Feb 19

Grit and grades – what are schools actually for?

One of my treasured childhood memories is staying with my grandfather at his house in Colchester, in England. I can still recall the pipe he used to smoke and the books he used to read; most special of all, though, was the fact that I was there by myself, and I could do things that I wasn’t normally allowed to do at home – the prerogative of grandparents, of course. This is why the night-time chocolate biscuit tasted especially delicious, and why the films that I watched with him have stayed with me.

I say ‘stayed with me’ – but, as memories have a tendency to do, these films (for the most part Westerns) have all coalesced into one single film, which I seem to recall quite vividly – ‘True Grit’, starring the great John Wayne. The film won an Oscar for John Wayne – his only Oscar, in fact – and I guess on reflection that the screen shots of him as US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, posing brooding on a horse, as he set off to confound our expectations of his character, had something to do with this. Not, of course, that I had any clue at the age of 7 or 8 what an Oscar was – but there was obviously something powerful in the film to make it stick in my memory, and some of that undoubtedly came down to the ‘true grit’ which all the main characters exhibited in one way or another, facing up to adversity and pursuing justice in spite of all the dangers and difficulties that stood in their way.

‘Grit’ is a concept used increasingly frequently in education, as we challenge ourselves to redefine what schools are actually for. Grit has (perhaps not surprisingly) been identified as a significant factor in achieving long term goals and life outcomes, and attention is turning to how schools can best encourage the development of grit in young people. As a new study of 4,500 16 year-olds in the UK shows, however, we should beware trying to make academic success – ie better exam grades – one of the desired outcomes to which grit contributes.

Writing in the American Psychological Association Journal of Personality and Social Psychology the authors of this study – entitled ‘True Grit and Genetics: Predicting Academic Achievement From Personality’ – conclude that grit adds little to school grades. In an article in The Conversation reflecting on their study, they write: “It’s clear from our study that more research must be done before concluding that a certain type of teaching or classroom intervention are beneficial for academic achievement or other life outcomes.”

This seems eminently sensible – wise educators in any case rarely rush to conclusions about ‘what works’ in the classroom: children, after all, are complex beings with differing backgrounds and previous experiences, which means that they respond to different approaches and different relationships with their teachers. If this study shows – as the authors conclude – that “grit is not a good way of predicting whether a child will get good grades”, then this is interesting for educators to know, but it does not mean that grit is not a good thing, especially as the authors of the study refer specifically to the “long-term benefits for children” which increasing grit or perseverance could have.

What is disheartening in an otherwise well-balanced and informative piece is the statement in their article in The Conversation that “These results should warrant concern given education policy directives in the US and in the UK, which emphasise the importance of grit and character education.” This statement is underpinned by an enormous and – so many, many educators would argue – erroneous assumption that schooling is all about the grades. Without rehearsing the argument at length, quite simply – it can’t be the case. If success at school is predicated on achieving an A grade in every examination, then thousands of children are destined to fail, and as educators we cannot accept this. School is such a large part of a child’s life, and so formative in it, that it is inconceivable to educators that its sole purpose is to develop a sense of inadequacy. On the contrary – we believe that school has the power to help young people become amazing adults, and phenomenal contributors in the world.

School is about preparing young people for success in life – all sorts of different types of success. We know that academic success is not the only type of success in life. This is the kind of knowing that comes from years of working with children, preparing them for the future, helping them discover who they are and enabling them to learn who they might be. Research contributes hugely to this understanding and knowledge, and is to be welcomed. It must in turn be analysed carefully, and not allowed to turn into knee-jerk reactions. The current focus on greater character education in schools is a move in the right direction and should not be put off course.

Now we just need to work on the perception that academic grades are all that matter.

 

   

Feb 10

The value of teaching overseas: an oversupply of teachers in Australia? Teach in the UK!

Statistics released in a UK Government National Audit Office today reveal that in 2014, the recorded rate of vacancies and temporarily filled vacancies in schools in England and Wales rose to 1.2% – that means over 5,000 unfilled posts in England alone. This is because the birth rate is rising – the school population is estimated to go up by 10% to 10.4 million by 2025 – and because not enough teachers are being trained, especially in Maths, Science and Languages. Teaching is naturally a demanding job, too, as well as being a great job, and there is a high turnover of teachers. All this means that headteachers of UK schools report increasing difficulty in recruiting staff, and figures published before Christmas showed that almost two thirds of UK schools had struggled to get the right teachers to fill their posts in the previous year.

At the same time, the number of Australian teachers on the waiting list for a permanent post in NSW has reached an all-time high of around 45,000. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work out that the UK is a great destination for Australian teachers, especially as Australian teaching qualifications are usually transferable to the UK with no extra study needed, and because there are a number of different visa options. It can be very straightforward to get a visa in the shortage subjects of Maths, Physics and Chemistry, too.

This was the topic of the Courses and Careers Show with Steve Price and Danny Bielik on 2GB Radio today, and it was a pleasure to contribute to it. Teaching is an incredibly important profession, and it needs good people – the last thing anyone in education wants is for well-trained teachers to be underemployed when there is a huge job to be done to educate the global generation of tomorrow. If there is an oversupply of teachers in one part of the world, why shouldn’t these teachers consider teaching somewhere else for a time?

The starting salary for teachers in the UK is £22,244 per annum, or £27,819 in inner London – accommodation costs are very high in London, of course, but drop dramatically in other parts of the country. Overall – especially with the weak Australian dollar – the average UK teacher salary of £37,400 is attractive for teachers in their first decade of teaching.  UK schools have a reputation as being very innovative places, with leading edge pedagogy and research-driven initiatives. Some schools are very challenging – where in the world is this not the case? – but this challenge can be exciting too.

International teaching experience brings a wealth of opportunities: living and working abroad enables people to learn a huge amount about themselves, and they develop their personal resilience; they learn too a huge amount about other cultures and other ways of life. All of this sticks with them when they return home, and it makes them better teachers to young people who themselves need to become globally mobile if they are to make the most of what the 21st century has to offer them. International experience calls … why not make the most of the opportunities now?

 

Useful websites for teachers looking to work in the UK:

UK Department for Education

https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/explore-my-options/overseas-applicants

Job sites

www.tes.co.uk

http://www.eteach.com/

UK Visa information

https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa

 

Jan 19

The upsides of homeschooling

Today’s Daily Mail contains an upbeat and encouraging article about the TV presenter Nadia Sawalha and her decision to home-school her two daughters: “My two girls are home schooled and it’s brilliant, says TV’s Nadia”. In a refreshingly positive story about education – albeit with some editorial sniping at private schools – Ms Sawalha describes how she and her husband came to the decision that a standard, one-size-fits-all school was not right for their daughters’ specific needs, and so took the step into home schooling.

It is estimated that over 50,000 children are home-educated in the UK, and while the article suggests that this is down in part to the squeeze on school places as the population rises, one of the major reasons is that many parents realise that the schools to which they have access do not suit their children, and they recognise that they need to forge another educational path if their children are to be able to make the most of their potential. Home schooling does not require children to follow a specific curriculum, and nor does it have regulated hours or approaches; the downsides are the potential lack of social contact and the potential lack of contact with a variety of highly trained teachers, but the upsides are its flexibility and responsiveness to the child’s needs, and the freeing and empowering effect it can have on children’s creativity, their ability to think, and their happiness.

There is much to be said for home schooling. It is hard work for parents, and it does not suit everyone, but its real value lies in its fundamental belief that children are individuals and that they learn in different ways, and that a programme of education designed for children should accommodate to them, and not the other way around. The best schools recognise this too, and ensure that they understand and respond to the needs and uniqueness of their students; it is very easy, however, for even the best school to slip into patterns of teaching and assessing that – while effective for most – do not always work for everyone. If schools seek to be truly excellent, then from time to time they should take just a few minutes to reflect, genuinely, on what they can learn from alternative approaches to education.

The question for the day, then: how can schools incorporate the best of home schooling into their programmes? The answer: really know your children, spend time thinking about what would work for them, and don’t be afraid to experiment. Every moment we spend reflecting on what we could do better in education contributes to the growth and development of our young people. What better way to spend our energy?

 

Jan 12

Tiger or Dolphin – the politics of parenting

Prime Minister David Cameron makes the front page of The Times in the UK today with a headline that throws down the gauntlet in the battle to conquer disadvantage and inequality, beginning with social mobility – specifically, children’s potential in life, as determined by the start they get. Setting out his ‘bucket list’ of what he wants to change before he leaves office, he emphasised in a speech yesterday the importance of parenting in giving all children the very best start, and he focused in on the desirability of improving parenting, so that every child can benefit from the high expectations that will be their passport to a better future. His answer: tiger parenting; the headline reads: “All children should have ‘tiger mums’ – Cameron”, and he is quoted as saying “It is, in fact, what the tiger mothers’ battle hymn is all about: work, try hard, believe you can succeed, get up and try again”.

In many respects, he is absolutely right. Children thrive on boundaries, and they also rise to high expectations. This is not an easy ask of parents – challenging children to work hard and do their best can be very tough. If at first children don’t succeed – and they often won’t – then it can be hard to coax them to try, try, try again. It requires time, effort, a belief that this kind of tough love has an end goal that is worth more than the discomfort of the moment, and, sometimes, tears and meltdowns. It is extraordinarily painful for a parent to watch his or her child suffering (however temporarily), and it is so, so much easier (in the short term, at least) to alleviate the demands on them, to weaken the structures and boundaries, and to let them relax – apparently more comfortably – into the moment. Part of the wisdom of parenting is to know that this is not always the right thing to do, and this is where the Tiger Mother philosophy comes into its own.

Part of the art of parenting, however, is to know the limits of this philosophy. Tiger parenting has been associated with increased levels of childhood anxiety, depression and stress, as well as developing deep-rooted feelings of inadequacy, and it is easy to see why. If a child is constantly being told that he or she is not good enough, and has to do better, then instead of developing a resilience and robust desire in the child to succeed, this approach be entirely counter-productive, and the child can, quite simply, withdraw and give up. Although most children, much of the time, will benefit from tiger parenting, it is not always the answer.

This is where Shimi Kang’s Dolphin parenting comes into its own. Published in 2014, her book ‘The Dolphin Way’ (an interesting and insightful read) has struck a chord with parents and educationalists who know that there is more to parenting than constant pressure. Tigers are fierce, unrelenting and single-minded; dolphins, meanwhile, are social creatures with a collective mindset and a gentler approach to life, Tiger parenting, Shimi points out, is all about instruction which leads to mastery; dolphin parenting is all about role-modelling, play, exploration. and guidance. It is a useful antidote to the intensity of the tiger approach, but it is no less demanding – it requires parents to learn who their children are, and to understand when they need to be left alone, as well as when they need nudging.

And therein lies the rub – even gentle parenting is still tough on parents. Tiger, Dolphin or mixture of the two … no matter what style or styles parents adopt with their children, there is no let-up: parenting is for life, not just for the first few days or months of a child’s life, and in an increasingly complex world, it is an increasingly complex process. Parents are not born, they are made – through their own experiences as children, through their observation of others, and, if they are lucky, through access to the accumulated wisdom of society, which is (encouragingly) constantly developing fresh insights while rediscovering old ones). The more we can talk about parenting and support, value and empower parents, the more likely it is that parents will learn to parent in the very best interests of each unique child.

In a liberal society, it be rather disconcerting and unsettling to witness politicians entering into the private life of the family with frameworks and targets for what should go on inside the home, but it is not hard to argue for a greater good in this respect: well-parented children make for better rounded, more well-rounded, happier people, and, undoubtedly, better citizens. Perhaps there is something to be said for qualifications in parenting after all …

 

Jan 05

The times (tables), they are a-changing … or not, as the case may be

It is curious how emotive discussions can become when the subject is that of teaching multiplication tables in schools. Nicky Morgan, the UK Secretary of State for Education, recently announced that new online tests of children’s ability to recount their times tables up to and including 12 x 12, would be piloted this year for 3,000 11 year olds in England, with a view to rolling out the tests to all 11 year olds across the country in 2017. Predictably, perhaps, this has resulted in a flurry of polarised responses from commentators on education (note – commentators are not usually current or previous teachers), from the vehemently expressed ‘yes – traditional rote learning is an essential part of good education’ to the equally vehemently expressed ‘no – learning times tables is obsolete in a digitally connected world. For those of us who have been in education long enough to see the wheels turning several times, each time seeking to balance out or compensate for a perceived failing in the last cycle, there is nothing new in this, and the politicking and posturing can be somewhat tiresome. Is it time (no pun intended) to move beyond this?

Education is not a simple matter. No matter how attractive the concept might be to policy-makers, teaching children can never realistically be a case of inputting certain data and guaranteeing specific outcomes. Children and their circumstances are too complex, their relationships with teachers and their peers are too intricate, and nothing is absolutely for certain in every case – statistics, after all, about what works and what doesn’t in education are by their very nature generalised. In a society which values difference and individuality, we should not be surprised or irritated by the fact that people learn in many different ways, with different motivations and with different outcomes. Rather, we should embrace this uncertainty as a welcome sign of variety – and that the system has worked.

That said, we have accumulated significant amounts of wisdom about the building blocks that lead to a good basic understanding of the world, and, equally, we have learned enormous amounts – held, it must be said, largely in the form of teachers’ practical experience – about how individuals can be coaxed to understand, learn, develop and grow. Teachers help children to learn and this, fundamentally, is why teachers are so important in schools – they are the people who can respond to the needs of individuals, and they have an enormous influence on what children do and achieve. It follows that their views about the importance or otherwise of elements of the education programmes they follow really do matter, because these opinions, translated into action in the classroom, directly affect whether or not children learn them.

So – what do teachers think about learning times tables? Are times tables useful? Is learning these times tables useful? Is testing the learning of these times tables useful? For school leaders and teachers, in practice, the question of times tables is actually a non-story, because for the most part they have been quietly just getting on with doing them in schools for years. Yes, times tables are as useful now as in the past as a basic mathematical concept and part of how we perceive the world. Yes, learning them is useful – and teachers are always looking for ways to help children learn them more effectively and so that they are more meaningful for them. Yes, testing them is useful too, at least to a degree – it certainly proves that children can reproduce the times tables (although not necessarily that they have absorbed an understanding of their significance); and the rigour of learning does also focus children.

Moreover, there is an equality of access argument in the teaching, learning and testing of times tables – children in all schools, from all walks of life, should be able to have the same access to the same quality of teaching, ie teaching that will help them develop the same quality of learning. Does testing have potentially negative outcomes? Yes, it does – the time and resources spent on testing can detract from time and resources spent on learning, results can be (usually are) used for short-term political gain rather than genuinely enhancing the life chances of individual students, league tables promote competition between schools rather than collaboration … the list goes on.

But what is really important in this debate is that no-one is really listening to teachers in a systematic, comprehensive way. No-one is really listening to schools just explaining what they are doing – no-one is asking and listening with an open, non-judgemental, curious mind, free of the desire to criticise or give anecdotally-based opinions on what schools should be doing. The lack of a united teacher voice on curriculum matters is not surprising – teachers, as students, are individuals with varied experiences, and this is to be welcomed in a system which seeks to develop such individuality. The lack of any strong representative teacher voices is much more concerning. Where are the voices saying, for example, ‘we, ie your local school, does this, because we believe …and we know that it works because …’?

School leaders generally don’t speak out about what they do and why, either because they are wary about how their words and ideas will be communicated by the media, and how their constituencies will react to this (what will be the scandalous spin? what will people think?) or because they actually have no official remit to say anything, because most of what they do is prescribed from a centralised office, and if they choose to do follow their own path because it works well for the students in their school, they prefer to keep quiet about it.  Schools have grown silent because they have gradually become disempowered or fearful of reaction. When you are expected to be all things to all people, all of the time – a panacea for society’s ills, and yet the focus of its ire – it is easy to see why you would remain circumspect.

And yet we need schools to speak out, to re-establish themselves as the voices of education – schools working within wider education systems but responsive too to the needs of the individual children in their care. A nagging suspicion vexes those following the debate on times tables … a suspicion that schools are not really being trusted to do what is right – perhaps because we have left the age of authority behind, and perhaps because people don’t really understand that schools are always, always seeking to improve, and that this is not a sign of inadequacy but rather a very grown-up sign of strength. Schools are amazingly complex places, as the debate about times tables serves to illustrate: what fills national newspaper columns for a few days is a microscopic element in the daily life of a school.

Perhaps the time has come to give schools credit for this, and just allow them to get on with it.

Dec 22

Bailey Matthews and the power of joy

Bailey Matthews is clearly loving life at the moment. If you did not watch the UK’s BBC TV’s Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) Awards on Sunday night, or are not one of the 80 million plus people who have viewed the video online showing Bailey completing a triathlon earlier this year, then you need to look up Bailey’s history and achievements as soon as possible so that you can share in his joy.

For 8-year-old Bailey has cerebral palsy and yet, undaunted and determined to follow in the footsteps of his father, trained for and completed a children’s triathlon in North Yorkshire in July in which he had to swim 100m, ride a bike for 4km and run for 1.3 km. He had his father alongside him – and a lifeguard in the water – but he was resolutely cheerful as he made his way around the course, and so enthusiastic and resolute that, 20 metres from the finish, he abandoned his walking frame and made for the line. He stumbled and fell, but picked himself up and threw himself forward again, crossing the finish line to the cheers of the crowd. On Sunday night, he was awarded the Helen Rollason Award at the SPOTY awards, to a standing ovation.

In all his interviews before and since, Bailey has revealed himself to be irrepressibly joyful. He has enjoyed engaging in banter with interviewers galore, and he chuckled through his mock boxing bout with Tyson Fury. How many 8 year olds do you know who could stand up in an arena of adults, under the lights and cameras and noise, grab the microphone and enjoy telling the crowd that they can stop cheering now? It is easy to imagine that he is not always the most obedient of children – such ebullience is rarely easily contained – but this roguish element endears him to us more, as when we watch and listen to him, we are reminded that we can all receive pure, unadulterated pleasure from sharing another’s joy. It is said that when a baby laughs, the world stops for a moment, and that was exactly what viewers experienced on Sunday night, and since, when they have seen Bailey in action.

His parents are incredibly proud of Bailey – to bursting point! – and with reason. They too deserve our admiration and gratitude for bringing Bailey up to be so determined and so full of joy, and for letting us share in this. Shared joy is a beautiful thing – an amazing aspect of the world that we inhabit with 7 billion others. And when better than today – here and now, in this very moment – to recollect this, to revel in our good fortune, and to include others in it.

In thanking Bailey for reminding us of the power of joy, go and be joyful today – and share it.

 

Dec 04

‘The mortal in the portal’: how the online world strengthens our capacity to be truly human

I am indebted to Richard Ovenden, the University of Oxford’s Bodley’s Librarian, for the title of this blog; speaking last week at a City of London Livery Company Event in Vintners’ Hall, he used the phrase during the course of his fascinating (and passionate) insight into the work that librarians now do to educate their users about data and its meaningfulness, and his words captured my attention. ‘The mortal in the portal’: so many significances in a single phrase! So much that resonates with our experience and current understanding of how we interact with the online world! And so much embedded within it that points to the potential for our future relationship with technology …

‘Portal’ is a word loaded with potential in its own right – with its hint of technological sophistication in a future, science-fiction inspired world, it embodies the sense of a gateway to a wider world, be it access to our past, now digitised, or to geographically distant places, or to culturally and philosophically diverse thinking. As for ‘mortal’ … yes, this brings with it a time-limitation, for all mortal lives come to an end, and – with our wry sense of very human humour – we recognise that we attribute to it a sense of mistakes easily made and the potential for error (sometimes fatal), but it also communicates life, ageing, growth in wisdom and organic, creative thought, energy and movement.

Bring the two together, and we realise that each depends on the other to realise their potential. Without the mortal, the portal is inert – a series of 0s and 1s, without purpose or intent; without the mortal, the portal would not have been conceived of, nor would it operate. Without the mortal, who is there to press the ‘on’ switch?

Without the portal, though, the mortal is restricted to what he or she can find in the world immediately around, and while we know from personal experience how rich and varied this is, we know too, now we have glimpsed the possibilities that ‘the portal’ brings us, how much richer and more varied our worlds can become when we are able to access the vast fields of accumulated (and accumulating) knowledge that are ‘out there’.

Part of this week’s Times Educational Supplement is devoted to exploring the ways in which technology can enhance learning in the classroom, and in one of the articles I urge schools to think more broadly and more boldly about how to embrace this potential (and, specifically, in this case, the potential of online gaming). If we can prepare our young mortals with the skills of flexibility, adaptability, robustness and resilience, and if we can release in them their innate sense of curiosity, creativity and a desire to explore, then we can ready them for a world where they can make the best use possible of the work that previous mortals have done to create online portals to past, present and future. In turn, they will take this work forward, creating new pathways, new gateways and new levels of understandings.

And if we prepare them properly, with strong, deeply entrenched values that recognise the overwhelming importance of respect for fellow human beings and the essential togetherness of humankind, then we can ultimately ensure that their life’s work will be, as should ours be, to use the potential for connection and understanding that the online world brings to help heal division and make a truly positive difference and change in the world around us.

Nov 16

Education will save us

It is hard to write anything at all today without the dark pall of the Paris massacres hanging over the words. What happened on Friday night turned an ordinary day and week into an atrocious nightmare for hundreds upon hundreds of people, and as the ripples of the murders spread out into the wider world – families, friends, neighbours, members of the local, national and international communities – then we find ourselves all touched to some degree by what happened. On Saturday morning, flowers were already thick on the ground at French embassies and consulates around the world and the worldwide web was riven by words of consolation, of solidarity and of friendship. The sadness of Paris was in our minds and hearts.

A deeper sadness can be found too when we reflect that not only were there people who were prepared to kill other human beings who posed no threat to them, but there were other people – scores? hundreds? thousands? more? – who were prepared to plan to kill and to derive immense satisfaction from killing. The act of killing another human being – of extinguishing their life – has a finality about it; it presumes, given all that we know about the human consciousness and social connectedness, that the perpetrator does not regard his or her victims as equal to him, but rather as beings unworthy of respect and of life. Throughout history, people have thought in this way of fellow human beings who have disabilities, or who are of a different sexual orientation, or who are of a different ethnic background. We are undeniably all united in sameness, but we are all, too, uniquely different, and these differences have often been the focus of misunderstanding and hatred.

How have we been able to rise above these differences and appreciate the togetherness of humankind rather than its fractures? In truth, of course, we cannot say that we have succeeded entirely in any realm as yet, but when we look back at the advances in the past few decades especially at a national and international level in areas of gender equality, access of all children to schooling and anti-discrimination laws, to name a few, we can see the progress that we have made. This is not true in every case, nor in every country – far from it – but we can see it happening, and this should give us courage and hope. There may be a long way to go, but a retrospective view of what we can achieve enables us to renew our commitment to respecting others, to kindness, to understanding, to helping our fellow human beings.

When human beings feel justified in killing other human beings, we know that we are a long way from a vision of harmony and tolerance in our world. But we know too that we can effect change, and that we must. It is never easy – education is not a straightforward process, in which, simplistically, both carrot and stick have their place; moreover, when ideas and perceptions of the world are deeply embedded, they are hard to shift, and it can test all our imaginative powers to work out how to do this. We know that we must, though – we must teach our children not to hate others, and we must reach out across the world, to every corner, to every child. We must lead by example, by caring and loving. We teach by being and doing, and we all have a hugely important role to play in this education of the world.

And – above all – we must not give up believing this.

 

Nov 02

Why diversity is good for your brain – and every other aspect of your life

A great article appeared in a recent Guardian newspaper on the topic of diversity and why it keeps your brain active. The author, Professor Richard Crisp from the Aston Business School, in fact likens the benefits to the brain of living in a multicultural society to the benefits to our bodies of a daily run; when we encounter diversity, this keeps the brain fit, strengthens its resilience and robustness, and we are enabled to think more creatively and innovatively as a result. It is an interesting and empowering perspective, and certainly one worthy of further exploration in relation to all aspects of our social and professional lives.

Professor Crisp’s research reveals that the brain behaves – unsurprisingly – in the same way, physiologically, as the rest of the human body. In practice, this means that it does not particularly like hard work, even though hard work is good for it. When everything in the world around is homogenous – ie simple and neatly structured – then the brain does not have to exercise itself as much as it does when it encounters fluidity and diversity. These ‘messier’ concepts challenge the brain’s rather lazy tendencies to want to have everything ordered and in a defined place, and it has to work harder to incorporate them into its understanding of the world. In doing so, it strengthens its ability to open itself to greater creativity and innovative ideas – in this case, as in so many others, hard work really does pay off.

What is good for the brain is good for the person; what is good for the person is good for the team. Diversity in teams makes a real difference to productive thinking, as people have to face the challenge of dealing with different perspectives. This was identified as far back as 1999 in research at Stanford, which exposed that people in diverse teams, in dealing with one another, are made to deliberate more, clarifying issues, seeking the fundamental common ground, and finding shared and mutually acceptable solutions which are often not the solutions they expected at the outset. This, of course, is creative thinking in action.

Diversity may be hard work, but it really makes a difference when it is embraced, from the family to the boardroom. It follows, therefore, that the more we can speak up about diversity and spread the word, the more exciting, creative and productive we will all be.

 

Oct 23

The wonders of the unseen world

Visiting the world-leading Science Museum in London last week, I was lucky to be able to attend a showing of a relatively recent (2013) addition to their collection of IMAX films, ‘The Mysteries of the Unseen World’. If you haven’t seen it, do try to see it at some point; at the very least, look at the website: www.mysteriesunseenworld.com. The purpose of the film was to give the viewers an insight into the world that exists around us all the time, and yet is invisible to us. It explored the broad light spectrum, for instance, and imagined what the world would look like if we could see infrared or ultraviolet rays; we were also treated to slowed-down photography of actions that are too fast for us to see normally (raindrops hitting water, for example), and speeded-up photography of actions that are too slow for us to see – the growth of plants and the decay of food, amongst others. The film took us down into the microworld and reminded us (rather uncomfortably!) of the mites that live in the dust around us, and then it led us, deeper still, into the nanoworld – that amazing state at the atomic level about which we are still learning, and where the laws of gravity and inertia do not appear to apply.

It was a fascinating peek into the enormous omplexity of the ecosystems in which we live, and which we take for granted most of the time, unaware of them as we are. It was also a salutary reminder that we interfere with this complexity at our peril. Any actions we take as individuals will almost inevitably have unforeseen and conceivably harmful consequences on the world around us; our ignorance of the vast unseen world around us means that it is doubtful whether we can predict even a fraction of the outcomes of our choices. It follows, of course, that when this ignorance is multiplied a billion-fold (or seven billion-fold), potentially harmful consequences can become overwhelming and fatal. In essence, a nudge towards appreciating the unseen world around us reminds us to think a bit more carefully about our environment and the choices we make as a human race.

The film made me think still further, however, about what else is unseen in our world.  What else, other than the physical elements explored in the presentation, impacts on our lives in a tangible way but remains unseen? An obvious answer, of course, lies in all our thoughts and feelings, which affect how we view not only the world but our role within it, and which help direct our actions and our choices. Just imagine if we could see thoughts and feelings; the air would be thick with them, in the same way that it is thick with infrared and ultraviolet rays. Cultural expectations, prejudices, hopes, fears, preoccupations, memories, dispositions, and any and every emotion on the spectrum from joy to rage – just imagine for a moment what it would be like.

When we ruminate upon this, then we realise that to a certain extent we can already see, or at least sense, some of these thoughts and feelings. Estimates vary as to how much of normal communication between humans depends on interpreting non-verbal signals; it could conceivably be as high as 93%. When we meet people for the first time, it takes us a fraction of a second to make a judgement about them – we pick up and process tiny clues about their posture, their physiology, their stance, their expressions, and even their smell. When they speak, we hear not only words but intonation and emphasis. The more practised we become in this art, the more visible the signals appear.

Still, though, it would take a leap further forward in our perceptual powers to be able actually to expose thoughts in the way that an infra-red camera can expose infra-red waves. Ignorance of this unseen world, however, is potentially as harmful as ignorance of the unseen physical world: our actions can have untold consequences, resulting potentially in misunderstandings and lack of connection. In many cases these will be trivial; not so, however, in many others, and certainly not when it comes to relationships between nation states or even different social groups, when conflicting strong emotions can cause rising tensions.

So – a thought for the day – if we could take time to become just a little more aware of the unseen thoughts and emotions which we project, and which others feel and project too, we might find surprising benefits. Perhaps this greater awareness of being open to scrutiny, and visible, might encourage us to look more closely at our inner world and to work even harder on disciplining and taming some of the less savoury elements which most of us would prefer to remain hidden, so that we can pretend that we not possess them – intolerance, arrogance and anger, for instance.

Little steps of awareness that might just go a long way to making the sum of our human interactions so much more harmonious.