The Formative Five

Fostering Grit, Empathy, and Other Success Skills Every Student Needs

Thomas R. Hoerr

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781416622727
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

For success in school and life, students need more than proficiency in academic subjects and good scores on tests; those goals should form the floor, not the ceiling, of their education. To truly thrive, students need to develop attributes that aren't typically measured on standardized tests. In this lively, engaging book by veteran school leader Thomas R. Hoerr, educators will learn how to foster the "Formative Five" success skills that today's students need, including

• Empathy: learning to see the world through others' perspectives.
• Self-control: cultivating the abilities to focus and delay self-gratification.
• Integrity: recognizing right from wrong and practicing ethical behavior.
• Embracing diversity: recognizing and appreciating human differences.
• Grit: persevering in the face of challenge.

When educators engage students in understanding and developing these five skills, they change mindsets and raise expectations for student learning. As an added benefit, they see significant improvements in school and classroom culture. With specific suggestions and strategies, The Formative Five will help teachers, principals, and anyone else who has a stake in education prepare their students—and themselves—for a future in which the only constant will be change.

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Chapter 1

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Thinking About Tomorrow

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Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.

—Thomas Frey

Like many of you, I've read lots of projections and scenarios about what the future might hold for education. So much is changing at such an amazing pace that it's hard to keep track of it all. This fact smacked me between the eyes when I read a New York Times article about dead people coming back to life:

Andy Kaufman and Redd Foxx to Tour, Years After Death, as Holograms

As comedians, Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman could hardly be more different. Foxx, the pioneering nightclub performer and star of Sanford and Son, who died in 1991, was candid, socially conscious, and unapologetically obscene. Kaufman, the standup, sometime wrestler, and ‘Taxi’ costar, who died in 1984, was experimental, obtuse, playful, and perplexing.

But now these two comics will be united in a most unlikely way: Both are being turned into holograms to perform and tour again.

On Friday, Hologram USA, a technology company that specializes in these visual recreations of celebrities, announced that it would use the likenesses of Kaufman and Foxx and parts of their previously recorded routines to create hologram shows that will be presented across the country next year. (Itzkoff, 2015)

No, I am not making this up. But as I think about it, I should not have been that surprised. Ray Kurzweil predicted this blurring of reality and illusion in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), envisioning a future in which holograms appear so lifelike that the only way to determine whether the teacher at the front of the classroom is human is to reach out and feel either flesh or air.

As it happens, holograms have been passing as living humans for some time. The Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois, opened in 2005, features a presentation by an actor who, it turns out, is really a hologram. I was there a few years ago, and the illusion was so effective that it took me quite a while to realize that the figure I was watching wasn't a human after all.

Consider, too, the Cisco Connected Classroom at the University of Pennsylvania, as described by Ariel Schwartz (2013): "a floor-to-ceiling screen at the front of each connected room for the lecturer, two smaller 80-inch screens on each side to display notes and guests beaming in from elsewhere, and two mid-sized screens in the back to show students in the other classroom." Although there aren't any holograms per se, the life-size moving image of an instructor operating in real time and beamed in from another continent challenges traditional conceptions of classroom teaching. Returning to the idea of teacher holograms discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the future is closer than we think. Here's the first line from an article on Ray Kurzweil's website about robots possibly replacing teachers: "Researchers in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Cynthia Breazeal, PhD, have developed a powerful new ‘socially assistive’ robot called Tega that senses the affective (emotional/feeling) state of a learner, and based on those cues, creates a personalized motivational strategy" (Angelica, 2016).

Taking another step into the future, Ray Kurzweil posted an article to his website titled, "How to Animate a Digital Model of a Person from Images Collected from the Internet" (2015). What's next? Might we go to a theater to see John F. Kennedy debate Ronald Reagan? Surely we have libraries of videotape featuring the two presidents, so it's not at all a far-fetched possibility. And from there, how difficult would it be to bring portraits and pictures alive so that we can watch Abraham Lincoln discussing slavery with Christopher Columbus? If we can consider whether or not to use DNA extracted from fossils to bring dinosaurs that died 65 million years ago back to life, then creating holograms of long-deceased people using their DNA or that of their ancestors is not out of the question. Still, it all makes me very uncomfortable. Perhaps it would be a good topic to discuss during intermission at the Red Foxx and Andy Kaufman performance.

The Future, in General

Much of the rapid pace of change that we're experiencing is due to the invention of and rapid spread of new ways to communicate. Today, for better and/or worse (actually, for better AND worse), we are almost always connected. For example, each day there are 100 billion e-mails sent and 300 billion Facebook posts made; last year, 200 billion tweets were sent. That's a lot of keystrokes! And according to The Atlantic magazine, 935,951,027 websites existed in September of 2015 (Lafrance, 2015). To put that in perspective, it would take 18 years to spend just one minute on each of those websites, excluding breaks for eating, sleeping, or walking the dog. My smartphone gives me access to the world's libraries and to millions of people. There is no doubt that the technology explosion has changed our lives for the better—but there is also no doubt that it has come at a cost.

A commentator on the NBC Nightly News recently noted that a study of low-income parents in Philadelphia showed that "nearly half of children less than a year old used a mobile device each day, and by the age of two, that percentage jumped up to nearly 80 percent." Dr. Matilde Irigoyen of the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia added that "by age four, most (of the children) owned their own personal device" (2015). Parents and caregivers frequently use technology to keep young children occupied. And as everyone working in a school knows, it doesn't get any easier as kids get older.

Albert Einstein once said, "I never think of the future. It will come soon enough." Educators don't have that luxury. We must anticipate what the future will hold in order to prepare our students for tomorrow, but predictions are always uncertain. Here are two notorious examples (Lewis, 2013): In 1962, Decca Records passed on signing the Beatles to a contract, with one executive commenting, "We don't like your boys' sound. Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished." And in 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, "There's no chance that the iPhone will get any significant market share. No chance." (See these and other equally bad predictions.) Difficulty anticipating the future isn't limited to trying to determine what consumers will purchase. We have all seen the photo of President Harry Truman triumphantly displaying the newspaper proclaiming his loss to Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948, for example. More recently, the weekend before the national election in November 2012, Mitt Romney's campaign committee installed a $25,000 firework display in Boston Harbor in anticipation of Romney's election. According to a 2012 blog post by Eric Randall on the website of Boston magazine, Romney "and Paul Ryan seemed to truly believe the polls were ‘skewed’ to overestimate the numbers of minority and young voters that would show up to the election." For years I've been foolishly predicting that the St. Louis Rams—remember them?—would win more games than they would lose, and for years I've been proven wrong. (And don't get me started on those stocks that I was sure would increase in value!)

Perhaps Peter Drucker said it best: "Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window." But our students' futures are too important for us not to at least try to anticipate what they will need and how we can best serve them. Driving down that metaphorical dim road, I see six trends that will inform how we need to prepare our students to achieve success in tomorrow's real world. Three of these trends are contextual—that is, they are worldwide thrusts that will have a strong effect on education. The other three trends are education-specific—they reflect ways in which schools will change. Each of these trends will result in the Formative Five success skills playing a prominent role in future school curriculums.

Contextual Prediction 1: The Earth Will Become More Fragile

Climate change will have a dramatic effect on how we live and work. Rising seas and more extreme weather will make it impossible to deny that it is happening, so conserving energy and protecting the planet will become immediate priorities. Unfortunately, much of the damage to Spaceship Earth has already been done, and it will take sustained effort by much of the world to halt it, let alone reverse it. The fragility of our ecosystem will result in much greater levels of environmental awareness and efforts by educators.

I do not anticipate the dystopia that James Kunstler predicts in his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, with skyscrapers abandoned because there's not enough power to operate the elevators. But there's no doubt that we will be forced to live differently—and, most likely, less comfortably. Potable water will become a scarce resource in many places, weather patterns will turn increasingly disruptive, and global disparities in wealth and comfort will grow larger and larger.

Writing for National Geographic, Tim Folger (2015) asserts that global warming projections from 2012 are actually too conservative. "Year by year, millimeter by millimeter, the seas are rising," he writes. "Fed by melting glaciers and ice sheets, and swollen by thermal expansion of water as the planet warms, the world's oceans now on average are about eight inches higher than a century ago. And this sea change is only getting started." Folger notes that eight of the world's ten largest cities are on seacoasts. Of course, rising sea levels will affect all of us, no matter where we live. At the same time, where we live will increasingly determine our quality of life. As Robert Kaplan puts it in his book The Revenge of Geography (2012), "The only enduring thing is a people's position on a map" (p. xviii).

According to the Conserve Energy Future website,

The population of the planet is reaching unsustainable levels as it faces shortage of resources like water, fuel, and food. Population explosion in less developed and developing countries is straining the already scarce resources. Intensive agriculture practiced to produce food damages the environment through use of chemical fertilizer, pesticides and insecticides. Overpopulation is one of the crucial current environmental problems.

Clearly, respect for the Earth will become an integral part of every child's education, and students will learn to understand how their actions can contribute to solving rather than exacerbating our environmental plight.

Implications for the Formative Five. Empathy and embracing diversity will be very important, because many of the steps necessary to protect our environment will require us to make personal sacrifices in order to help others. We will look beyond our borders and take actions that we know will cost us in some way—though because we are all on the same planet, helping others is ultimately helping ourselves as well. Students will also need to develop self-control in making decisions that require staving off immediate gratification in exchange for a better future—and because environmental change is a complex problem with no easy solutions, tenacity and resilience—grit—will be necessary to make progress.

Contextual Prediction 2: Technology Will Touch Everything

As computer chips become ever smaller, faster, and more powerful, technology will become even more pervasive in our lives than it currently is. Ray Kurzweil "predicts that in the 2030s, human brains will be able to connect to the cloud, allowing us to send e-mails and photos directly to the brain and to back up our thoughts and memories. This will be possible, he says, via nanobots—tiny robots from DNA strands—swimming around in the capillaries of our brain" (Miles, 2015). Kurzweil refers here to an approaching singularity, with computers increasingly doing our problem solving for us with little human direction or intervention. (Bear in mind that intelligence is problem solving.) In a 2007 New York Times column titled "The Outsourced Brain," David Brooks makes the point succinctly: "I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized that the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less."

Of course, the ubiquity of computers has already significantly changed how we work: we've gone from counting on fingers to using the abacus, slide rule, and adding machine to mostly observing as computations are done for us. We might analyze the problem, frame the question, and press a few buttons, but we know that computers are more accurate and infinitely faster than people at solving complex mathematical equations. Actually, scratch that—why waste time pressing buttons when you can just ask Siri for the answer?

Incredibly, Siri is already yesterday's technology. Today's computers can do more than just hear us; they can now go as far as to read our facial expressions and infer our emotions. It won't be too long until we're greeted at the hospital emergency room by computers—perhaps even holograms—that ask us our symptoms, observe our expressions and body language, and refer us to a specialist, accordingly. Indeed, a company called Affectiva, founded by Rana el Kaliouby, is already developing such an artificial intelligence. According to an article in Fast Company magazine, the company's technology "is sophisticated enough to distinguish smirks from smiles, or unhappy frowns from the empathetic pursing of lips" (Segran, 2015). How many receptionists or aides will be replaced by this kind of automation? (See el Kaliouby's 2015 TED Talk video for more information on Affectiva's work.)

Already, as pointed out by David Rotman (2013) in the MIT Technology Review, technology has had a major effect on employment. From nearly half of Americans working in agriculture in 1900, only 2 percent did so in 2000. Additionally, "The proportion of Americans employed in manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent in the post-World War II years to around 10 percent today—partly because of increasing automation, especially during the 1980s."

That is likely just the beginning. Rotman continues: a "less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks." Claire Caine Miller captures the interplay between technology and jobs well in her New York Times article "As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up" (2014); similarly, in The Industries of the Future (2016), Alec Ross warns that "tomorrow's labor market will be increasingly characterized by competition between humans and robots" (p. 247).

Sometimes I wonder about the potential consequences of the driverless car. Once we are able to sit comfortably in an automobile for long journeys without having to focus on the road, will we still need motels? How might driverless cars affect the airline and railroad industries? And as labor becomes increasingly automated, what will we do with our free time? According to Thomas Frey (2014), by "2030 the average person in the U.S. … will spend most of [his or her] leisure time on an activity that hasn't been invented yet" (p. 52).

That many jobs will be eliminated is beyond question. A 2016 article in The Economist notes that "a study published in 2013 by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University stoked anxieties when it found that 47 percent of jobs in [the United States] were vulnerable to automation"—and that in poorer countries where jobs can more easily be automated, the percentages are even higher (e.g., 69 percent in India, 77 percent in China, and 85 percent in Ethiopia). As leadership guru Warren Bennis has memorably said, "The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

Implications for the Formative Five: As we are freed more and more of mundane tasks and obligations, our ability to exert self-control and make wise choices will become ever more important. Increased opportunities to interact with those we do not know (only interacting online) mean that the attributes of integrity and embracing diversity will be particularly valuable.

Contextual Prediction 3: Diversity Will Be in Our Faces

As much as it pains me, I'm afraid that members of our species will continue to discriminate among one another. I would like to believe otherwise, but history is my guide—and recently, some of the responses to the Syrian refugee crisis and to terrorist acts by a few Muslims portend increased fear and discrimination throughout the West. And despite the United States' status as a melting pot, many Americans continue to struggle with diversity issues—unsurprisingly, given our history with slavery.

This legacy begins in 1619, when the first slaves were brought to North America from Africa. (In 2015, Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie published a powerful video showing the paths of these forced journeys, which encompassed 20,528 slave ships over 315 years.) Indeed, from its very founding, the United States relied on slavery for much of its economy. Though it is rarely noted in history books, the founders paid a lot of attention to slavery when devising the Constitution. (Joseph Ellis's 2015 book The Quartet provides a wonderful summary of the deliberations and tensions between the northern and southern states during this "second American Revolution.")

In Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that "at the onset of the Civil War," the "stolen bodies" of black slaves "were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies—cotton—was America's primary export" (p. 101). Although things have gotten much better, we have much more to do: Type racial conflict into Google's search engine and you'll get about 71,000,000 links. (Ferguson shooting results in about 34,200,000 links.) Our country will become even more diverse: according to estimates by the U.S. Census, "International migrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Thinking About Tomorrow
• Chapter 2. Empathy
• Chapter 3. Self-Control
• Chapter 4. Integrity
• Chapter 5. Embracing Diversity
• Chapter 6. Grit
• Chapter 7. Culture Is the Key
• Chapter 8. Upon Further Review
• Appendix A. Self-Assessment Surveys
• Appendix B. Family Letters
• References
• About The Author
• Acknowledgments
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright