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 pathways through which energy flows and connect intentions of all kinds of results.
The social-emotional pathway. The first pathway Mary Gordon enlists is the inner life of each 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 non-moralistic. 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.
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.
Pathways as reinforcing feedback loops. What turbocharges Mary Gordon’s central message, however, is in the recursive nature of “time pathways.” 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 -- “reinforcing feedback loops.” Significant change relies on the lining up of linear pathways 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 indeed 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!
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 pathways through which energy flows and connect intentions of all kinds of results.
The social-emotional pathway. The first pathway Mary Gordon enlists is the inner life of each 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 non-moralistic. 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.
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.
Pathways as reinforcing feedback loops. What turbocharges Mary Gordon’s central message, however, is in the recursive nature of “time pathways.” 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 -- “reinforcing feedback loops.” Significant change relies on the lining up of linear pathways 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 indeed 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!