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!
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!