Dialogue with Emily Larson II This Journey
Am happy to share with you a dialogue that transpired two years back between me and Emily Larson, the then Director-International Positive Education Network (IPEN).
Emily currently is a senior advisor leading the schools brief at Behavioral Insights Team, UK. While at BIT Emily has worked on reducing burnout, increasing parental engagement and using edtech to reduce teacher workload. Before joining BIT, Emily was the director of an international organisation that brought together leaders in the fields of education, policy and psychology to promote teaching character and wellbeing in schools. She has worked for over seven years to develop, employ and run large scale trials for educators in Nepal, India, Thailand, the Philippines, the UK, and the USA. Emily graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with her Masters in Positive Psychology.
The file had developed an audio problem two years back and hence we could not be published then. We have been able to retrieve a version of it which can be experienced if with the subtitles "on" (https://youtu.be/rK3Yy5MaIrY ). Alternatively, Below is the excerpt of our interactions.
Emily spent a year in Asia (most of it Bihar, India) while starting out after University of Pennsylvania as Masters in Positive Psychology.
She looked at concepts like Growth Mindset, Mindfulness, Grit, Compassion and others, for implementations with students in Bihar.
Education is to move from "how to pass test" to "human skills" that are important in 21st Century Skills. Moving from "passing the tests" to "prepare for the test of life".
We have a popular myth that children learn "character" at home and "resilience" at home. The truth is that parents are overworked and under-skilled in building these. Hence schools have a responsibility towards these.
In the talk we cite a particular UK Policy Exchange debate involving:
- Toby Young - Associate Editor of The Spectator & co-founder West London Free School
- Martin Robinson - Author "Trivium 21c"
- Dr Anthony Seldon - Master of Wellington College
- James O'Shaughnessy - Managing Director, Floreat Education
- argued whether "character is trainable"?
The talk had specific debate around whether "character" is trainable?Should curriculum time be exchanged for these areas like character, resilience, etc?
James Heckman, (((Nobel Prize Winner and the Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group))), has done studies on the neuroscience of "character". And he has shown that its "malleable".
Carol Dweck (((Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on the mindset psychological trait.))) has worked a lot on "growth mindset", that is the belief that we can change our skills and abilities, if we work hard and persist.
Aristotle and Benjamin Franklin too had the philosophy of practicing virtues over time to make it as a effortless and a natural trait.
Alejandro Adler (((Well Being Scientist & Associate research Scientist, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia))) and Emily have worked in India, Bhutan, Korea, Mexico, Phillipines. There is a false dichotomy .."you can get the grades or you can be happy...you can't be both". The research suggests that "teaching skills for life increases standardized test scores". Adler has worked at country level at Bhutan, with 700,000 students in Peru, 70,000 students in Mexico.
The biggest barriers in these change programs are "cultural barriers" and "cultural differences".
Money is not a necessary condition for change as Emily cites examples from the work of slum schools or budget schools. It is shown that some of them assimilate these programs better, if the leadership conditions are conducive for change.
IPEN (International Positive Education Network) was founded by Dr Martin Seligman & Lord James O'Shaughnessy. They brought together 16 of the world's leading thinkers in positive psychology and education in 2013 for a 2 day summit. These people came from different parts of the world and were practicing "moral education" or "virtues education" or "character education" or "citizenship". Despite these different names, they all had this kind of underlying DNA called the "double helix of positive education" namely:
1. teaching "academic" + "character + wellbeing"
2. they were doing really great research from all over the world from Mexico to Australia to Bhutan, but they have never been in the same room before. They never had the opportunity to share the best practices in research. But they were able to bridge the gap between "policy", "research" and "educators".
It was discussed that education has emphasized a lot on "intelligence" till date. "Does IQ correlate to being a leader or having beneficial outcomes in life?". Emily beams hope from seeing a slow shift towards alternate skills like emotional intelligence, creativity and innovation and decelerate the over-reliance on "IQ".
We are seeing new paradigm of "democratic business structures". This is in response to "employees having difficult time dealing with their emotions" and "repetitive jobs being outsourced to machines, and humans are finding it difficult dealing with abstracts or intangibles of concepts-judgements-opinions".
Moot questions need to be asked of again and again:
What is the purpose of education?
What kind of jobs are we preparing students for?
What are companies looking for?
Something like 81% of the leaders are looking for Leadership, Co-operation, Teamwork & Innovation as the four top skills.
Disengagement results in higher risk of physical illness and higher sick days. And companies need to provide "an income + a job + autonomy + intrinsic motivation" + ability to use one's strength"
IPEN focusses on the following learning outcomes :
growth mindset, mindfulness, creativity
leadership, cooperation, empathy,
24 character strengths and relationship quality.
Angela Dusckworth's work on Grit highlights passion+perseverence for goals. Her research suggests that people with grit sometimes outperform people with high IQ.
There was also a small mention of a spearate conversation between thinker like Michio Kaku (Physicist) + Antonio Damasio (Neuroscientist) and JoAnn Deak (Educator & Psychologist): "Is there a story behind geniuses?"...are geniuses born or do they become genius...the platform eventually was converging around having both the disposition and the perseverence...
James O'Shaughnessy's Floreat was cited as a school that emphasizes on "character education" with simple thinking that starting young helps in tapping the malleability in young children.
Believe that positive psychology can be "taught" through curriculum but also "caught" by looking and following from the everyday ethos lived by the leadership and the peers.
Emily also mentioned about unique case study about Tecmilenio University having 29 campuses in Mexico. ...one of the pioneers in positive learning philosophy and methodology in the world.
In Australia right from 2008, Geelong has been leading the way by bringing in Martin Seligman and has become the hotbed of positive education. Peters College, University of Melbourne and others are also leading the way.
UK is working at the policy level for mental wellbeing and assimilating "academics plus character+wellbeing"
Till about two decades back these words and concepts were not encouraged in researches... the word in consciousness, science of awe, science of forgiveness, science of cooperation, science of laughter. And now there are several researches and application coming out in these areas.
In order to counter the "reach of reason" for firing up of agendas, Emily relies on network of researchers across 52 countries and disciplines who sift through the noise and share trusted information with her...to help her ground in the ocean of information explosion.
Singapore has also shown leadership by introducing "citizenship" curriculum.
The Government Summit in Dubai had Elon Musk highlighting the loss of jobs to machines. That it is certainly going to happen. Emily highlights that IPEN skills in "character and wellbeing" can help two fold:
a) give more resilience to cope with VUCA world
b)artificial intelligence hasn't been able to master "human skills" like empathy and love (example research shows that when doctors show empathy, patients recover better and faster)
In the hyper-knowledge era, "answers have become easy" (((or maybe we are looking for easy answers)))
Nikola Danaylov has interviewed about 200+ people on "singularity". In one of his interviews with "Kindered AI" that is working on embodied AI...replicating the dense and depth of human body and the mind network that runs through it beyond the conventional brain...where there are endeavors to even impart citizenship to AI. However in conversation with Emily, we touched upon the human-ness of genuineness, warmth, authenticity of a human being. And that its time to resurrect that.
Emily mentioned that she was asked to comment on the recent Elon Musk statement (at Government Summit in Dubai). Through her answer, she kindled the very spirit of human existence....the idea that whenever we are faced with massive changes, it forces us to rethink our connection to other people...and how, and how much they matter to us.
One interpretations of reading persons like Chomsky, Minsky hints at them not being able to see an event horizon where AI equals or overtakes overall human capacity. Then there are other school that believes that it is possible. Emily mentions that with so much of tech around, its easy to forget about the people around us, the kind of conversations we have with them.
...Positive psychology research is clear on the phenomena that "other people matter". When AI comes in and is not a human-friendly AI, it would push us to embrace our ingroup (i.e., humans).
Books recommended by Emily during our dialogue:
"The Mandibles"...how money has become devalued
"Making Paradise in Hell" ...how people come together during times of crisis...through examples of Hurricane Katrina and 9/11
"Flourish" ...positive psychology
The second book mentioned by Emily is something that we touched upon in one of my other talks with Jeff Lieberman (Host of Time Warp on Discovery Channel) some months back. He makes a mention about Ellen Dissanayake who talks about how adversity brings us together sometimes and in absence of it, we dissipate into cross-purposes.
We briefly also touched upon the work of Alain De Botton, where he draws from religion and highlights the stories-symbols-rituals as devices for sustaining practices so to make them into habits.
I thank you for your kind attention and time going through this.
Have a human day.