“Psychologists believe that our ability to read others supports one of our primary drives as human beings, the drive to relate to others and form social bonds,” notes Gehlbach, an educational psychologist who is looking at ways to improve teaching and learning by enhancing SPT in the classroom.

In addition to suggesting that students who are more motivated and accurate in their social perspective taking also tend to get higher grades, Gehlbach’s research has outlined ways in which SPT is critical for a variety of stakeholders in education.

“Principals constantly need to read and respond to the needs of students, parents, and teachers and resolve issues in ways that are effective and equitable,” Gehlbach says. “Teachers have to figure out each day whether that student in the third row understands what’s being taught, and students need to be accurate in their assessment of teachers’ expectations and the perspectives of their classmates.”

The last point is especially important, Gehlbach says, in an era when globalization has made it much more likely that students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds will be learning together. “We need to help students comprehend their classmates’ values, perspectives, and motivations so they can learn from each other as well as from their teachers.”

To develop ways to help students and teachers hone their perspective-taking, Gehlbach decided it was necessary first to more fully understand the underlying process. In research due to be published early next year, Gehlbach, doctoral student Maureen Brinkworth, Ed.M.’06, and Ming-Te Wang, Ed.M.’06, Ed.D.’10,  looked closely at how SPT actually happens. The studies yielded some important clues about what motivates individuals to take the perspectives of others, the strategies used by “expert” perspective takers,  and the sources of evidence that inform perspective takers’ conclusions.

Choosing to Empathize

What motivates us to take the perspectives of others? “We are exposed to dozens of people every day — in the grocery check-out line, during our commute to work or school, or sitting in a restaurant — yet we are very selective about those with whom we empathize,” Gehlbach observes. To uncover motivational factors in SPT, Gehlbach and his colleagues compared two groups of participants: a sample of 18 adults from professions such as teaching, psychotherapy, and military intelligence, who were identified by peers as experts at social perspective taking; and a group of 13 high school students nominated by their teachers and administrators and chosen because of their apparent struggles with SPT.

All participants completed a survey, viewed a video, and answered related questions during in-depth interviews designed to uncover triggers and barriers to SPT. One key finding was that if a person or situation is important to us, we are much more likely to engage in SPT. “For example,” Gehlbach explains, “a border crossing guard who is trying to identify someone who might be a threat, or [a] detective questioning a high-stakes suspect, is very motivated to take that person’s perspective to try to figure out what they might be thinking.”

In less dramatic circumstances, a high-stakes person might be a family member, teacher, or student whose opinions and actions matter to us. “Students who want to do well in school have a high interest in teachers’ expectations, and adolescents, in general, are very interested in how they are viewed by their peers,” he notes. “It’s how we develop a sense of ourselves during a critical time in our lives.”

A more unexpected finding, says Gehlbach, is the extent to which the role individuals take on in a given situation determines whether or not they engage in SPT.  “One member of the Army that we interviewed was highly motivated to engage in SPT when he was in his role as an interrogator.  However, when he was in his role as the disciplinarian of his unit, he was completely uninterested in the perspective of soldiers who had broken rules,” says Gelbach.  “A teacher who views his or her job as solely to deliver content might not try to figure out what’s going on with a student who pays attention on Monday but acts out on Wednesday.

“That kind of teacher might see perspective taking as the job of a school counselor,” continues Gehlbach, “but what is interesting to consider, especially for those of us who want to enhance SPT in educational settings, is the possibility that one’s role can be changed.”

If teachers who focus primarily on delivering content can be convinced that having a better understanding of their students’ perspectives will increase their success, Gehlbach says, “they may shift their strategy to include a greater emphasis on SPT.”

Strategies and Cues

When it comes to strategies that facilitate social perspective taking, the old standby of putting oneself in another’s shoes is commonly used, but it is by no means foolproof. “That can be risky,” Gehlbach says, “because you can impose your personal values and background on someone who might not share those at all.”

A more sophisticated strategy that emerged in the study was the practice of delaying judgments about others until ample information is available. “This was a technique the counseling psychologists often used,” Gehlbach relates, “along with volunteering information about themselves in order to draw out the perceptions of their clients.”

In looking at the sources of evidence used to discern the thoughts and feelings of others, in-depth interviews with participants revealed 12 different cues, including facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and postures.

“One data point that was a little less intuitive,” Gehlbach says, “was the lack of expected reactions.” In one of the videos used in the study, when a joke was told and did not elicit laughter, viewers concluded that the person listening didn’t understand what was going on. “They began to read something into that,” he reports. “It seems that unexpected responses are a pretty strong cue in social perspective taking.”

Triggers and Barriers

Gehlbach’s soon-to-be-published research offers numerous insights on the triggers and barriers that influence social perspective taking in the classroom. “Cognitive load is one frequently cited example of a barrier,” he relates. “If a teacher is focused on taking attendance, starting a lesson, catching up a student who was absent yesterday, and scheduling a principal’s observation, taking the perspective of 25 students in a given class is very difficult.” On the other hand, Gehlbach says relationship goals, “such as when a student engages with a new classmate to get to know him or her better,” promote SPT and could be used to facilitate peer learning in the classroom.

One of the biggest surprises in the study was the extent to which the “expert” participants and the student SPT novices fared similarly across a spectrum of measures. “I think that’s indicative of the complexity of the process,” Gehlbach comments. “Even those who struggle with SPT strategies and skills can go a long way just on motivation. It’s a great platform to build on as we begin to develop approaches to teach SPT in school settings.

Ho’s present research highlights contrasts between current approaches to measuring student and school proficiency and proposes alternative metrics that address some of the problems that have emerged in standardized testing since the 2001 enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In December, at the time of the following conversation, Ho was scheduled to brief congressional staffers about a recent Department of Education report on so-called “growth models,” an increasingly popular approach to school accountability that tracks students over time. Ho was the lead psychometrician on the report.

What do you see as some of the key problems with the way students’ progress is measured now?
Strictly speaking, No Child Left Behind doesn’t track student progress at all. The original act held schools accountable to minimum percentages of proficient students, as measured by scores on standardized tests, with the threat of sanctions, including school closure, if they failed. Student progress over time was not a factor; the only thing that mattered was whether a student was proficient or not. A big problem that emerged was that the distribution of incentives in this proficiency model was not uniform.

What do you mean by that?
So, say the cut score — the score that indicates proficiency on a test — is 30 out of 50. Teachers who have the responsibility to maximize the number of students who score at least 30 ― especially in districts with limited resources ― may have a very tough decision to make. Where might they concentrate their efforts?

Probably on the students who are just below that 30 mark?
Exactly. That’s the so-called “bubble hypothesis,” which has been used to explain disproportionate gains we’ve seen by students who are near the center of the distribution. The proficiency cut score has acted as a kind of lens to focus incentives and accountability on just one segment of students.

Was NCLB designed to work that way?
Psychometricians deal a lot in unintended consequences and hidden dependencies. I’d say this is an unintended consequence that was deeply embedded in the proficiency model that came out in 2001.

Who suffers the most under this model?
We’re not giving credit where credit is due. Schools that are doing heroic work bringing students with extremely low scores up to a point that may be just below proficiency get no credit for that, and may, in fact, face serious sanctions despite the progress they are making with kids who are the most at risk. On the other end of the spectrum, students who are high achieving one year can slip drastically, and the system does nothing to flag that decline as long as they stay above the cut score.

And your research is on alternatives to the proficiency model?
Yes. One compelling feature of the growth models we’re looking at as an alternative is an allowance for more realistic expectations for lower-scoring students. If you look at the distance some of these students have to travel to reach proficiency, the requirement for them to get there in just one year is more of a deterrent to effort than an inspiration. It can also lead to undesired responses by teachers who may be tempted to think of them as lost causes. Our research looks at alternatives that not only give credit where it’s due, but also set ambitious yet realistic expectations for our most disadvantaged students.

How would you respond to critics who may say you are letting schools off the hook if you change the requirements?
The changes would actually let us be more accurate about detecting which schools are achieving increases in learning and achievement. While it’s true that some schools now classified as failing would be classified as making “adequate yearly progress,” I would argue that they are making adequate yearly progress if their students are well on track to proficiency. We have a fundamental validity problem; the model we have now is very insensitive.

How would you go about making the model more sensitive?
We look for evidence that a student will achieve a high standard in the near future.
The idea is to measure what schools are actually set up to do — teach and change students over time — as opposed to taking a snapshot of a student at a particular time and counting only that. We’re moving away from snapshot models to measuring trajectories.

Would what you are talking about require changing the composition of tests or just the evaluation of results?
Good question. Some states have tried taking the numbers from the “snapshot” tests and extending them beyond what they were designed to do. That’s not recommended, though, because it usually results in unsupported inferences.

Many states are using tests that are arguably more sensitive to growth and change over time. These include Massachusetts and Iowa, where the movement away from the proficiency model has had some traction. There is work on alternative tests, supplemental tests, and new ways of scaling tests. One proposal involves “through-course assessments,” shorter, more frequent tests that allow for even more nuanced growth interpretations. As you might imagine, those are more formative assessments that may supplement or even replace yearly summative assessments.

What are some of the challenges you face in helping to translate this kind of research into policy?
People often talk about the dissemination of research, but John Easton, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, prefers the word “facilitation,” which connotes more than just publishing a paper and throwing it to the wind. That distinction is so important in a field that produces statistics which are used — and often misused — in sound bites and headlines about school and teacher quality.

Direct, clear communication with policymakers around these issues is critical. For example, when I speak to [Congressional] staffers later this winter, one of the points I will make is that the on-track designations and growth models we are starting to see differ dramatically across states. The contrasts are stark, and our research has clearly identified the tradeoffs. Developing a precise, common understanding of growth models at this juncture will help us avoid the kinds of unintended consequences and cross-state dependencies that developed under the proficiency model. It’s a time when psychometric research can really influence the outcome.

“Many multicultural students experience intense culture shock when they come to college,” observes HGSE lecturer Josephine Kim, a National Certified Counselor whose research and clinical experience with multicultural populations span residential facilities, community agencies, and public and private schools. “The adjustment challenges for young people who have been raised in the U.S. by immigrant parents can be complex and multifaceted.”

Since the spring 2007 slayings at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were killed by a troubled Korean-American student, Kim has been working to raise awareness of mental health issues that affect Korean-American students. As an emergency outreach counselor immediately following the tragic event — and in her subsequent role as founding executive director of Mustard Seed Generation, a nonprofit organization with a mission of encouraging Korean American youth to develop all aspects of a healthy identity — Kim has addressed an array of mental health issues in the Korean American community, including suicidal tendencies, depression, anxiety, perfectionism, low self-esteem, body image issues, substance abuse, and identity confusion.

Many of these problems arise from intercultural and intergenerational conflicts among Korean Americans, says Kim, a Korean American who spent parts of her own childhood in both Korea and the United States. Her research examines inherent differences between western and Asian cultures and seeks to establish “scaffolding” for understanding the internal conflicts that can happen when disparate cultures merge. “Whether you are a parent or a child, when you are immersed in a culture, you don’t always understand the external factors that influence how you feel,” she explains. An example might be the parents who raise their children according to Korean traditions only to see them behave according to American mores as they mature. “In American schools, children are taught to think critically and to articulate their opinions. The parent may see that behavior as rebellious and disrespectful,” Kim notes, “but the fact is, their children have become Americanized.”

Some Korean Americans grow up denying their Korean heritage in order to fit in, only to become drawn into activities and organizations that emphasize that heritage when they arrive at college. “A lot of students are confused about themselves at that point,” Kim says. “They don’t understand why they hated their ethnic identity before and now find themselves completely immersed in it.” That confusion, coupled with parents’ high expectations for success in school and careers, the frustration of having white peers constantly question their “American-ness,” as well as body image and other concerns that are common to all teens are among the factors that put Korean American students at risk for a growing list of emotional and psychological issues.

Finding ways to address those problems is a tough challenge in a culture that traditionally has been reluctant to seek mental health care. “The stigma many Korean Americans attach to psychological and emotional problems prevents them from seeking help, namely counseling,” Kim notes. “Too often, the solution has been to put on a brave face and try to ignore the problems or to mask them in unhealthy ways.”

Since the majority of Korean Americans have a close affiliation with Christian churches, Kim’s faith-based Mustard Seed Generation organization (the name taken from a biblical reference, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed…”) works with churches to present counseling in a positive light. In conferences both in Korea and the United States – including one held this August in Gaithersburg, Md., aimed at Korean American youths, college students, youth leaders, and church leaders — Kim and her colleagues offer a changing slate of educational colloquiums, spiritual worship sessions, and group counseling sessions that zero in on the societal and familial realities that Korean Americans face and the role that counseling can play in fostering healthy social, emotional, and psychological development.

The group counseling sessions are mandatory. “Since counseling is embedded in the curriculum and everyone takes part in it, the stigma is removed,” Kim explains. In counseling, participants have a chance to deeply explore their own perceptions and cultural identities. Church leaders, who often are on the front lines when family crises hit, come away with concrete skills and tools for serving as liaisons between families and the mental health community. Students develop a better grasp of the professional resources that are available to them when problems arise and hopefully become less reluctant to take advantage of those resources.

“Students have told me they had no idea their internal conflicts or difficulties with their parents were part of a cultural experience,” Kim reports. “Discovering that the issues they’ve been grappling with are really part of a larger context of immigrant life can be transformational. It takes away the shame they associate with having personal problems and makes them something that can be talked about more openly.”

The courses Kim teaches at the Ed School, Preventive and Developmental Group Counseling and Issues of Diversity in Cross-Cultural Counseling and Advocacy, both draw on and enrich her community outreach work. More than 30 Korean and Korean American students at HGSE have participated as counselors or presenters at Mustard Seed conferences and conducted independent studies under her supervision in the past three years. Some of the topics they have examined include the identity development and mental health of Asian American college students; intergenerational conflicts between immigrant parents and their Americanized children; depression and suicide among Korean Americans, with a focus on help-seeking behaviors and the consequences of not seeking help.

Looking ahead, Kim, who has conducted numerous seminars on east-west cultural differences for teachers and administrators and lectured widely on the topic in the U.S., Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Mongolia, and the Philippines, says the areas of multiculturalism and diversity acceptance are ripe for further research. While she will broaden the focus of her outreach to other ethnic cultures in the future, for now there is urgency for her work within the Korean American community.

“As horrible as it was, the tragedy at Virginia Tech was a catalyst for change,” she says. “It has given us a chance to openly talk about mental health issues in a community where that topic has been off-limits. It opened the door to changing perceptions among Korean Americans in a way that will benefit students and parents alike. We need to take full advantage of that opportunity now.”

Assistant Professor Stephanie Jones and her colleagues Larry Aber and Joshua Brown from New York University and Fordham University are looking at how classrooms can be used as settings for positive youth development. One of the programs that they have examined closely is the Reading, Writing, Respect, and Resolution (4Rs) Program, developed by the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. This curriculum is based on a philosophy that the best ways to have students internalize positive social and emotional behaviors are to have them learn in settings where social and emotional skills are directly taught, and where teachers routinely model and explicitly demonstrate positive behavior themselves.

The 4Rs Program embeds direct instruction in conflict resolution within lessons that meet academic requirements in language arts. Educators use high-quality children’s books as a springboard for discussion, role play, and other interactive activities in seven areas: building community, feelings, listening, assertiveness, problem solving, diversity, and cooperation. In addition to a manualized curriculum, teachers receive training and ongoing coaching and support from program staff developers on implementing the 4Rs’ curriculum throughout the school year.

Recognizing the stress associated with being an educator, particularly in the New York City public school system, the 4Rs Program provides opportunities for teachers to learn and practice conflict resolution skills themselves. When teachers demonstrate positive social and emotional behaviors, students may adopt those behaviors as well. For example, when teachers make direct eye contact with students, and paraphrase and acknowledge comprehension of the students’ messages, students have a model of good listening skills. Further, by engaging in more positive interactions, stronger teacher-student relationships may develop, yielding positive effects in the broader classroom climate. These program features may contribute to its overall effectiveness.

Jones and her colleagues have begun to measure the effects of the 4Rs Program on children in eighteen New York City public elementary schools, nine that were randomly assigned to receive the school-wide program and nine randomly assigned to a comparison (“business as usual”) condition. The results are now available from the first two years of the study.

At the end of the first school year, independent observers — researchers not aware of whether the school was participating in 4Rs — rated the quality of classroom climate in all third-grade classrooms in the 18 schools using a research-based assessment called the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). In previous research, higher levels on the CLASS — which measures emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support — have been linked to children’s positive social-emotional development and higher academic achievement. Compared with classrooms in control schools, classrooms using the 4Rs Program were rated as having significantly higher average levels of overall classroom quality and emotional and instructional support from their teachers.

Teachers also reported on students’ social and emotional skills. Over the program’s first two years, when compared with those in the control schools, children in 4Rs schools showed lower rates of depression; lower tendencies to assume hostile intent from others in ambiguous social conflict situations; declines in problems with attention; increases in social competence; and significantly slower growth in aggression.

The 4Rs Program also appears to be having a positive impact on the academic achievement of students who began with the highest levels of aggressive behavior. After one year of participation in the program, these children had better attendance than similar high-risk students in the control schools. After two years, these high-risk students exposed to the 4Rs scored significantly higher on standardized reading and math achievement tests compared with similarly high-risk peers in the control schools.

Taken together, the findings to date suggest that the 4Rs Program is an effective school-based approach to promoting social-emotional learning among elementary school students. Further, academic benefits are emerging, at least among students initially exhibiting the most aggressive behaviors. Jones and her colleagues will continue to track the impacts of the 4Rs Program through ninth grade. Their results will help to identify whether the approach that this program takes continues to facilitate students’ development of skills for positive social interaction and school success.

For more information, visit www.morningsidecenter.org.

The 4Rs Research Project was part of a national study of social and character development programs, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the federal Centers for Disease Control, and the William T. Grant Foundation. The follow-up study, through grade nine, is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

With the assistance of doctoral student Leslie Boozer, Ed.M.’07, Jackson investigated the sources of student improvement in relation to effective teaching methods. They interviewed leaders from eight districts and two education agencies from across the country that had all shown significant progress in math and reading scores. The districts comprised a diverse group, ranging from large urban to smaller suburban systems.

How Districts Were Chosen

In choosing the districts for her research, Jackson first turned to the Council for Great City Schools’ 2007 report Beating the Odds, which provided her with a list of urban districts throughout the country that showed promise in improving student achievement. She then consulted the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and chose an additional five districts that had been successful in improving math scores at the third and eighth grade levels. Jackson says that selecting districts based solely on test scores wasn’t her preferred method, but it was the quick way to get a conversation started for a small, first cut of the study.

From this pool of prospective sources, Jackson then contacted each district’s chief academic officer or their assistant superintendent responsible for instruction. She then narrowed the group of respondents to those who had a clearly defined sense of what effective teaching was within their individual districts.

The Interview

Jackson and Boozer conducted extensive interviews with each of the district leaders, starting with the following questions:

• How has your district defined effective teaching, and how did you reach that definition?
• How did you assess where teachers were currently, and how did you determine where you wanted them to be?
• What resources did you use when researching instruction and learning? Whose work/research did you look at?
• What effective practices did you adopt?
• How did you implement the changes in effective teaching?
• What accountability measures were tied to the effective teaching elements?

The Results

Jackson and Boozer are just beginning to examine the data from the interviews. However, they have discovered a number of trends that appeared across the districts.

“For most of the school systems this was a multiple-year project,” says Jackson, “part of a comprehensive reform process. The prime mover for the work — the chief academic officer or the superintendent — had a clear vision and a sense of purpose. They took the time to actually define effective teaching, and what that practice should look like within the district.”

In the districts studied, the district leader’s defined plan encompassed all of the schools within the system, but with the realization that it was going to look a little different at each one. Several of the districts had varying socio-economic classes, with some schools that had no need for subsidized lunches, and others in which all of the children were getting their meals for free or at a reduced price. Despite the students’ different backgrounds, the district included teaching methods that were effective for every child, including those in special education and also English language learners.

Another common characteristic of these successful districts was that everyone – from all levels of the school systems – were encouraged to think about their roles in relationship to what went on in the classroom, and what effect they each may have on the teaching and learning process. This included the central office administrators, office personnel, food-service workers, and bus drivers as well as teachers and administrators.

To evaluate a teacher’s effectiveness, Jackson and Boozer found that the districts had developed a variety of tools, some of which were tied to student growth, and others consisting of multiple dimensions. For example, teams from the central office and the school would go in and visit classrooms on a regular basis, rather than just the usual one or two classroom visits per year. Some districts videotaped a teacher, and then everyone involved sat down to review the tape and critique what was strong about the teaching methods, and identify where could there be improvement. The districts often partnered with their teachers union or association in creating their evaluation methods.

Several districts, as part of their long-term plans, are considering tying student growth measures to incentives such as offering extra pay, sending teachers to special professional development opportunities, giving them lead teacher positions, or giving bonuses to a successful school. However, Jackson learned that although there was a need for incentives to shift behaviors, a monetary reward wasn’t the only source of motivation. “Being treated with respect and as a professional was essential,” she explains. “The people involved in a successful teaching program were very proud of their work, and came up with a product that they defined and shared with others within their district.”

“Quite a few of the districts did not give any extra pay to have teachers and principals involved in this process,” adds Boozer. ”But they were honored that their practices were considered high caliber.”

The process itself was often very detailed and continually evolving, with constant feedback between the participants to truly understand what was being communicated. “Teachers were eager to share what they did,” says Jackson, “and volunteered a great deal of their time, working collaboratively to help other teachers build their toolkits, so they had multiple ways to present material.” All of the districts used research, but customized it to what worked in their own contexts, by connecting it to what their teachers already knew, then moving to integrate it into their plans.

Jackson and Boozer hope that the results of this research, which will go to the Wallace Foundation to share with schools across the country, will provide guidance to other district leaders as they work to raise student achievement.

“Teaching is essentially an autonomous profession,” observes HGSE Associate Professor Monica Higgins. “It’s a culture where individual expertise and independence are rewarded. When you close the door to the classroom, you need to be in charge.” Since joining the HGSE faculty in 2007, Higgins, whose research focuses on leadership development and change in organizations, has been helping education administrators find new ways to address challenges outside the classroom, in situations where being “in charge” may not always be the best approach.

“In interactions where they have to exercise influence without having formal authority, educators need to have excellent teamwork skills,” says Higgins, who spent eleven years as a member of the Harvard Business School faculty before coming to HGSE. “Finding solutions to many of the issues school systems face today—shrinking budgets, outmoded facilities, underperformance—requires buy-in from multiple constituencies.”

Collaborative leadership

Most recently, Higgins has been studying the effectiveness of senior leadership teams from large urban school districts across the United States. “Almost as soon as I arrived here, I was invited to teach a session on team building in an executive education program for school superintendents,” she notes. The session was enthusiastically received, and since then Higgins has been working regularly with groups on team building and collaboration. Many of her engagements take place as part of two HGSE-based outreach programs, the Executive Leadership Program for Educators (ExEl) and the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP).

Higgins has been struck by the prevalence of the expert-based model of leadership among educators and administrators. The author of Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across an Industry (2005), which highlights the influence of early career experiences on the leadership styles of executives in the biotech industry, Higgins sees some parallels in the field of education. “Early professional experiences can have a powerful effect,” she explains. “In education, where professionals begin their careers in the classroom, expertise is highly valued and rewarded. Yet, when school leaders need to work with parents, community leaders, or administrators from other districts, being an expert might not be as effective as being able to listen and learn from another person’s point of view, or to question one’s own assumptions.” Currently she is studying how senior leadership teams function in order to help them begin to move toward a more collaborative model.

Creating effective teams

Utilizing assessment measures developed by Harvard psychology professor Richard Hackman, Higgins has been gathering data on how the senior leadership teams in programs such as PELP work together: the extent to which they feel they are a “real team,” whether they believe they share a common vision, and how firmly they are committed to working together. She also asks for information about team effectiveness and outcome variables. “The questions are set up so we can compare how the senior leadership teams in education rate themselves vs. teams from other fields that have taken this survey in the past,” Higgins explains.

One important contributor to effective teams is the availability of coaching, an area where the survey results point out distinct differences between the PELP teams and teams in other professions. “These teams have some deficits when it comes to coaching,” Higgins relates. “In terms of the availability of coaching and the quality of coaching directed at reinforcing good behavior, improving interpersonal relations, and improving work processes, the PELP teams rate themselves less highly than leaders in other fields.” What does that reveal about the nature of these teams? “I really do think it has something to do with the way we’re brought up as educators,” Higgins ventures. “We’re trained to critique; we’re supposed to have the answer. That’s a very different model than professions where people don’t always have the answer and need to reinforce others’ positive contributions.”

Creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking

Another aspect of Higgins’s work focuses on helping education administrators create environments that are “psychologically safe” for creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking. “That term comes from Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, who studies ways to encourage entrepreneurial thinking in business organizations,” she notes. “It’s equally relevant in public education, where we urgently need to find ways to support creative approaches to entrenched problems.”

By asking the teams of public school principals to assess how well their organizations learn, Higgins is beginning to identify some of the barriers to entrepreneurial thinking in educational settings. “The ideal is that you want an environment where people can put forth new ideas, ask for help, and question the status quo—while still being accountable for reaching challenging goals,” Higgins says. “Our preliminary data show that while there is a fair amount of experimentation in these organizations, there is relatively little evaluation of the outcomes, questioning of underlying assumptions, or after-action reviews. In short, they aren’t learning as much as they should from testing new ideas.

“My sense,” continues Higgins, “is that this could be linked to the current emphasis in our public schools on accountability and results. People do not feel psychologically safe, they’re anxious, and that keeps them from probing deeply into what works and what doesn’t.” A significant challenge for school leaders, Higgins believes, is to cultivate an atmosphere where testing—and sometimes invalidating—innovative ideas is an accepted part of the creative process.

Entrepreneurial leadership

Higgins is pursuing the theme of entrepreneurial leadership in her work with students at HGSE, where she teaches a course called Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Learning. “It’s been very encouraging to see such a high level of interest in creative leadership and entrepreneurship among students here,” she notes, mentioning the activities of the Bridge Group, through which more than 150 students have demonstrated an interest in developing entrepreneurial initiatives in education.

“I think what’s happening is that the next generation of educators is embracing the notion that to do well in their careers, they need not only strong capabilities in instructional practice, but also the capacity and confidence to engage with others in productive collaborations,” Higgins ventures. “The ability to approach challenges that way is an essential element of strong leadership, especially in a field where the stakes and hurdles are as high as they are in education today.”

What is the “knowing-doing gap”?

Lahey: Ever tried to make a change you want to make, but you still can’t do it? That’s a version of the knowing-doing gap. Most school principals, for example, know they need to reconstruct their work roles from being “plant managers” to “leaders of instructional improvement,” and, in our experience, most of them want to, too. But they find it is hard for them to actually do it. And this is true in every profession we work with, in public and private sectors, in the US and abroad…. They sincerely want to make the change, but, too often, they cannot. And, of course, this is as true in our private lives as our work lives: A recent study from medicine showed that even when a heart doctor’s patients know it will literally kill them if they don’t change personal habits around diet, smoking, and exercise, only 1 in 7 can actually do it.

So the gap must not be about motivation.

Kegan: Well, it is hard to change if you are not motivated; but, yes, motivation alone is often not enough. Lots of people say the secret is to create a sense of urgency, but things couldn’t be much more urgent than your impending death, and that alone is clearly not enough.

But Immunity to Change is an optimistic book.

L: We have been working on how to close this gap for 20 years and I think we are getting somewhere. Most intentional efforts to change or improve take what we call “the New Year’s resolutions approach” or “the dieter’s approach.” You have a clear goal — lose 10 pounds. You are aware of the behaviors that get in the way of your goal — you eat too many calories, or carbs, or fat, or whatever. You sincerely resolve to mend your ways. You even come up with a strategy or plan for changing these behaviors — the diet!

But it doesn’t work.

K: Actually, it works pretty well for awhile. It’s like Mark Twain said, “I don’t know why people say it is so hard to quit smoking; I’ve done it hundreds of times myself.” You do lose weight on a diet — and then you regain it. One study showed the average dieter regains 107 percent of the weight they take off.

L: And trying to “diet” our way to school improvement, or other, more personal goals, often runs a similar course. Temporary success, followed by a return to the status quo, or worse.

So what is your alternative?

K: We take quite a different view of these so-called problematic behaviors like overeating, or not getting out of your office and into classrooms. We don’t look at them as undisciplined sides of ourselves or things we have to fight and defeat. To us, they are like breadcrumbs, and we follow their trail until they lead us back to a whole other set of “hidden commitments” which most of us are not aware we also hold, along with the “visible commitments” like becoming an instructional leader or losing 10 pounds.

Such as?

L: We ask the school principals, “What would your biggest worry be if you were in your office less and in classrooms more?” One says, “I worry that people will no longer feel I am available.” Another might say, “I worry that I am not going to like what I see, about the difficult conversations I don’t want to have, about disturbing a comfortable and collegial professional culture around here.” We have even heard people say, “I worry the math and science teachers will discover I don’t know their subjects well enough to be of much help if I do observe.”

K: We then invite people to consider that they do not just have these perfectly reasonable worries. They are also actively, and successfully — even brilliantly — spending their energies to prevent the thing they are worrying about from happening! That’s perfectly understandable.

L: These are their “hidden commitments.” So, in addition to the commitment to be in classrooms more, and be more of an instructional leader, one principal may also have a commitment (without realizing it) to be known to the teachers as a principal who is available to them 24/7, or to not finding out about things I don’t want to have to deal with, or even to not having my teachers discover I know nothing about high school math.

K: And so long as we are not looking at our hidden commitments we will believe we can “resolve” and “diet” our way out of our obstructive behaviors. But those behaviors are serving a very important purpose!

They are helping us fulfill our hidden commitments!

L: Exactly! They are not really “weaknesses,” the way we often see them. They are brilliant behaviors, just exactly what you should be doing, in order to fulfill the hidden commitments — but these behaviors will also make it impossible to fulfill the visible goals. It is this combo of commitments that creates a single, powerful system — one foot on the gas pedal (the improvement goal) and one foot on the brakes (the hidden commitment). So the car doesn’t go anywhere.

In the book, you call it an “immune system.” Why?

K: To make clear from the start the thing we are helping you to see is not a disease, not a bad thing. It is keeping you from making the change you want to make, but not because there is anything wrong with you.

L: An immune system has one purpose: to take care of you, to save your life. It is only trying to protect you. Sometimes our immune systems will get us in trouble, by the way they reject new material the system needs to take in — but, even then, the system is acting in an effort to take care of you. It is just mistaken.

You say in the book that groups, not just individuals, also have immune systems. Can you give an example from the world of education?

L: We worked with the leadership team of a California school district serving kids from low-income families. The student body is 80 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Anglo; the administrative team is just the opposite. Their unaccomplished goal is to hold their kids — especially their English-language learners — to higher expectations. Try as they might, they couldn’t get the system to succeed at this goal. But they felt they got to a whole new place and turned a corner when they came to see they had a hidden commitment to what they called “a povrecito culture,” a culture that took pity on these “poor little ones” by not heaping upon them the further “burden” of high academic expectations. The big insight, as one of them put it, was seeing “that we could sell our kids short, not out of disrespect for them, but out of our love for them. That was a big eye-opener!”

Once people see their immune system how do they unlock it?

K: Our immune systems are founded on certain core beliefs which need to be examined. We call these our “big assumptions.” They are “big” because we are currently taking them as certain truths, not just assumptions, which may or may not be true.

Our approach invites people to shift to an inquiring stance toward their big assumptions. They begin to run experiments of increasing size to see whether they should continue to hold their assumption exactly as they have, or whether it needs to come in for some modification. Even small modifications in the big assumptions can lead to very big changes along the lines of one’s original goal.

The book has lots of examples of the changes you see people making ac
ross a wide range of professions, roles, and improvement goals. Where are you going with the work at the moment?

K: We are trying to learn more about the most powerful conditions for taking up this work, and the most promising challenges to deploy it against.

L: So an example of the first is that we are exploring the benefits of people engaging in this work within real, intact, ongoing work-teams, where each person’s progress means a lot to the others in the group, and where they can hold each other accountable and celebrate the value of the changes that do occur.

K: And an example of the second is in the healthcare sector. Right now we are researching whether our approach might be helpful to an enormous national health problem, “patient nonadherence.” Huge numbers of people who are prescribed maintenance medications they should take daily for the rest of their lives do not take their meds. They know they should; they know it could kill them if they don’t; they are having no bad side-effects or cost issues, they just ‘forget’ or, ‘for some reason, just don’t.’ There are almost certainly “immunities to change” here that healthcare people don’t know enough about.

Since this interview, CVS Pharmacies released an overview of the initial stage of the Kegan-Lahey research on “why people don’t take their medications.” Go to www.mindsatwork.com for further information.

Judicial involvement in American education has grown in the past 50 years. Why?

Well, the first thing to note is that education was not alone in experiencing more court oversight during this period. The judiciary’s role in social policymaking expanded broadly with the rights revolution of the 1960s, as the public’s thirst for “total justice” combined with the courts’ willingness to embrace new legal doctrines, increasingly long and complicated federal statutes, and the emergence of well-funded advocacy organizations to generate a surge of litigation across policy areas. Federal courts came to supervise many core functions of state and local government: police, prisons, and mental hospitals, for example, in addition to schools.

In the case of education, these factors coincided with a growing ferment over the performance of the nation’s schools and an urgent, at times seemingly frenetic, search for solutions. Competing reform movements based in universities, foundations, and civil rights organizations advanced proposals for more spending, greater accountability, and expanded parental choice, to mention only the most prominent. These efforts invariably provided occasion for litigation and sometimes, as in the case of school finance reform, worked primarily through it.

The increased federal role in education also played a big role. As Congress imposed new obligations on states and school districts, conflict arose over their performance of those duties. In fact, Congress often invited litigation by creating “private rights of action” that empower individuals to file suit if they dislike how a statute is being enforced. And in areas in which the federal government lacked either the license or capacity to shape local policy directly, executive branch officials used federally sponsored litigation as a tool to advance reform.

What are some of the consequences of education litigation?

That’s a hard question to answer in general terms. The courts have obviously articulated important principles – most notably in Brown v. Board of Education – that have played a constructive role not only in American education but in American society writ large. Yet it is equally clear that education litigation has often failed to achieve its goals. Indeed, the judiciary’s attempt to desegregate public education has become perhaps the leading example for scholars asserting the limits of court-led reform. And all too often judicial interventions in education policymaking seem to have produced unintended consequences.

The issue of school discipline, which [NYU Professor] Richard Arum and [doctoral student] Doreet Preiss examine in our book [in the chapter, "Still Judging School Discipline"], is a good example. The Supreme Court, between 1969 and 1975, issued a series of decisions expanding students’ rights to free expression and due process in discipline cases. These decisions undoubtedly increased opportunities for student dissent and provided protections against unfair punishment. Yet they also led school districts to abandon disciplinary practices that relied on educator judgment and to adopt heavily bureaucratic procedures and zero-tolerance policies that arguably undermine the authority of school officials and make it more difficult for them to maintain order.

In recent years courts have grown much more likely to defer to the decisions of school officials in cases involving school discipline, but the volume of such cases has continued to increase. And Arum and Preiss show that both teachers and students believe that students have much more expansive legal rights than is actually the case. It is no surprise, then, that a national survey conducted in 2004 by Public Agenda found that 82 percent of public school teachers and 77 percent of principals practiced “defensive teaching” in order “to avoid legal challenges.”

Is education litigation still on the rise?

The average number of education cases decided each year in state and federal courts has remained fairly stable at almost 7,000 since the 1970s – up from around 1,500 per year in the 1940s. But the overall volume of litigation or the volume in a particular policy area can be a misleading indicator of judicial influence. Where the courts establish clear and enforceable standards, the number of cases filed will fall as compliance increases. And if legislatures or agencies incorporate judicial standards into laws and regulations, the role of the courts will be camouflaged.

That said, our research did identify several policy areas where courts seem to be taking a more hands-off approach. It is well known that federal courts since the 1990s have been withdrawing from active involvement in school desegregation. While the judiciary helped to shape federal special education laws, it now plays a surprisingly limited role in their implementation – in part because of the development of quasi-judicial administrative procedures to channel disputes. In the past few years, state courts have also become much less willing to enter into ongoing supervision of school finance systems.

But this does not mean that the volume or importance of education litigation will decline. In areas such as school choice, student speech, and school discipline, courts are being called upon to resolve controversies at an increasing rate. These areas are distinguished by the combination of ambiguous legal doctrine and constituencies eager to exploit that ambiguity to pursue policy objectives. For example, despite the Supreme Court’s 2002 Zelman decision upholding school voucher programs involving religious schools, my own chapter in the book [ "School Choice Litigation after Zelman"] shows how ongoing litigation in state courts continues to shape the development of programs providing school choice in both the private and public sectors.

What advice does the book offer for policymakers working within the current legal environment?

Perhaps the most concrete advice comes from [American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess, Ed.M.'90] and [North Carolina State University's] Lance Fusarelli, who studied how (often exaggerated) legal concerns affect the behavior of district superintendents. They argue that most superintendents by training and socialization seek to avoid conflict and that they have few professional incentives to defend school districts vigorously in court even when they are likely to succeed. They operate in “cages of their own design.” Superintendents from nontraditional backgrounds, however, appear more inclined to push legal boundaries to advance an agenda of reform. Rather than ask their legal teams whether a policy option is permitted, they incorporate lawyers into their planning process and ask them: How can we use the law to achieve our goals?

And while I’m reluctant to offer advice to judges, we do urge them to be cautious when wading into educational disputes. For example, they should consider whether im
plementable and effective remedies exist for alleged violations before launching far-reaching reforms. And when they do engage in education policymaking, they should articulate clear standards that minimize legal uncertainty and the need for additional litigation.

“The common assumption is that teens who dress in a certain way or act tough are in gangs or aspire to lives outside mainstream society,” notes Warikoo, a second generation Indian American who grew up in a working class town in Pennsylvania. “But when you talk with them, you discover that the way they dress or challenge authority in class often doesn’t mean that at all.” In fact, during her experience teaching the children of immigrants in New York City, Warikoo observed that “even my most difficult students, when I talked with them one-on-one, confessed sincere desires to straighten up, earn better grades, and finish school on time.”

To gain a better understanding of the meaning of second generation youth cultures in urban schools, Warikoo, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Harvard, spent a year studying two racially diverse high schools with low achievement profiles, one in Queens, New York, and one in London, both in working class neighborhoods. “I chose London because it lacks the racial residential segregation you see in large U.S. cities,” she explains. “The prevailing theory, which I didn’t believe, was that immigrant kids in the U.S. pick up oppositional attitudes from African American peers who are supposedly entrenched in an anti-school counterculture.”

Spending approximately six months in each school, Warikoo observed classes, walked the hallways, mingled with students in the cafeteria, and conducted extensive interviews with 120 students. Interviewees fell into four ethnic categories: U.S. and U.K.-born Afro-Caribbeans; U.S. and U.K.-born Indians; U.S.-born Indo-Caribbeans; and native whites in London. The latter group allowed her to determine which social processes are unique to second generation groups and which are common to urban youth in general.

Culture as Currency

Warikoo’s research indicated that a great deal of culture on both sides of the Atlantic is common to urban youth in general, regardless of where they or their parents were born. She reports that hip-hop culture has become “a global currency for status among urban youth.” The majority of her interviewees said they listened to well known, top-10 American hip-hop artists, while a smaller number favored hip-hop performers with messages more critical of mainstream society. Yet despite their music preferences and affectations, most of the students Warikoo interviewed had fairly traditional views of the link between academic achievement and success in later life. Even the minority who enjoyed rappers more critical of dominant society seemed less affected by their messages than their teachers or parents might think.

“Teen culture — how they dress and talk and the music they listen to — means a lot,” says Warikoo, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean what adults assume it does. I found no cause-and-effect connection between hip-hop culture and poor school performance or the propensity to believe that racial discrimination prevents academic success.” Instead, she determined that peer-driven culture, with its script for certain kinds of behavior, clothing tastes, music, and styles, allowed the students in her study to establish symbolic boundaries among ethnic and racial groups and to gain peer status. “It’s the same quest to establish identity that all teenagers engage in,” she notes, “but when you are a second-generation kid trying to find your place, dressing or acting in a way that makes your peers think you are strong, tough, or cool takes on heightened importance.”

Helping Students Find a Balance

Warikoo says that academic performance is at risk when students’ preoccupation with peer status sabotages their intentions to succeed at school. Educators and parents who are interested in helping students reach their long-term goals — staying in school and getting good jobs — need to help them get better at “code switching” as they navigate their way through daily social and academic challenges. “The way many educators approach peer culture is to tell kids to leave their culture outside the school door,” Warikoo notes. “First of all, that’s impossible, and second, what we really need to do is teach kids how to balance their goals of school success and fitting in with their friends.”

Warikoo says that students need the same tools that adults use to switch behavior “codes” when they find themselves in various social settings. “If you were interviewing for a job, you would act differently from the way you would on an evening out with friends,” Warikoo ventures. “Sociologists call it ‘cultural capital’: the unwritten ways of being that will get you ahead. For kids, it’s learning that the way you act with your peers probably won’t advance your cause when you interact with teachers.”

To help students stay on track in school, Warikoo suggests talking openly with them about strategies for managing conflicts. “Role play strategies for what to do when a disagreement with a teacher or classmate arises,” she urges. “Helping kids to anticipate difficult situations and to think in advance about responses that won’t compromise their goals can lead to much better outcomes.”

When it comes to avoiding conflicts — especially those with racial overtones — Warikoo found the size of the two schools she studied had a significant impact. Overcrowded and sprawling, the school in New York offered few opportunities for teachers and students to make meaningful connections or even for students to socialize with each other as they rushed between tightly scheduled classes. “Kids clung to their ethnic/racial identities because it was the only way to make sense of their environment,” says Warikoo. “When asked to describe school social groups, who is popular, who their friends are, and who they feel comfortable with, New Yorkers were much more likely to use race or ethnicity to draw boundaries of us and them.”

In contrast, the British school had a smaller enrollment, a homeroom system that grouped students together for multiple years, and regularly scheduled, schoolwide break times. “Kids defined their social groups by the interests they pursued at lunch and breaks — soccer [or] hanging out in the library, the computer room, or music room. They formed bonds based on interests rather than race or ethnicity alone. There’s been a lot of research to indicate that smaller schools lead to better academic outcomes,” she notes. “I think they also lead to better race relations.”

Warikoo also believes that integrating elements of youth culture into the curriculum can help kids navigate the disparate demands of school and peer society. Including rap lyrics in a unit on poetry, or graffiti as a jumping off point to talk about the history of art establishes a bridge between youth culture and academic pursuits. “If kids see their interests taken seriously in school,” Warikoo observes, “they, in turn, will be more serious in school.”