What myths do we cling to?

In an article titled The Real Problems with Psychiatry, Hope Reese asks psychotherapist Gary Greenberg about something called "drapetomania":

Question: In 1850, doctor Samuel Cartwright invented "drapetomania" -- a disease causing slaves to run away. How do social and historical context affect our understanding of mental illness? 

Answer: Cartwright was a slaveholder's doctor from New Orleans -- he believed in the inferiority of what he called the "African races." He believed that abolitionism was based on a misguided notion that black people and white people were essentially equal. He thought that the desire for freedom in a black person was pathological because black people were born to be enslaved. To aspire to freedom was a betrayal of their nature, a disease. He invented "drapetomania," the impulse to run away from slavery. Assuming there wasn't horrible cruelty being inflicted on the slaves, they were "sick." He came up with a few diagnostic criteria and presented it to his colleagues.

 It's hard not to read this and ask how anyone could be so ignorant or naive?

I think a lot about how often we are satisfied by myths. It's easy to have a good laugh at the expense of people like Dr. Cartwright and his "drapetomania".

What's not easy is to stop and reflect on what myths are we foolishly subscribing to today. What myths are we clinging to today that might make people 10 or 20 years from now laugh at us?

If this kind of thinking interests you, here are a couple concepts you might need to know more about:

• cognitive dissonance

• you say you want this, so then why are you doing that?

• confirmation bias

• Knowledge gap and surprising validators

• Trusted Naysayers

• mandated optimism

We need to disagree better

This was written by Greg Miller who is a Principal of a Pre-K to grade 6 elementary school in Alberta. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally posted here.

by Greg Miller

We’ve all done it. The moment someone retweets our thoughts, we head straight to their profile and click the follow button. Why not? They obviously like the way we think and that’s good for our ego and self-esteem. If we follow them, and they follow us we will have one more person entrenching us in our way of thinking.

As a matter of fact, teachers in most schools tend to connect and work with colleagues who see the world through the same eyes as them. It’s so much easier to collaborate with others who are on the same page. Even when hiring, leaders look for individuals who are going to fit the best with their philosophy and way of thinking. In general, human beings don’t like to openly disagree with the ideas of others. There just seems to be too much work involved with it, and more often than not it leads to some level of conflict. Why engage in conflict when it can be avoided? If things go wrong it also may affect our standing within our school or organization. So most of us go through our careers never giving ourselves the opportunity to learn from people who might challenge our way of thinking.

It’s my opinion that this kind of thinking supports the status quo and will slow us down significantly in efforts to transform education. Not only do we need to do a better job of connecting with those who see things differently, we also need to approach conflict not as a roadblock but as working toward a solution. We must listen to the ideas of others and be prepared to change our minds. When approached in this manner, spirited collaboration can produce some of the most creative and innovative solutions and ideas.

Last week, at my opening staff gathering I shared this Ted Talk by Margaret Heffernan called Dare to Disagree. In the conversation that followed, all agreed that if our collaborative efforts are to make a real difference, we need to be more willing to disagree and bring conflict into our processes. All agreed to make this effort in the year that lies ahead.

I encourage each of you in my PLN to engage, both online and in person, with passionate and caring individuals who challenge your way of thinking every day; and even with a few that think the same way as you.

Changing School

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do.

Let's talk about scurvy.

Between 1500-1800, it is estimated that at least two million sailors died of scurvy. In 1753 research was formally published that scurvy could be eradicated with fresh fruit such as limes and lemons, but it wasn't until 1795 that the Royal Navy introduced fresh oranges and lemons into their sailors' diets. It took 42 years to close the gap between what we knew about scurvy and what we were doing about it.

Consider this.

In the 1950s, Dr. Alice Stewart discovered that at a rate of 2 to 1 children who died from cancer came from mothers who had x-rays while they were pregnant. In 1956, Dr. Stewart published her findings, but it took 25 years for British and American doctors to stop x-raying pregnant women.

Like scurvy and childhood cancer, education also suffers from a considerable gap between what we know about how children learn and what we do in school. Many of us have experienced this first hand, which is why so many people know that school needs to change in order for it to be a good place for all children.

So how do we change school?

While our ultimate goals for children tend to be at least in the same ballpark (happy, trustworthy, responsible, caring, creative, critical thinker, etc), how we attain these goals can pit adults against one another.

As an educator and a parent, I've worked with others to rethink some of their unquestioned assumptions about school. Along this journey, I have learned a great deal about how to (and how not to) work with others to make school a better place for children (read: I've made mistakes and turned people off). I've often been described as passionate about education which can be a compliment (he gets it) and a criticism (he won't shut up).

Whether you want to talk about homework, testsandgrades, classroom management, religion, punishment, due dates, recess, literacy, numeracy, curriculum, technology, or lesson plans, here are the steps I try and use as both an educator and parent to engage people who may have a different vision for how to do school:

1. Develop a relationship. At the heart of all learning and progress are relationships. Without a healthy relationship, it doesn't matter how right or smart you are. People won't care what you know until they know you care about them.

2. Ask and listen. You're going to be tempted to start by sharing your own knowledge, expertise or perspective, but you're better off asking questions and listening first. Consider starting by asking others for their opinion. There are two goals here: 1) whoever you are talking with needs to know that you are listening and that you are not simply waiting for your turn to talk. 2) You need to listen carefully so that you can gain insight into their beliefs and motives. We all tend to have good intentions, so try and find out what their good intentions are.

3. Share a story. After you've gained insight and they know you've listened to them, it might be your turn to talk. Again, it is best to resist lecturing on your soap box. Instead, take a highly specific example for how your child or student was affected by traditional school. If you do this right, whoever you are talking with should experience this story not as a reward or punishment but as information. No judgement. The goal here is not to win an argument, but to engage in a two-way conversation.

4. Read and share. If you want to influence others, you need to be credible so you will need to be well read and well researched. You will need to familiarize yourself with both the anecdotal evidence and scientific research that supports and counters your position. Once you've nurtured a relationship, you can start to ask questions about how and why we do things and implicitly or explicitly share examples for how and why we might do things differently. Share articles, research and books. Engage.

5. Know when to be patient and when to pursue. People don't resist change -- they resist being changed. The whole idea here is to avoid adversarial relationships. Others need to experience you less like a judge-in-waiting and more like a safe and caring ally. The only way to avoid being ignored or labelled a trouble-maker is to do nothing and remain silent, but keep in mind the slippery slope of the status quo is fuelled by silence, so you will need to be selective with when it is worth speaking up.

6. Organize and mobilize. One person with a point or problem may be easily dismissed but two, three, four, five people with a point or problem are much harder to dismiss. Talk and work with others to create a connected network that influences change through collaboration.

I have some bad news.

Even if you do all this really well, you need to know about something called confirmation bias. When people hear information that contradicts their current beliefs, we tend to go out of our way to criticize, distort or dismiss it so we can maintain our existing beliefs - this is confirmation bias.

So can anything be done to break up the echo chamber?

Yes.

Some call it surprising validators.

Dismissing information that contradicts our existing beliefs may comfort us, so the challenge may be to have information presented by a source that we would be uncomfortable dismissing. In other words, disagreeing with contradictory ideas may be easy, but disagreeing with people we trust might be enough to make us rethink our positions.

Confirmation bias is most destructive where its least acknowledged. People who are wilfully blind lose awareness of what they are doing. Drawing attention to these destructive tendencies can help reduce their hold over us.

Change is fuelled by constructive conflict brought on by cognitive dissonance inspired by engaged conversations but is stifled by needless combativeness which breeds disengagement and defensiveness.

Margaret Heffernan: Dare to disagree

Consider taking 13 minutes to watch this brilliant video featuring Margaret Heffernan who is the author of Willful Blindness: Why we ignore the obvious at our peril.



I have written a couple posts on the ideas that Margaret Heffernan plays with such as cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and leadership.

The inconvenience of cognitive dissonance

Gold Stars and Grades

You have to open your own eyes

Challenging Leadership

Trusted Naysayers

Seek Dissent

Mandated Optimism

Collaboration Agent

Gold Stars and Grades

What if deadlines, imposed goals, surveillance and evaluations were found to all undermine intrinsic motivation?

What if grades, gold stars, and other rewards for performance sabotage a student's desire to engage in learning for its own sake?

Are you prepared to engage with these questions or are they too threatening?

If you are willing to see cognitive dissonance as an opportunity to play with, rather than a crisis to be avoided, I suggest you try playing the game You say you want this, so then why are you doing that? by taking a look at these three books:

Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn

Drive by Dan Pink

The inconvenience of Cognitive dissonance

Do you remember believing that the moon only came out at night? If so, do you remember the day that you saw the moon during the day?

If you can relate to this experience, you have an understanding for what cognitive dissonance feels like. In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan describes cognitive dissonance as:

The mental turmoil that is evoked when the mind tries to hold two entirely incompatible views.

Believing that the moon only comes out at night and then seeing the moon during the day are incompatible - this is cognitive dissonance - and for a species that spends so much of its time making meaning of the world we live in, cognitive dissonance is, to say the least, inconvenient.

However, rather than seeing cognitive dissonance as a crisis to be avoided, the most successful people in the world embrace cognitive dissonance as a remarkable opportunity. They see it as a fork in the road where they can choose to continue down the comfortable status quo, or they can take a turn down a new, unfamiliar road.

This is exactly how trailblazing starts. There may be no other way to engage in real improvement and authentic innovation.

For educators and parents, it is time to engage in some cognitive dissonance. Traditional education has been built on a number of assumptions that we stopped questioning a long time ago. If we are prepared to make school a better place for our kids, we need to stop and reflect on some of these assumptions which means we might have to make school look a lot less like school.

I think it's safe to say that the following list of items are mainstays for traditional schooling:

• homework
• praise or positive reinforcement
• grading or marking
• final exams or exit exams
• punishment

What if:

• the biggest problem with the homework that didn't get done was that it was assigned in the first place?
• praise actually discourages children?
• children not only learn less but they choose to learn less because of the grade assigned by the teacher?
• exit exams have actually proven to reduce graduation rates?
• punishment and discipline are the problem, not the solution?

If any of these What Ifs make you angry or if you have a sudden desire to kill this page and move on with your day, that's ok. You've just experienced the inconvenient feeling of cognitive dissonance.

The trick isn't to avoid the feeling. To be honest, because we are human, I don't think avoiding the feeling is within the realm of possibility. The trick is to not succumb to the feeling and remain aware that you are uncomfortable while at the same time accepting the challenge that your longtime beliefs may be wrong.


Mara Sapon-Shevin writes in her book Widening the Circle:

Courage is what it takes when we leave behind something we know well and embrace (even tentatively) something unknown or frightening. Courage is what we need when we decide to do things differently... Courage is recognizing that things familiar are not necessarily right or inevitable. We mustn't mistake what is comfortable with what is good.  

After all, can you imagine how much worse off we would all be had we all chosen to turn our backs on that moon during broad daylight?

Sure we might salvage our comfort in remaining right (at least in our own minds), but this comfort comes at an alarming cost - that is, to remain comfortable, by definition we have to remain ignorant.

And there may be only one thing worse than ignorance and that is willful ignorance.

Chewing on ideas

I just read Ted Hutchings' latest post titled Technological Dissonance and if you have a minute, I think you should read it for yourself.

It's kind of weird how something you write can speak to others in ways they might never predict. For me, I appreciated the dissonance that Ted wrestled with over allowing technology such as video games into his family's home.

Here's how Ted started his post:

The idea for this post has been percolating for over a year, but I never seem to get around to actually writing it. I've changed titles, messed around with the topic and even now, I'm rewriting this introduction for the fourth or fifth time.

As someone who has been blogging pretty hardcore for about a year and a half, I know how the best posts can be the ones that sit as a draft for weeks or even months.

They sit there staring at you.

Sometimes you pull up that draft only to quickly close the laptop in frustration or avoidance. Sometimes you make edits or whole scale deletions, only to click undo.

So where am I going with this?

I think it's a damn shame that even the most unaccomplished writers can know the best writing comes from making time the variable and thoughtful prose the constant. And yet it's May - are you aware of how many children, some as young as grade 3, are put through some kind of written response standardized test? For these tests, time is the constant and thoughtful prose is the variable.

And what do we expect, when these kids are all given the same prompt that they've never seen before and have been told to write something thoughtful in the time allotted.

Writing for me is a highly personalized adventure - and if someone told me what I had to blog about, and that I only had x amount of time, I would tell them where to go and how to get there faster than you can say Jack Robinson.

Can you imagine how many children are turned off of writing because of these tests? Real learning is not likely to survive under such contrived environments.

If we are to move past spitting back the superficial, we all need more than a couple hours to chew on our ideas.

If I don't praise children, what can I do?

My class went for our afternoon walk to the local park when upon our way back, we came across an elderly woman who was struggling with her purse when she dropped her cell phone.

When the phone dropped, I was walking next to Amber, who I've taken it upon myself to teach and model some rather desperately needed social skills. Once the phone hit the ground, I subtly turned to Amber to see if she noticed. She casually walked towards the phone, picked it up and handed to the lady.

The lady smiled back and said thank you. 

Amber replied with you're welcome.

I then had to make a decision - I really wanted to say something to help Amber recognize the virtue of her kindness. I wanted to encourage Amber to see how her act of good-will benefited not herself but the elderly lady.

You see, that's the rub. 

If I praise Amber by saying "good job", it's the equivalent of patting her on the head and throwing a mirror inches in front of her face - like the praise, the mirror would encourage Amber to focus on how her good-will benefited her. After all, praise from an authority figure such as a teacher is something that can feel awfully nice to receive, but I'll be honest with you, Amber is as narcissistic as she needs to be. She certainly does not require anything, such as praise, that would encourage her to think of herself anymore than she already does.

So instead of dropping the "good job" like the verbal tick it has become, I said, "did you see the smile on that ladies face?"

Amber looked at me with an ear-to-ear grin and said, "yeah, I did."

And that was all I needed to say.

The trick here is that rather than simply lathering on the praise, I invited Amber to reflect on how her actions made someone else feel. You'll notice that I did not ask Amber how picking up the cell phone made her feel - rather I asked how this act of kindness made the lady feel. This is important because I believe our motivations matter - in other words, it's not enough that Amber was kind. I want her to be kind for the right reasons. I want her to be kind because of how it will affect others and not because being kind will land her in the teacher's good books.

The point here is teach a kind of character education that encourages Amber to serve others because it will help others and not simply as a means to an end to benefit her own status.

Here is an invaluable chart that Alfie Kohn offers from his book Unconditional Parenting:

If the idea of removing praise from your interactions with children bothers you, I invite you to think about two things.

Firstly cognitive dissonance, an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously, is never convenient.

Secondly, when asked to rethink some of your most cherished pedagogical practices, consider what Mark Twain was on to when he said:

It ain't what we don't know that get's us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

For a deeper understanding of the pitfalls of praise:

Pondering Praise

Five reasons to stop saying 'good job'

Kids need our presence not our praise

Reward and Punishment vs Information