In This Issue:

1. Making meetings meaningful – and clearing time for everything else

2. Talking to teens about romantic relationships and sexual harassment

3. Getting middle-school students doing productive group work

4. Does having power change people’s brains?

5. Teachers taking care of themselves

6. Tips for giving an effective pep talk

 

Quotes of the Week

“Meetings are supposed to improve creativity and productivity – but they do the opposite when they’re excessive, badly scheduled, poorly run, or all three.”

Leslie Perlow, Eunice Eun, and Constance Noonan Hadley (see item #1)

 

“Teachers, for the most part, have little idea how students talk or what students actually talk about when they work in groups.”

            Al Rudnitsky, Cate Barclay, and Lauren Binger (see item #3)

 

“If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic.”

            Jerry Useem (see item #4)

 

“My early training as an improviser got me used to the idea of uncertainty and the value of the imperfect. Everything is a stepping-stone to something else, whether it’s perfect or lousy. I’m always looking to get better. It will never be perfect.”

            Alan Alda in “Life’s Work,” an interview with Alison Beard in Harvard Business

            Review, July/August 2017 (Vol. 95, #4, p. 152), https://hbr.org/2017/07/alan-alda

 

“For adults to hand over responsibility for educating young people about romantic love – and sex – to popular culture is a dumbfounding abdication of responsibility.”

            Richard Weissbourd, Trisha Ross Anderson, Alison Cashin, and Joe McIntyre (see #2)

 

“Ironically, as girls and young women continue to make great gains in school and work – outperforming boys in school, outnumbering them in college, outpacing them in many professional fields – the more subordinate many appear to be in some aspects of their romantic and sexual relationships, and the more subject many appear to be to certain forms of degradation.”

            Richard Weissbourd, Trisha Ross Anderson, Alison Cashin, and Joe McIntyre (ibid.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Making Meetings Meaningful – and Clearing Time for Everything Else

            “Meetings are supposed to improve creativity and productivity – but they do the opposite when they’re excessive, badly scheduled, poorly run, or all three,” say Leslie Perlow and Eunice Eun (Harvard Business School) and Constance Noonan Hadley (Boston University) in this Harvard Business Review article. One executive they interviewed described stabbing herself in the leg with a pencil to stop from screaming during a particularly tortuous meeting.

But despite the amount of grumbling about meetings, they keep happening, consuming hundreds of hours a year. That’s because it’s assumed that meetings are necessary for communication, alignment around the mission, collaboration, innovation, and including everyone in decisions. One executive said he was okay with the “cultural tax” imposed by meetings because of what he hoped they would accomplish.

Most leaders have heard the standard suggestions for making meetings bearable – have a clear agenda, do stand-up meetings, reach closure, etc. But Perlow, Eun, and Hadley believe these Band-Aids won’t prevent the downsides of badly run meetings:

-   They are a poor use of people’s time and undermine morale.

-   When people covertly do their own work during a meeting, they’re not paying full attention and others notice, undermining group cohesion.

-   Meetings rob time from “deep work” – that is, focusing without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks.

-   This contributes to employees burning the midnight oil in search of quiet time.

Working with a number of organizations, the authors have developed a five-step program for dramatically improving meeting quality:

            • Survey everyone. An anonymous questionnaire will tell what people really think of meetings and pick up on any resentment that may be bubbling under the surface.

            • Make meaning of the data together. Look at the survey results as a group to see what’s working and what isn’t. A neutral facilitator may be helpful in taking an open, nonjudgmental look at what emerged, but the authors recommend against outsourcing the analysis.

            • Agree on a collective, personally relevant goal. This might involve (a) creating “white space,” no-meetings blocks in everyone’s calendar that allow them to do high-priority individual work; (b) setting norms for meetings, such as “no tech;” and (c) finding ways to share key information and stay in touch without face-to-face meetings.

            • Set milestones and monitor progress. “As with any change effort, it is important that concrete and measurable progress be assessed and discussed along the way,” say Perlow, Eun, and Hadley. “Small, tangible wins provide something for people to celebrate, and small losses provide opportunities for learning and correction.”

            • Regularly debrief as a group. The authors recommend frequent “pulse checks” (weekly at first) on questions like: How are you feeling? How valuable are the ways in which you are spending your time? How well are you working as a team? Is this sustainable? The leader’s openness and affect are crucial, say Perlow, Eun, and Hadley: “We have found that a group can change its approach to meetings as long as the team leader has the authority to encourage people to raise issues, take risks, make mistakes, and discover new ways of working together.” One leader who took the authors’ suggestions reported, “We started communicating more openly and honestly, which enabled us to better help each other… We helped each other prioritize, we helped each other find access to other resources, and sometimes we reallocated tasks or simply helped each other do the work.”

 

“Stop the Meeting Madness” by Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun in Harvard Business Review, July/August 2017 (Vol. 95, #4, p. 62-69),

https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness; Perlow can be reached at [email protected].

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2. Talking to Teens About Romantic Relationships and Sexual Harassment

“Parents and other adults often fret a great deal about the ‘hook-up culture,’” say Richard Weissbourd, Trisha Ross Anderson, Alison Cashin, and Joe McIntyre (Harvard University) in this Making Caring Common Project paper. But these worries are overblown. According to the authors’ survey of over 3,000 U.S. high-school students and young adults, supplemented by extensive interviews, only about 15 percent  of young people said they were engaging in casual, hook-up sex. To complicate things, many buy the myth about the amount of hooking up that’s going on, say Weissbourd et al., which makes them feel “embarrassed or ashamed because they believe that they are not adhering to the norms of their peers. It can also pressure them to engage in sex when they are not interested or ready.”

Much more important than all this, say the researchers, are three issues that have a much deeper impact on today’s youth:

• First, how unprepared young people are for the caring, lasting romantic relationships almost all of them seek – “[I]t is strikingly evident that many people of all ages are not having healthy, mature romantic relationships,” say Weissbourd et al., “and this failure can reverberate destructively in various domains of their lives… [Young people] are undertaking perhaps the most daunting, complex, important challenge of their lives without strong guideposts from older adults.” The adults in their lives are doing very little to prepare young people “for the focused, tender, subtle, generous work of learning how to love and to be loved,” say the researchers. “Nor do we help many young people develop key skills they need to maintain energizing, mature romantic relationships.” Teens and young adults are eager (even if they don’t always show it) for guidance from family members and educators. Some survey responses:

-   70 percent said they wished they had received more information from their parents about emotional aspects of a romantic relationship, including how to begin a relationship, how to avoid getting hurt, and how to deal with breakups.

-   65 percent said they wished they had received guidance on emotional aspects of romantic relationships in a health or sex education class.

-   Most sex education programs don’t delve deeply into relationships, focusing instead on mechanics and “disaster prevention.”

The paucity of good conversations about romantic relationships at home and in schools “creates a perilous void,” say Weissbourd et al. “– a void that is commonly filled by popular culture… For adults to hand over responsibility for educating young people about romantic love – and sex – to popular culture is a dumbfounding abdication of responsibility… This abdication and our failure to prepare young people for healthy romance have huge emotional and financial costs, including high rates of divorce, marital misery, alcoholism, depression, and domestic abuse.”

• Second, how pervasive and normalized sexual harassment, degradation, and disrespect of young women are in high schools and colleges – Free access to online pornography, with its frequent depiction of male sexual domination, further complicates things. Some survey responses:

-   87 percent of female respondents said they’d experienced at least one of these: being catcalled; being touched without permission by a stranger; being insulted by a man or a woman with sexualized words like “slut;” having a stranger say something sexual to them; having a stranger tell them they were “hot.”

-   20 percent of women are victims of sexual assault in college, according to a recent national study.

-   Significant numbers of respondents were oblivious to sexualized treatment of women in the media, the double standard, and the desirability of a power balance in romantic relationships.

-   One interview respondent put it this way: “One thing that I think all girls go through at some age, is the realization that their body, seemingly, is not entirely for themselves anymore… The unfortunate thing is that we all just sort of accept it as a fact of life.”

“Ironically,” say Weissbourd et al., “as girls and young women continue to make great gains in school and work – outperforming boys in school, outnumbering them in college, outpacing them in many professional fields – the more subordinate many appear to be in some aspects of their romantic and sexual relationships, and the more subject many appear to be to certain forms of degradation.”

• Third, how little guidance young people are getting in both areas from parents, educators, and other adults – Some survey responses:

-   Most young people said they’d never had a conversation with parents about being “a caring and respectful sexual partner,” not pressuring another person to have sex, and not having sex with someone too intoxicated or impaired to make good decisions.

-   76 percent said they had never had a conversation with their parents about how to avoid sexually harassing others.

From all this, Weissbourd and his colleagues formulated five suggestions for parents and educators as they embark on modern variations of “The Talk” with young people:

            • Talk about love and help teens understand what mature love looks like. “Many parents may not see providing guidance on romantic relationships as their role, not know what to say, or feel hobbled in these conversations because of their own romantic failures,” say Weissbourd et al. “But relationship failures can generate as much wisdom as relationship successes, and all adults can distill their wisdom and share it in age-appropriate ways with teens and young adults.” These conversations need to address the difference between attraction, infatuation, and love; how to know if you are in love; why and how romantic relationships become deeply meaningful and gratifying; how romantic relationships change over a lifetime; the distortions that pornography presents; and why we are sometimes attracted to people who are unhealthy for us.

            • Guide young people in identifying healthy and unhealthy relationships. Does a relationship make you and your partner more or less self-respecting, hopeful, caring, and generous? What are examples of healthy and unhealthy relationships? What makes these relationships healthy or unhealthy?

            • Go beyond platitudes. Almost all teens know they’re supposed to be respectful in relationships. What they don’t know, because adults don’t go into enough detail, is what respect means in different romantic and sexual situations. A starting point might be sharing the data from the survey Weissbourd and his colleagues conducted about the amount of sexual harassment and debasing treatment young women are subjected to. “Adults can also discuss with teens,” say the authors, “various examples of caring, vibrant romantic relationships, including relationships in books, television, and film that show how thoughtful, self-aware adults deal with common stresses, miscommunications, and challenges, and use these examples to explore with teens the capacities and skills it takes to develop and maintain a healthy, energizing romantic relationship.”

            • Step in. Adults need to speak up when they witness degrading words or behavior. “Silence can be understood as permission,” say Weissbourd et al.

            • Talk about what it means to be an ethical person. Adult-with-teen conversations about romantic relationships are a natural bridge to talking about developing other caring, responsible relationships, growing up as ethical adults, community members, and citizens, and feeling an obligation, say the authors, “to treat others with dignity and respect, intervene when others are at risk of being harmed, and advocate for those who are vulnerable.”

 

“The Talk” by Richard Weissbourd with Trisha Ross Anderson, Alison Cashin, and Joe McIntyre, Making Caring Common Project, June 2017,

https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/files/gse-mcc/files/mcc_the_talk_final.pdf; Weissbourd can be

reached at [email protected].

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3. Getting Middle-School Students Doing Productive Group Work

            In this article in Middle School Journal, Al Rudnitsky and Cate Barclay (Smith College) and Lauren Binger (Mohawk Regional School, Massachusetts) discuss the challenge of getting middle-school students to be successful participants in collaborative learning groups. “Teachers, for the most part, have little idea how students talk or what students actually talk about when they work in groups,” say Rudnitsky, Barclay, and Binger. “Efforts by teachers to shape group discourse proceed without the benefit of being able to actually listen in on groups talking.”

By placing audio recorders in all the groups within several classrooms, the authors were able to listen in on student discourse and were struck by significant variations in quality: “The assigned task may be the same for all groups,” they say, “but how students are talking and what they are talking about varies widely from group to group. It is reasonable to wonder whether learning is taking place no matter the specifics of the talk.”

            Drawing on research on classroom discourse, Rudnitsky, Barclay, and Binger identified three types of small-group interaction:

-   Disputational – Disagreements are expressed without the intent or expectation that there will be resolution – an adolescent version of parallel play.

-   Cumulative – Students talk about procedural information and work to produce a deliverable (a poster, PowerPoint, or report); they may add onto what others say, but may not reach a shared understanding.

-   Exploratory – Students try out new ideas, are hesitant and tentative, relate new ideas to their experiences, and develop a new, shared understanding.

Of these three, exploratory discourse happens the least frequently in classrooms while cumulative discourse is the most common. In cumulative work, say the authors, students “adopt the deliverable rather than learning as the goal, and much of the discourse and student thinking is about task accomplishment, procedures, and who is going to do what. In this way, a product orientation often leads to students dividing the labor and going off to work as individuals, thus thwarting any chance at discourse and defeating the main purpose for having students work in groups.”

            One way to foster higher-quality exploratory discourse is to get students focused on an interesting problem rather than a run-of-the-mill deliverable. An example: challenging sixth graders to study key geographic, climatic, economic, and cultural factors of the 50 U.S. states and then work in groups to redraw the map into regions that make more sense than our somewhat anachronistic boundaries. Provocative, problem-based assignments like this are more likely to produce high-quality group discussions, but they don’t guarantee it. Students also need to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be effective participants and reach a meaningful learning target.

            Rudnitsky, Barclay, and Binger explored research findings on productive group norms and practices and synthesized them into an acronym designed to appeal to middle-school students – BRAVE:

-   Build on others’ ideas.

-   Risk half-formed thoughts.

-   Ask questions.

-   Value other perspectives.

-   Use Evidence to support your thinking.

The authors then designed a Good Talk Workshop to train students in productive group work. Of course, getting students to internalize these ideas and use them effectively “will require practice and explicit attention over a period of months,” say the authors, but these five lessons build a foundation:

• Activating students’ existing knowledge – Teachers ask, Why collaborate? What makes for good collaboration? and have students reflect, discuss, and share ideas via sticky notes on a bulletin board.

• Introducing new ideas about collaboration – Students view a slideshow on successful group collaboration in sports teams, NASA control centers, and other venues, view a video about IDEO, a company whose expertise is innovation and invention, and articulate some key factors.

• Introducing the BRAVE framework – Teachers explain the features one by one, linking them to the previous lessons and emphasizing that these are the features that Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Google, and other successful companies have found to be important to successful collaboration. A poster with the BRAVE elements stays up for the rest of the year. Students then watch short videos showing effective and less-than-effective group work, taking notes relating what they see to the BRAVE characteristics.

• Applying BRAVE, but with a wrinkle – Students use BRAVE in a problem-solving session (the Worm Journey), but without talking; they have to share ideas via sticky notes, drawings, or jotting on a large sheet of paper. The point is to slow down communication so students can concentrate on the qualities of good collaboration, which the whole class discusses when the exercise concludes.

• Using BRAVE to engage in group work – Students are asked to reflect on which of the BRAVE elements they especially want to work on, discuss their choices in groups, and then work on Raven’s Matrix problems, trying to apply the BRAVE elements as they collaborate.

            How did the workshop go? Rudnitsky, Barclay, and Binger looked over students’ shoulders during the five lessons, examined their written work, and were pleased by students’ insights and progress (they plan to do further research on long-term benefits). Some samples from fifth and sixth graders reflecting at the end of the workshop:

-   “I always thought disagreeing was bad but I know it’s not.”

-   “I learned a lot about collaboration, but the one important thing is: It’s okay to say, ‘Guys, let’s think about this,’ or ‘Guys, let’s listen to so and so,’ or ‘Guys, we’re all talking over each other.’ It’s okay to take charge – but not be a dictator.”

-   “Problems are so much easier when you have more than one person helping you. I learned how to build on other people’s ideas. I learned how much it helps not to talk over each other.”

-   “Anyone can collaborate, also a lot of people don’t share their ideas because they don’t feel confident, but their ideas are really good.”

-   “If I put out some half-formed thoughts, it helps my group work a bit better by saying if they agree on the idea or if they don’t.”

-   “I mostly want to work on risking a half-formed idea in my mind but I shut it down immediately because I don’t think it’s right, but a lot of times, that is the right answer.”

-   “I need to work on having more evidence so I can actually have proof that my idea is right.”

-   “Ask good questions. I get caught up in my own ideas and don’t want to question them. Also it would help the discussion.”

-   “I will work on listening to others. It helps me have better ideas.”

 

“What Students Need to Know About Good Talk: Be BRAVE” by Al Rudnitsky, Cate Barclay, and Lauren Binger in Middle School Journal, May 2017 (Vol. 48, #3, p. 2-14),

available for purchase at http://bit.ly/2sen4go; the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

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4. Does Having Power Change People’s Brains?

            “If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects,” says Jerry Useem in this article in The Atlantic. “It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic.” But psychologists have uncovered a deeper effect in field experiments, lab tests, and brain scans: power affects people like a traumatic brain injury, making them more impulsive, less risk-aware, and less able to see things from another person’s point of view. The historian Henry Adams, without the benefit of modern techniques, had a similar insight: power, he said, is “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” The irony is that attaining power impairs the very qualities that made it possible to get it in the first place. Might this apply to school leaders?

            In one experiment designed to measure mirroring and empathy, people were asked to draw the letter E on their forehead so another person could read it. Subjects who were feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the correct way for themselves, but backwards for a person facing them. Other experiments have shown that powerful people do less well at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret what they said. Other brain studies have found that powerful people don’t mimic what others are doing (a normal, subconscious process); they don’t laugh when others laugh or tense up when others tense up. What’s impaired is the neural process of “mirroring” – a cornerstone of empathy. Tellingly, at the 2008 Olympics, President George W. Bush, presumably feeling powerful, held up the American flag backwards.

            Is this power-driven brain impairment permanent? The evidence so far is that mirroring and empathy are temporarily disabled – but for people who hold power for an extended period of time, there may be “functional” changes in their brains. In one experiment, powerful people had these effects explained to them and were asked to make a conscious effort to tune in to others’ feelings. There was no difference in their self-oriented behavior. “This is a depressing finding,” says Useem. “Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”

            Is there any way to mitigate this numbing effect on empathy? One strategy is to temporarily stop feeling powerful. Power “is not a post or position but a mental state,” says Useem. “Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people – and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection.” Some examples:

-   Leaders who as children lived through a tornado, tsunami, or volcano eruption that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than those who hadn’t.

-   When Indra Nooyi was appointed to the board of PepsiCo in 2001, her mother stopped her from telling the “great news” and asked her to go out and get some milk. When Nooyi returned, fuming, her mother said, “Leave that damn crown in the garage.”

-   Louis Howe, a political advisor to four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, never stopped calling him Franklin, which Howe described as being a “toe holder” to keep the president from being too full of himself.

-   British prime minister Winston Churchill, around the time the Nazis marched into Paris, received a letter from his wife, Clementine, who had heard that he had been acting contemptuously toward subordinates in meetings, resulting in no ideas, good or bad, being offered. “My Darling Winston,” she wrote, “I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.”

“Hubris syndrome,” wrote David Owen, a British neurologist and politician, in a 2008 book, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Among the symptoms he catalogued: contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. Useem interviewed Owen, who admits to some hubris himself, and asked what keeps him tethered to reality. His strategies: think back on hubris-dispelling incidents in his past; watch documentaries about ordinary people; and read letters from his constituents.

 

“Power Causes Brain Damage” by Jerry Useem in The Atlantic, July/August 2017 (Vol. 320, #1, p. 24-26), http://theatln.tc/2rtVP2b

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5. Teachers Taking Care of Themselves

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Angela Watson on why so many teachers don’t take better care of themselves. Some reasons:

-   We think being crazy busy is normal. “Busy is normal,” says Watson, “but normal is not the same thing as healthy, and we can accomplish a lot of things without feeling busy when we build in that time for self-care.”

-   We don’t realize how dire the situation really is. We put off self-care because other things seem more urgent and we believe we won’t be so stressed next year. “We can’t wait until our body is physically manifesting these symptoms of stress to decide to take care of ourselves,” says Watson.

-   It’s hard to say no to people and things we care about. Teachers are always in demand, and turning people away feels wrong.

So what does a manageable self-care routine look like? It has to be something you can maintain long-term, says Watson, “because otherwise, it just won’t happen.” It has to have a meaningful impact on your well-being, “take a weight off your shoulders, and give you this real sense of satisfaction.” Here are her suggestions:

            • Reframe rest as the catalyst for productivity. Rather than thinking of naps and sleep as something to do after you’re finished working, see them as keys to your work life. They’re not a diversion but a necessary part of your schedule. It could be taking a break from checking phone messages, social media, and e-mail and substituting silence and stillness. A simple step like this can make a big difference in one’s energy level and ability to focus and concentrate.

            • Streamline your schedule by doing fewer things better. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything we need to do. Eliminate things that are not “the highest and best use of your time,” says Watson. Think about the things you can let go to create space for self-care. “If you say no once, you’ll find that people will stop asking you so many times. They realize, ‘Oh, okay, this is a person who really protects boundaries around our time, and doesn’t say yes to be a people pleaser, and isn’t just going to bend over backwards any time I need anything,’ and they will stop asking you so much.”

            • Pair a self-care habit with your regular routine so it becomes automatic. For example, getting up 15 minutes earlier and using the time to meditate; when you get in the car in the morning, putting on a favorite song that uplifts and inspires you; at lunch time, listening to good music for a few minutes; getting some fresh air at some point every day; turning out the lights in the classroom when the kids have left for the day and breathing deeply for 60 seconds to clear your head and energize yourself for the rest of the day; having a hot bath before bed; pleasure reading or watching TV for a half an hour.

            • Focus on the habit of the habit, so you’ll value right actions over right results. “[I]t’s essential that you prioritize creating and sticking to a habit if you want your self-care to become a regular part of your life,” says Watson. “Assume that what you’re doing today is what you’ll do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year…”

 

“Why It’s So Hard for Teachers to Take Care of Themselves (and 4 Ways to Start)” by Jennifer Gonzalez and Angela Watson in The Cult of Pedagogy, June 19, 2017,

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/teacher-self-care/

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6. Tips on Giving an Effective Pep Talk

            In this Harvard Business Review article, editor Daniel McGinn synthesizes research from the business world, the military, and sports on the key elements of an effective motivational speech:

            • Give direction. The leader tells precisely how to do the task at hand with easily understandable instructions, a clear definition of tasks (Here’s what I’m asking you to do…), and detail on how performance will be evaluated.

            • Express empathy. The leader shows concern for the performers as human beings, which may include praise, encouragement, gratitude, and an acknowledgement of the difficulty of the task. I know this is a challenge, but I trust you can do it. How are we all doing? Your well-being is one of my top priorities.

            • Make meaning. The leader says why the task matters (Here’s why this is important…), linking it to the organization’s purpose or mission and the individual’s key role, and expressing confidence in success (I know you can do it.). One way to do this is telling stories about people who’ve worked hard and succeeded, also how the work makes a difference to others.

            Including all three elements is important, says McGinn, but the mix will be different with each group: “Experienced workers who are doing a familiar task may not require much direction. Followers who are already tightly bonded with a leader may require less empathetic language. Meaning making is useful in most situations, but may need less emphasis if the end goals of the work are obvious.”

 

“The Science of Pep Talks” by Daniel McGinn in Harvard Business Review, July/August 2017 (Vol. 95, #4, p. 133-137), https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-science-of-pep-talks

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