee Ross in their book, The Wisest One in the Room, you can “change norms, and in so doing change the very meaning of the behavior in question.” That’s real change!
Turning situations, groups and individuals into agents of change. This notion—that there is tension and human potential that is trapped within situations, groups and even within individuals—and that these very situations, groups and individuals can turn themselves into channels that link intentions with results—is the galvanizing idea behind this book. It is this very notion that explains how a small catalyst can result in big changes and conversely how a big catalysts like comprehensive governmental programs can result in little, if any change at all. It also explains how a productive or unproductive equilibrium—however stable it may appear to the naked eye, can teeter at the very cusp of change.
That’s the power—even the mystery of social change. Each of the changemakers celebrated in this book approaches an unproductive equilibrium from a different perspective. Initially, they may see only as far as the “on-ramps” to channels. Jill Vialet comes at it through situations. Her on-ramp is a place where students gather repeatedly. Uri Treisman’s on-ramp is the study group, and for Nicholas Carlisle, it’s a team of student peers. Carol Dweck and J.B. Schramm’s on-ramps are more direct. They go straight into the minds and hearts of students.
Over time, changemakers get good at what Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, calls “feeling their way to solutions.” They keep at it, parlaying failures into precious opportunities to learn and eventually succeed. They turn the very situations, groups and individuals that originally were points of tension into points of change. What once was of negative value now assumes positive value.
But here’s the kicker: you won’t really know what works and what doesn’t work until you give it a try!