Glad you asked . . .
Tag: Ashoka
The Empathy Formula
For over a year now, I’ve been working with a remarkable group of people at Ashoka who believe empathy is the foundational skill we need in order to become effective changemakers in modern society — and who are bold/quixotic enough to envision a world in which one day, every child learns to master it as readily as s/he masters the ability to read and write.
The challenges associated with an idea this big are myriad. Public education in America is organized around content knowledge, not skills. It defines success via the prism of intellectual, not emotional, growth. It survives via compulsion, not commitment. Any effort to elevate a “soft skill” like empathy must unfold within a larger culture that aspires, tragicomically, to be Bruce-Willis hard. And any adult who already sees the value of nurturing empathetic children needs useful guidance in how to actually do it.
It’s a tall order. And in a recent conversation with some of my Ashoka colleagues, I heard something that might diffuse all those challenges in a single stroke.
As it turns out, there’s a formula we can use to explain how people master empathy, even if no one’s ever described it that way before. And best of all, it’s got a familiar ring to it:
E = EC².
This “Empathy Formula” first emerged out of a conversation several years ago between Emotional Intelligence author Dan Goleman and behavioral scientist Paul Ekman. As Goleman describes it, the two men were discussing FEMA’s feckless response to Hurricane Katrina, and trying to clarify what went wrong, and how the full range of human capacity could be activated in solving our most intractable problems in the future.
What Goleman and Ekman mapped out — in a little-read blog post from 2007 – was three different ways a person can convey empathy. The first is “cognitive empathy,” or the act of knowing how another person feels. This is the first stage of becoming empathetic, and while it may be helpful in motivating people or running for elective office, it also has a dark side if it exists in isolation: narcissism and sociopathic behavior, to name a few.
The second is “emotional empathy,” or the capacity to physically feel the emotions of another. Until recently, we were at a loss to explain how, or even why, we do this. But now scientists have located the process in a set of special cells in the brain called mirror neurons. These cells are what help us recognize and understand the deepest motives and needs of our fellow human beings. As with cognitive empathy, however, emotional empathy can have troublesome consequences if applied in isolation. As Goleman writes, “One downside of emotional empathy occurs when people lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions can be seen in the psychological exhaustion that leads to burnout. The purposeful detachment cultivated by those in medicine offers one way to inoculate against burnout. But the danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring.”
That leads to the third and final part of the formula — “compassionate empathy”, which is what occurs when we combine the previous two in the name of acting upon what we think and feel. This was the missing ingredient in FEMA’s response to Katrina. Is it possible that it’s also the key to helping us unpack not just how to walk in another’s shoes, but also how to act compassionately on their, and our, behalf?
What would happen if schools were more mindful of this Empathy Formula? Instead of offering disconnected but well-intentioned efforts to help children think, feel or act, would adults start to help children think, feel and act? Would communities be increasingly populated with people who were neither narcissistic nor emotionally empty? And would the most pressing problems of our day — from energy to education to enlivening our civic life — be analyzed, internalized, and diffused by a new generation of changemakers?
Ashoka certainly thinks so. What do you think?
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
This is What Great Teaching Looks Like
There’s a lot of talk nationally about the importance of teachers, and the need to identify what great teaching actually looks like — and requires.
Our search should start and end with people like Kathy Clunis D’Andrea.
A veteran educator at the Mission Hill School in Boston, Kathy epitomizes everything that’s good about the profession — and everything the rest of us need to pay closer attention to if we want to support a better, more holistic vision of American public education.
It starts with her three-part recipe for success: Love, Limits & Laughter. It succeeds because of her recognition that what matters most is equipping young people with an essential set of skills and habits that will guide them through life. And it endures because of her school’s commitment to create an environment that is consistent across classrooms, and grounded in shared values of trust, equity, and empathy.
See for yourself. And spread the word.
(This post also appeared on Start Empathy.)
How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?
Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.
The first two were meetings that represented parallel, powerful constituencies and ideas – an Imagination Summit hosted by the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City; and an Empathy in Action working group, hosted by Ashoka in Washington, DC. At each gathering, I heard stories and insights from some of the world’s most influential thinkers – from Sir Ken Robinson to Deepak Chopra to Kiran Bir Sethi. I heard compelling cases for helping our education system become more effective at ensuring that all children become empathetic, and develop the ability to think imaginatively, act creatively, and behave innovatively. And I left feeling impressed by the energy and the motivation that was driving each group to push its work forward.
In a few days, I’ll also be attending the Save Our Schools (SOS) March, a grassroots-led movement of teachers and parents from across the country that disagree with the Obama administration’s current reform path – and plan to peaceably assemble in DC to indicate their displeasure. Since I’ll also be covering the march for CNN, I’ve been reflecting on the goals of those private meetings, the goals of this public march, and the essential questions that must be answered for any movement to be successful: Who or what is the movement’s opponent? What is its core idea, and how can that idea be expressed as simply and compellingly as possible? And how can a complex network of individuals, organizations and alliances come together to forge a common agenda?
Our own history tells us just how possible, and difficult, it is to turn ideas and energy into transformational change. That’s because reforming a system requires not just the capacity to know your enemy and forge a compelling narrative, but also a systemic approach to the problem – an articulation of the whole. Too often, what happens instead is we lose sight of the whole out of our preference for a specific piece of the puzzle – I call it the sacred cow syndrome. Instead of a unified movement, we get a cacophony of parallel efforts. And instead of paradigm shifts, we get Groundhog Day.
If you’re a principal, you know this all too well. In addition to everything else you do, you have to regularly sort through the literature from a range of school-improvement approaches and programs that, to your eyes, seem to have similar objectives and research bases: is it a service-learning focus you want to adopt, or a character education program? Is civic education where you will choose to hang your hat, or will you double down on social and emotional learning?
To be certain, each of these field’s approaches to learning is distinct, and each field has its own unique advantages. Each would also clearly benefit from a larger movement that brings about a shift from our Industrial Age model of schooling to one that is suited for the Democratic Age. And yet for years the different leaders of these different fields have sought, genuinely, to unite their efforts – only to fall back, eventually, on their respective sacred cows.
Which returns us to the present. What will the future hold for these nascent Imagination and Empathy networks, and for this weekend’s DC protest? Since all three tribes talk of movement building, will one be able to craft a big-enough umbrella to unite the aspirations of the many? Will we develop the capacity to understand the whole? And is it possible to sustain a movement of sacred cows that, by definition, no one is willing to eat?
Recent Comments