Welcome back, have a seat, and settle in. We hope you had a great holiday! This week, the C-Suite roundup takes a look at some of the people and science supporting the integration of noncognitive skills into broader education efforts.

Try: The Value of Failing

Do you believe that failure is not just instructive but healthy? Do your colleagues? Do your students? New research suggests that our understanding of failure – especially in schools – must expand beyond the idea that struggle is the key to success (which, while incorrect, is a common shorthand when discussing buzzy concepts like grit). When concepts related to noncognitive skills or executive function are misunderstood and misapplied, they fail to address the systemic obstacles that face people of color or individuals who live in poverty. That is, for some people, no amount of struggle is sufficient to overcome the hardships of life. However, this article suggests more nuance is appropriate when dealing with lessons about failure or what to do in the face of failure. Firstly, says researcher Xiaodong Lin-Siegler, the value of failure varies by tasks. Like self-efficacy beliefs, failure is context-specific. This is good news for content areas like STEM, which often “pushes out” interested students because they view failure as inherently bad or a signal that they lack the capacity for STEM-related tasks. Lin-Siegler acknowledge that any conversation around failure, from discussions of it to allowing failure to occur in safe and instructive ways, is a “hard sell”, she hopes that a broader understanding of failure and its benefits begins to permeate education. You might think about this in your own setting: are there ways in which you can structure conversations about failure so that students or colleagues learn from those experiences? In what ways does your organization’s structures prevent frank conversations about the value of failure?

Read: Expert Helps Educators Adjust Implicit Biases

Dr. Bentley Gibson has made a company and a career out of her interest in research-based approaches to implicit racial biases. Implicit biases are the “subconscious and unconscious prejudices and negative stereotypes that everyone has and often lead to inaccurate assumptions about and discriminatory treatment of other people”. Implicit biases are associated with individuals’ assumptions that Black men appear to hold weapons when they in fact hold hand tools or that male applicants are systematically rated as more qualified for lab positions than identical female candidates. Dr. Gibson’s company, The Bias Adjuster consultancy, offers a 10-week program in which participants take a self-assessment (you can take it here), acknowledge their own implicit biases, and begin to understand the consequences of biases in the world. Most of Dr. Gibson’s work focuses on anti-Black biases and she frequently works with teachers and educators, whom she asks to think critically about the overrepresentation of Black boys in special education and the school-to-prison pipeline. Dr. Gibson credits her success to the empirical foundations of her work and says, “A lot of strategies being used now are not research-based…. We repeat the cycle over and over.” She also remains optimistic about potential outcomes of interventions that those she offers. “You’re not going to get rid of implicit bias in everybody, but there is research out there that shows that eliminating it can be done. Attitudes and behaviors can be changed if people get the right strategies.” While Dr. Gibson’s work is not explicitly about the implicit biases around gender, her methodology and findings hold promise for issues regarding gender and education. Processes processes of education, acknowledgement, and understanding like those she has developed may be crucial to widespread dismantling of gender-based implicit biases in schools and universities.

Share: District 70 Students Taught Empathy through Special Project

We can all use a little good news on our news feeds. This article offers both a boost of goodwill and some good ideas about the value of empathy in classrooms. District 70 in Libertyville, IL is taking a new approach to inclusion by launching The Nora Project. A brainchild of teacher Amanda Martinsen, The Nora Project’s goal is to create empathy and socio-emotional intelligence by partnering students with special needs and students in general education classrooms. This program is designed for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders who receive lessons focused on disabilities, use classroom time to get to know each other, and ultimately create a mini-documentary about their “Nora friends”. Parents, teachers, and administrators are eager to begin The Nora Project and anticipate positive outcomes for their students. One parent of a special needs student says, “I have always wanted my family to be part of a place where everyone matters, everyone is valued, and everyone makes a difference and where differences create curiosity instead of fear.” While the article doesn’t mention this, The Nora Project is anchored in contact theory, which suggests that positive interactions among different groups can occur under four conditions: equal status, group cooperation, common goals, and support by social and institutional authorities. The Nora Project builds these features into its programming and we expect that similar programming could be used to develop empathy among other diverse groups of students (or educators).  

Lead: Towards conscious leadership

Author and counseling psychologist Anneke Kirsten-Barnard leads the reader through a compelling exploration of the link between emotional intelligence (EQ) and mindfulness. Instead of two separate constructs, she suggests that each may – in practice – enhance the other: “In order to become more self-regulated, motivated, empathic and socially engaged, which are the core elements of EQ, one needs to be self-aware. And self-awareness lies at the very essence of mindfulness training.” She also suggests that, while a common conception of mindfulness equates it with yogi-like zen state, Kirsten-Barnard instead lays out a situation in which mindfulness may invite more turmoil, especially for leaders who seek self-awareness in order to pursue “integrated, authentic leadership. The work required to ‘know yourself’ is neither self-indulgent nor narcissistic. Whatever self-knowledge and awareness we attain as leaders will serve those we lead.” What’s the solution? Kirsten-Barnard suggests that curiosity is a strategic path through both enhanced EQ and mindfulness practices because “purposefully cultivating curiosity facilitates asking those clever, sometimes difficult questions that nobody wants to ask. It leads to creativity and innovation, and it ultimately facilitates change.” If you find this appealing and want to infuse your own organization with more mindful leadership, consider reviewing the resources available at MindfulnessInAction, which was founded by Kirsten-Barnard and promotes some practices like curiosity.

- Lauren