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In This Issue:
1. Leadership lessons from the CEO of General Electric
2. The five characteristics of highly effective teams
3. The dark side of 11 seemingly positive personality traits
4. Being candid without being a jerk
5. What kinds of parent involvement really make a difference?
6. Using technology to increase family engagement
7. “Nudging” student achievement with a simple, low-cost intervention
8. What is rigor, anyway?
9. Helping students read online news with a critical eye
Quotes of the Week
“If we really want results in schools – if we really want kids to succeed – then the teachers have to be nourished, teachers have to be honored, and the art of teaching as well as the science has to be something the principal respects and invests in.”
Mark Shellinger, SAM Innovation Project, quoted in “The District Where Principals Run Their Schools – and Teach” by Denisa Superville in Education Week, August 30, 2017 (Vol. 37, #2, p. 7), www.edweek.org
“Overwork sucks us into a negative spiral, causing our brains to slow down and compromising our emotional intelligence.”
Annie McKee in “Happiness Traps: How We Sabotage Ourselves at Work” in Harvard Business Review, September-October 2017 (Vol. 95, #5, p. 66-73), no e-link available
“Rigor is the result of work that challenges students’ thinking in new and interesting ways. It occurs when they are encouraged toward a sophisticated understanding of fundamental ideas and are driven by curiosity to discover what they don’t know.”
Brian Sztabnik (see item #8)
“If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it… For millenniums, the environs in which we learned best were social ones. It was through other people’s testimony or through interactive discourse and exploration with them that we learned facts about our world and new ways of solving problems… We have to speak the mind’s language, and that includes the language not only of information but also social cues. Failing to do so will continue to artificially limit the gains that educational technology promises to offer.”
David DeSteno, Cynthia Breazeal, and Paul Harris in “The Secret to a Good Robot
Teacher” in The New York Times, August 27, 2017, http://nyti.ms/2xEWjoz
“The worst time to deal with issues is when you waited until you can’t wait anymore.”
Dan Rockwell (see item #4)
1. Leadership Lessons from the CEO of General Electric
In this Harvard Business Review article, just-retired CEO Jeffrey Immelt says of his 16 years at the helm of General Electric, “my story is one of progress versus perfection.” Here are his big take-aways, some or all of which might apply to K-12 education:
• Be disciplined. This includes “nesting initiatives within one another – showing how each one fits with the rest – and staying away from new ideas that don’t fit,” says Immelt. His calendar reflected a focus on five big transformations in the company, and he spent the bulk of his time on areas that needed the most change: “I had to provide ballast against stagnation.”
• Soak. Good leaders are curious, says Immelt. “They are absorbing information about potentially important trends and developments all the time, but they don’t instantly react to them. They contemplate them. They read about them. They listen to internal and external experts with a variety of perspectives. They engage in what I call a ‘soak period’ before they reach a conclusion about what the input means…”
• Swing for the fences. “Every time we drove a big change,” he says, “I treated it as if it were life or death.” But Immelt knew that one speech wouldn’t be enough and reached out broadly in the organization, including spending one weekend a month with a key GE officer, first over dinner at his home with their spouses, then the next morning probing the person for ideas.
• Be all in. “Half measures are death…,” says Immelt, “because people can smell lack of commitment. When you undertake a transformation, you should be prepared to go all the way to the end… You’ve got to be willing to plop down money and people. You won’t get there if you’re a wuss.” All points of view should be heard and adjustments might have to be made, but at a certain point, everyone has to get on board.
• Be resilient. “I hate to say it, but transformation takes time,” says Immelt. “If change is easy, it is not sustainable. You need a thick skin to see it through.” There will be setbacks and failures, and you have to learn from them and keep going.
• Be willing to pivot. Immelt says he and his wife enjoy The Bridge, a Scandinavian murder mystery on Netflix that has ten episodes a season. Watching the second episode of one season, his wife said, “Who did it? Who do you think did it?” He replied, “Honey, just let it come to you.” His belief: “We need people who are willing to stick around to the eighth or ninth episode and just let more of it come their way… Nothing we’ve done has ever turned out exactly as it began.”
• Embrace new kinds of talent. Immelt prides himself on hiring good people from outside GE and transforming the performance evaluation process from intense end-of-the-year rating meetings to a continuous performance development process. The focus is “on giving people the feedback they want and need to produce better outcomes for customers.”
“How I Remade GE and What I Learned Along the Way” by Jeffrey Immelt in Harvard Business Review, September-October 2017 (Vol. 95, #5, p. 42-51), no e-link available
2. The Five Characteristics of Highly Effective Teams
In this article in re:Work, Julia Rozovsky reports on what Google learned from its two-year study of what makes some of its teams more effective than others. After conducting more than 200 interviews, they gleaned 250+ attributes and thought they could crunch the perfect mix of individual traits and skills – perhaps one Rhodes scholar, two extroverts, one expert engineer, and a Ph.D. “We were dead wrong,” says Rozovsky. “Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm.”
The conclusion of all their work boiled down to the following key dynamics demonstrated by highly successful teams:
- Psychological safety: Team members feel comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable in front of each other (this was by far the most important);
- Dependability: Team members get things done on time and meet a high standard of excellence.
- Structure and clarity: Roles, plans, and goals are clear.
- Meaning: The work is personally important to each member.
- Impact: People fundamentally believe that what they are doing matters.
Rozovsky says that any team can do a quick analysis of its internal workings by taking a close look at how it’s doing on each of these dynamics.
“The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team” by Julia Rozovsky in re:Work, November 17, 2015, https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a-successful-google-team/
3. The Dark Side of 11 Seemingly Positive Personality Traits
“Research over decades suggests that it’s very difficult to change core aspects of your personality after age 30,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (University College London, Columbia University, and Hogan Assessments) in this Harvard Business Review article. The problem is that almost everyone has a few “dark side” traits that can cause difficulty in their work and personal lives.
“Worryingly,” says Chamorro-Premuzic, “leaders tend to do a poor job evaluating their own dark sides, particularly as they gain power and move up the ranks. Some perceive their career advancement as an endorsement or encouragement of their bad habits.” A cautious leader may seem to be mastering the situation but end up being so risk-averse as to obstruct progress and innovation; a passionate leader may tax subordinates by being volatile and unpredictable; and a diligent leader can morph into a procrastinator or drive people crazy by being obsessively perfectionist.
Twenty years ago, psychologists Robert and Joyce Hogan identified eleven common personality traits and described their positive and negative sides:
• Excitable – Upside: Passion, enthusiasm
- Dark side: Moody, easily annoyed, hard to please, emotionally unstable, volatile, has outbursts
• Skeptical – Upside: Politically astute, hard to fool
- Dark side: Mistrustful, cynical, sensitive to criticism, focused on the negative, quarrelsome
• Cautious – Upside: Careful, precise
- Dark side: Unassertive, resistant to change, slow to make decisions, indecisive, risk-averse
• Reserved – Upside: Calm under pressure, stoic
- Dark side: Aloof, indifferent to others’ feelings, uncommunicative, insensitive
• Leisurely – Upside: Relaxed, easygoing
- Dark side: Covertly irritable, stubborn, uncooperative, passive-aggressive, driven by personal agendas
• Bold – Upside: Assertive, filled with conviction
- Dark side: Arrogant, grandiose, overly self-confident, entitled, an inflated sense of self-worth
• Mischievous – Upside: Charmingly persuasive, risk-tolerant
- Dark side: Impulsive, manipulative, risk-taking, limit-testing, excitement-seeking
• Colorful – Upside: Entertaining, expressive
- Dark side: Socially obtuse, dramatic, attention-seeking, tends to interrupt and not listen
• Imaginative – Upside: Creative, visionary
- Dark side: Subject to wacky ideas, constantly changing, thinks and acts in unusual or eccentric ways
• Diligent – Upside: Hardworking, high standards
- Dark side: Micromanaging, overly perfectionist, precise, meticulous, and detail-oriented
• Dutiful – Upside: Loyal, compliant, team player
- Dark side: Submissive, conflict-averse, eager to please, reluctant to act independently or express disagreement
By profiling millions of adults, researchers have found that most people display at least three dark-side traits, and about 40% display them to a level that’s problematic.
“When your dark-side traits negatively affect others’ perceptions of you,” says Chamorro-Premuzic, “they become barriers to career success and good leadership. Unfortunately, even small slips – ignoring negative feedback when you are bold, responding to unpleasant e-mails in an impulsive manner when you are excitable, or getting carried away by awkward ideas when you are imaginative – can cause significant reputational damage.”
Can people change? Chamorro-Premuzic believes we can, but it’s hard work. “Most people don’t really want to change – they want to have changed.” To complicate things, a trait that can be positive in one situation or with one boss can suddenly become problematic when conditions shift – for example, being imaginative is terrific with an entrepreneurial leader but might rankle a cautious, conservative manager. Stress can also bring out dark-side traits by taxing our cognitive resources and making self-control more difficult. When we’re relaxed and the pressure is off, we may display dark-side traits that we hide when we’re more focused.
“But if you identify the traits that trip you up,” Chamorro-Premuzic says, “modify certain behaviors, and continue to adjust in response to critical feedback, you will greatly enhance your reputation, and with it your career and leadership potential.” One approach is to take the full personality inventory developed by the Hogans. There’s a shorter online version at www.hoganx.io (registration required). “Better yet,” he suggests, “ask bosses, peers, subordinates, and clients to give you honest and critical feedback on your tendency to display these traits. Tell them that you want to improve and need their candor… Remember, too, that people in your personal life are likely to be more familiar with your dark side than work colleagues are, so ask for their candid opinions as well.”
“Could Your Personality Derail Your Career?” by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in Harvard Business Review, September-October 2017 (Vol. 95, #5, p. 138-141), no e-link available; the author can be reached at chamorro-premuzic@tc.columbia.edu.
4. Being Candid Without Being a Jerk
In this Leadership Freak article, Dan Rockwell lists some of the reasons people might not be entirely forthright with a colleague about a concerning issue:
- It might hurt the person’s feelings.
- The person might get mad and lash out.
- It will make things worse.
- You can’t find the perfect words.
- You won’t be able to explain yourself clearly.
- You might be wrong.
- It’s better to wait for a really big issue before speaking up.
But if we avoid the subject, candor will become increasingly difficult. “The worst time to deal with issues is when you waited until you can’t wait anymore,” says Rockwell. “When frustration fuels candor, you waited too long.”
That’s an argument for coming out and saying what’s on your mind early. This allows you speak to concerns more strategically, with less emotional baggage. “Candor is simply noticing,” says Rockwell. “It isn’t belligerence, anger, or being in someone’s face.” Here are some specific pointers:
- Relax. Tell yourself you like the person you’re speaking with and let that show on your face.
- Maintain eye contact (without making it a staring contest).
- Soften your tone; candor isn’t an accusation.
- Be curious.
- Be real.
“Candor That Strengthens Relationships and Delivers Results” by Dan Rockwell in Leadership Freak, August 29, 2017, http://bit.ly/2x45SjS; Rockwell is at dan@leadershipfreak.com.
5. What Kinds of Parent Involvement Really Make a Difference?
In this article in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Angel Harris (Duke University) and Keith Robinson (formerly at University of Texas) affirm the importance of parents to their children’s academic success. But Harris and Robinson note that researchers disagree on the type of parent involvement that is most helpful. Is it helping with homework? Reading to children? Engaging children in home learning activities? Teaching social skills? Communicating with teachers? Attending meetings and events at the school? Being involved in school decision-making?
None of these are what really make a difference, say Harris and Robinson: “We argue that traditional measures of parental involvement fail to capture the fundamental ways in which parents actually help their children academically… [T]he mixed results observed in previous studies indicate that parental involvement does not operate through the typical channels posited by researchers, educators, and policymakers.”
So what does boost student achievement? According to the authors’ research, it’s stage-setting. The analogy is to what a theater’s behind-the-scenes workers do so actors can perform successfully in the show. “Thus,” say Harris and Robinson, “a good performance can be characterized as a partnership between two critical components: (1) the actor embodying his or her role, and (2) the stage-setter creating and maintaining an environment that reinforces (or does not compromise) the actor’s embodiment of the role. Likewise, many parents construct and manage the social environment around their children in a manner that creates the conditions in which academic success is possible.”
The most effective parents, say the authors, set the stage for their children’s academic success by the life space and messages they orchestrate:
- They provide a secure home and neighborhood environment so children don’t have to worry about food and shelter and getting to and from school safely.
- They make strenuous efforts to get their children into good schools.
- They are supportive of academics, but also of non-school activities like ballet or piano lessons.
- Their support comes across as caring about children’s overall success, not pressure and micromanaging to get an A in math. This can be conveyed indirectly, for example, by a desk rather than a TV in a child’s bedroom, and lots of books and magazines in the home.
- They convey the critical importance of academic achievement to future options and life success.
- They show confidence in the child’s intelligence and ability to do well in school, fostering a positive academic identity and a sense of responsibility to not let the family down.
All this produces a strong academic self-concept in young people. Harris and Robinson note that it’s possible to have that, but not a positive overall self-concept – and vice-versa. The best outcome is both – a strong academic and general self-concept.
Harris and Robinson’s big point is that it’s parents’ stage-setting, not being super involved in school activities, that makes the difference. “Whereas traditional forms of involvement comprise any number of parental activities,” they say, “stage-setting requires that parents focus on only two factors: messages and life space. Certainly, parents can be traditionally involved in their children’s schooling in some ways to accomplish each of these factors. However, stage-setting aims can also be achieved without employing any traditional forms of involvement. Thus, a busy parent with a demanding career can be a successful stage-setter with minimal direct involvement in his or her child’s schooling.” This hypothetical parent’s influence is at work under the surface, subtly shaping the children’s self-concept, aspirations, and future possibilities. By not micromanaging students’ homework and school activities, parents may produce more autonomous children who are better equipped to make their own way through the challenges of middle and high school.
How much of this is related to socioeconomic status? Harris and Robinson note that in more-affluent communities, a variety of factors make it easier for parents to set the stage for academic success. In poorer communities, the opposite is true: weaker neighborhood institutions and public services, fewer college-educated adults in the home and neighborhood, less access to museums and other enriching experiences. In addition, say the authors, “over the course of a year a majority of the poorest families experience at least one of the following deprivations: eviction, crowded housing, disconnection of utilities, no stove, no refrigerator, or housing with upkeep problems… These conditions inhibit the development of educational skills, depress school achievement, and discourage teachers… Thus, stage-setting is not a proxy for social class but a mechanism that explains the link between social class and achievement.”
Harris and Robinson note that African-American and Hispanic families have an uphill battle in this area because stereotype threat – internalizing negative societal messages about intelligence and ability – makes it more difficult for children to adopt a positive academic self-concept. In addition, schools with a high percentage of black students are more likely to have inexperienced teachers, a higher rate of teacher turnover, and may be less successful at reaching out to parents. Thus, say Harris and Robinson, “black parents have a particularly unique challenge in effectively setting the stage for their children’s academic success.”
Studies show that parents of all SES levels have high hopes for their children’s school success. What matters is how those hopes play out day to day. Harris and Robinson suggest four possibilities:
- Parents don’t convey the importance of education and don’t provide an educationally supportive home environment – This usually produces low achievers.
- Parents convey the importance of education but don’t create an educationally supportive home environment – This usually produces mediocre or average achievers.
- Parents don’t convey the importance of education, but there is an educationally supportive home environment – This usually produces average achieving students.
- Parents convey the importance of education and create an educationally supportive home environment – This usually produces solid high achievers.
Clearly some parents succeed in making these messages more central to their children’s frame of reference and creating a positive life space, thereby broadening children’s horizons, enriching their psyches, and setting them up for academic success.
The major conclusion Harris and Robinson draw from their research is that “stage-setting explains a greater share of the link between social class and achievement than traditional forms of parental involvement.” They believe that conventional home-school activities are not the most-effective drivers of students’ academic achievement, while the underlying stage setting – messages and life space – are what really makes a difference. It’s only because stage setting is so closely correlated with social class that it appears that SES is determining student achievement.
“To be clear,” say the authors, “we acknowledge that affluent parents are more involved than their less-advantaged counterparts. It is also true, however, that many educators find the anecdotally observed relationship between parent involvement and high achievement too appealing to ignore and thus promote parental involvement as the answer to most of the problems within K-12. We propose instead that affluent parents have created a space that sets their children up for success largely independent from their involvement… What contributes to the effectiveness of these positive factors within the life space, however, is that messages about the importance of schooling have a more lasting effect on the children of affluent parents because there are fewer threats in their lives that could disconnect their academic self-esteem from their global self-esteem.”
“The stage-setting framework suggests that the concept of parental involvement needs to be conceptualized differently in policy and practice,” conclude Harris and Robinson. Rather than pushing parents to be more involved in traditional school-based activities, educators should help parents understand and shape the factors that truly make a difference in their children’s academic success – messages about academics and certain home conditions. Schools should also address the ways they may be exacerbating economic and racial achievement gaps, including tracking and access to effective teaching. And by providing high-quality classroom experiences for all students, say Harris and Robinson, “schools can affect academic achievement independent from the life space parents create in the home.”
“A New Framework for Understanding Parental Involvement: Setting the Stage for Academic Success” by Angel Harris and Keith Robinson, The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, September 2016 (Volume 2, #5), http://bit.ly/2eDmCro; Harris can be reached at angel.harris@duke.edu. Spotted in Educational Leadership, September 2017 (Vol. 75, #1, p. 8), “Research Alert”
6. Using Technology to Increase Family Engagement
(Originally titled “3 Tech Strategies to Keep Parents in Sync with School”)
In this Educational Leadership article, teacher/author/consultant Catlin Tucker suggests three ways to use technology to keep parents engaged and informed:
• Record a short video with information on the teacher’s experience, philosophy, and key features of the class website, and send it to parents with a questionnaire on how they’d prefer to communicate during the year, what technology the family uses, and anything the school should know about their child. Tucker records her own video using QuickTime, puts it into iMovie, exports the video to YouTube, and sends a link in an e-mail to parents a week before back-to-school night.
• Use texting for routine communication with parents. Tucker uses Remind, a real-time messaging service for schools, to send quick updates, due dates, testing information, and other reminders, start group conversations, and plan field trips.
• Have students teach their parents about technology. Tucker hosts two student-led evening training sessions a year in which students pair up with parents on classroom laptops and explain Good Drive, Google Docs, Gmail, and other programs they’re using. “I loved seeing my students in the role of the teacher,” says Tucker. “They were patient and attentive as they worked with parents. I made the mistake of approaching a group to make a suggestion and was respectfully informed by a student, ‘It’s OK. We’ve got this, Tucker.’”
“3 Tech Strategies to Keep Parents in Sync with School” by Catlin Tucker in Educational Leadership, September 2017 (Vol. 75, #1, p. 84-85), http://bit.ly/2eVHk2C
7. “Nudging” Student Achievement with a Simple, Low-Cost Intervention
In this Education Week article, Sarah Sparks reports on experimental research demonstrating the surprising impact of having middle-school students write about their values. In one study, Stanford University psychologists Parker Goyer and Geoffrey Cohen randomly assigned black, Latino, and white students to explore their values in a series of writing assignments. Students were given a list – integrity, creativity, cultural identity, connection to family, and others – and asked to write about two or three they considered most important to their identity. During that school year, students wrote 2-5 similar assignments that built on the values they had chosen. Students in the control group wrote about neutral topics.
Following up several years later, researchers found that Latino students who were in the values group at the beginning of middle school were five times more likely to enroll in in AVID, a challenging college preparatory program in 8thgrade, than students in the control group. African-American students, who were followed over a longer period of time, were significantly more likely to attend college, and attend selective four-year colleges, than peers who didn’t take part in the writing experience. Black and Latino students in the values groups closed achievement gaps with white peers and reported a greater feeling of belonging in their schools. Interestingly, white students who wrote about values didn’t show the same gains, although other research has found that disadvantaged white boys had higher downstream achievement when they had written about values.
Why such a large effect from a simple, short intervention? Goyer believes it’s because thinking about values broadens students’ sense of self and counteracts stereotype threat. “It doesn’t have to be a formal intervention,” she says; “teachers can be affirming to students every day.” Noting that tracking often begins in middle school, Cohen adds, “The transition to middle school is an embryonic moment. It is a time when kids start to form their identity… It is a fork in the road in a lot of ways, and a lot of kids end up taking a negative turn… Part of what the exercise could be doing is giving the message that ‘you belong in school,’ because the teacher is giving the exercise and thus showing they care about their values. [Students] are encouraged to do the self-work of figuring out who they are, so they can feel like their values are bigger than the problems in front of them.”
“How a Simple Writing Exercise in Middle School Led to Higher College Enrollment” by Sarah Sparks in Education Week, June 20, 2017, www.edweek.org; Cohen can be reached at glc@stanford.edu.
8. What Is Rigor, Anyway?
In this Edutopia article, New York teacher Brian Sztabnik notes how often the word “rigor” crops up in faculty meetings, educational conferences, and worried chats with colleagues (“Is this book rigorous enough?”). But what does rigor mean?
- Making students’ work more difficult?
- Giving them more homework and classwork?
- Assigning work further up Bloom’s taxonomy or deeper on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge?
Hold on, says Sztabnik. “Rigor is a result, not a cause… Rigor is not defined by the text – it comes from what students do. It is not standard across a curriculum – it is individual to each student’s needs. It is not quantified by how much gets crammed into a school day – it is measured in depth of understanding.”
Sztabnik describes how novelist David Foster Wallace taught his literary analysis course at Illinois State University. Wallace used seemingly middlebrow works like Lonesome Dove, Carrie, and Silence of the Lambs and said to his students, “Don’t let any lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking this will be a blow-off-type class. These ‘popular’ texts will end up being harder than more conventionally ‘literary’ works to unpack and read critically.”
That’s the point, says Sztabnik: “Rigor is the result of work that challenges students’ thinking in new and interesting ways. It occurs when they are encouraged toward a sophisticated understanding of fundamental ideas and are driven by curiosity to discover what they don’t know… Let us aspire to something greater than making difficult work for our students. Let’s take them to that intersection of encouragement and engagement, where they confront ideas and problems that are meaningful. Let’s stretch their thinking. Let’s unleash their sophistication. And let’s foster a love of deep knowledge.”
“A New Definition of Rigor” by Brian Sztabnik in Edutopia, May 7, 2017,
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/a-new-definition-of-rigor-brian-sztabnik
9. Helping Students Read Online News with a Critical Eye
In this NJEA Review article, New Jersey school librarian Lisa Crate has practical suggestions for teaching students how to distinguish bona fide news stories from commercials, propaganda, and fake news:
- Examine the author and the sponsors. Is there a commercial or political agenda?
- Check the reliability of the source. Can key information be verified? Are there primary sources – documents, scientific data, physical artifacts, original photos?
- Look at the date and place of the story. The “About” portion of the website shows if it’s linked to other reputable online news sources. Is there other published work?
- Consider the emotions evoked by the story. How does the story make you feel? Propaganda is designed to make people angry, or nod in agreement with everything.
“Real news gives facts and information that can be investigated and verified as either correct or incorrect,” says Crate. “Propaganda tells a different story.”
“Fake News vs. Real News” by Lisa Crate in NJEA Review, March 2017 (Vol. 90, #7, p. 26-27), no e-link available, spotted in Education Digest, September 2017 (Vol. 83, #1)
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