Common Core Collaboration: Detrimental for Leadership Qualities?

Common Core standards stress collaboration and groupthink.  The proponents will tell you it is necessary to make students successful, global thinkers and ready for the 21st century economy, whatever a 21st century economy looks like.

Not so fast.  An article in forbes.com details what makes a leader and it's not what the CCSS proponents are promising will equip your child with strong work skills and success.  From Leadership Tip: Hire the Quiet Neurotic, Not the Impressive Extrovert:

Most leaders are attracted to the guy or woman who seems confident and outgoing, unafraid in any situation or facing any challenge. They expect an extrovert to infuse any team with energy, to push ahead on projects and to motivate colleagues to do their best work. Meantime they have low expectations of anyone who appears neurotic, who seems withdrawn and too anxious to live up to their potential. Leaders expect neurotic employees to contribute little and to drag down colleagues’ morale.

Not true, says a new study by Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. In a paper called “The Downfall of Extraverts and Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups,” Bendersky and co-author Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School, explodes stereotypes about how extroverts and neurotics perform on teams. It turns out that extroverts contribute less than team members expect and the contributions they do make are not valued highly over time. Neurotics, by contrast, are motivated to work hard on behalf of their teams, who wind up appreciating their efforts, in part because they exceed everyone’s expectations. In the end, extroverts decline in the teams’ esteem while neurotics rise in status.


The lesson of the study: Bendersky says team leaders should be wary of extroverts. “The core of an extroverted personality is to be attention-seeking,” she observes. “It turns out they just keep talking, they don’t listen very well and they’re not very receptive to other people’s input. They don’t contribute as much as people think they will.” If she were putting together a team, says Bendersky,“I would staff it with more neurotics and fewer extroverts than my initial instinct would lead me to do.”

Maybe those introverts and neurotics need to be left alone with their own thoughts and answers to problems.  Good luck to these budding leaders as they are mandated to collaborate and share their work with others.

Collaborating to Stagnation

The new Common Core standards are supposed to develop students with "21st century skills" and "higher level" or "critical" thinking skills. (I'm still waiting for someone to tell me what a 21st century skill is that is uniquely different from the skills k-12 education taught in that last century)  It's that second part that has a lot of people and businesses popping up and nodding their heads. Who wouldn't want kids with critical thinking skills? Just watch your average teenage driver with a permit take out the family car and begin setting those 4,000 lbs hurtling down the main drag of town past stop signs, pedestrians, bicyclists and pot holes and take note of how many times you pray that child has critical thinking skills. It's a laudible goal, but what does it mean in common core.

A post on InvisibleSerfsCollar.com delves into what the industry experts at Pearson think critical thinking means. "Pearson wants open-ended tasks to assess 21st century skills in authentic real-world problem contexts. And these tasks are to be done as a group in order to assess collaboration." The goal is not to complete the task, but to "assess collaboration." Pearson goes on to note that tasks which are “obvious” or “unambiguous” would offer “few opportunities to observe student negotiation because there is nothing about which to disagree.” True. So instead Pearson wants to create collaborative tasks that  “rely on stimulus materials designed to evoke cognitive conflict (ie, that reflect uncertainty, ambiguity, disorganization, and contradiction) which better elicit critical thinking skills than tasks that used stimulus materials that were orderly, well-organized, and coherent.”

The critical thinking they want your child to have is thinking that helps them find a collaborative solution to a disorganzied and contradictory assignment. Higher order thinking skills will help them work on problems that have "no clearly defined parameters, no clear solution strategies, and either more than one correct solution, or multiple ways of arriving at an acceptable solution.” That sounds like something I'd like my child to be experiencing on a regular basis in school - not. Knowing that the teachers are encouraged in the new education paradigm to let the children struggle on their own to find a solution does not offer me any more comfort.

We all know that such challenges exist in the real world and we have to work with others, sometimes, to arrive at a solution that is acceptable to the majority. The difference for adults is that we have both content knowledge and experience to help us identify solutions. Elementary school children do not have these tools. While they might come up with an "out of the box" solution, it doesn't mean such a solution will be usable or effective. Then again, the exercise doesn't care about the solution itself. Pearson even says there may be no acceptable solution. The exercise is to work on collaboration. Is collaboration really a necessary 21st century skill?

This video disagrees.  It quotes Steve Wozniak the inventor of the Apple computer who said, "Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. They are almost like artists. In fact the best of them are artists, and artists work best alone where they control an invention's design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don't believe anything revolutionary has ever been invented by a committee."



The video also notes that we have 60 years worth of study data to prove that concepts some business people believe are fact, like brainstorming being an effective idea generating tool, actually do not work. People in a group come up with few and less varied ideas than when they work alone. Collaboration or groupwork actually reduces innovation.

Once the pedagogy of group work is fixed in the classroom, we might actually be training our kids to be less creative and less productive. Collaboration certainly doesn't seem like a good 21st century skill.

What will it mean if your child is getting good grades in school then? Quite likely it will mean either they are enough of a bully to make the other kids in the group go along with their solution, no matter how bad it is, or they are sheep who will go along with anything just to get the grade. Not seeing a worker I want to hire in this century among those choices. Are you? 

The Wozniak quote in the video ends this way, "I am going to give you some advice that is hard to take. That advice is - Work Alone. You are going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you are working on your own, not on a committee, not on a team." But why take advice from Mr. Wozniak. It's not like he has a track record of success or anything.

STEM Students Need Their Privacy

Whether it's called collaborative learning, group projects, or collective education, we've all seen instances of modern education's love affair with kids doing projects together. It is usually justified by the notion that they will have to work together as a group in the business world so they may as well develop the skills needed to do that while they are in k-12. However, if the future focus of American education, the course work that is going to save our economy, is STEM courses, that justification may just have to be jettisoned. A now famous study, Coding War Games, looked at programmers (you know, people that excel at a STEM subject) in 92 companies and found that those who had a greater degree of privacy and autonomy were happier and more productive. Our society is traveling down a path that promotes, what author Susan Cain calls, Groupthink, the idea that creativity and achievement are arrived at by committee or through brainstorming sessions. But in the creative and technology world, this strategy may in fact be counterproductive and our current education process may be training our STEM students for failure.

In her new book, Quiet, The Power of Introverts, Cain sheds light on the introvert mind and shows how there is a currently a cultural bias against introverts.

"It’s playing out in schools and workplaces where everyone is expected to sit and work together. This enforced collectivism, she explained, in which nobody has a room of their own any longer, is creating a socialized, “groupthink” culture in which we are no longer thinking for ourselves."

This is not to say that introverts should be left alone to create and problem solve.  A balance in all things is necessary.  In the New York Times, Ms. Cain reminds us of the introverts role as she tells the story of the technical genius behind Apple, Steve Wozniack.

"Rewind to March 1975: Mr. Wozniak believes the world would be a better place if everyone had a user-friendly computer. This seems a distant dream — most computers are still the size of minivans, and many times as pricey. But Mr. Wozniak meets a simpatico band of engineers that call themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrewers are excited about a primitive new machine called the Altair 8800. Mr. Wozniak is inspired, and immediately begins work on his own magical version of a computer. Three months later, he unveils his amazing creation for his friend, Steve Jobs. Mr. Wozniak wants to give his invention away free, but Mr. Jobs persuades him to co-found Apple Computer.

The story of Apple’s origin speaks to the power of collaboration. Mr. Wozniak wouldn’t have been catalyzed by the Altair but for the kindred spirits of Homebrew. And he’d never have started Apple without Mr. Jobs.

But it’s also a story of solo spirit. If you look at how Mr. Wozniak got the work done — the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing — he did it alone. Late at night, all by himself."

What does this mean for education? For starters, the organization of the classroom into learning pods of grouped desks may work for some students but not for introverts.  It should not be accepted norm.

Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it. 

Maybe the incidences of students to acting out, being  distracted or taking a very long time to get their work done are actually due to the teacher's use of work groups.  This use of groputhink in was taken to the extreme in one class.

In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question.

Anyone who has sat on a committee that was charged with reaching a consensus will know the ultimate frustration in this scenario.  Cain's book says groupthink may have its place, but it is a very specific place. She points to studies that have shown that the best brainstorming is done by extremely large groups (think the internet), but that individual contributions to this mass collection are often developed in private.

Back in the classroom where the teachers are forcing group projects under the guise that this is developing useful job and coping skills, consider this study by Marilyn Ford and Jenny Morice.   They looked at the perceived fairness group assignments in class.  Their study showed the greatest dissatisfaction with group projects came from the highest performing students.  This is not surprising.  The second highest dissatisfaction level comes from the lowest performing students who are unhappy at the frequent complaints and efforts of their teammates to make them work. The same study also found that teachers were the least aware of problems in work groups. This was partly explained by the students perception that bringing these issues to the attention of the teachers was pointless as the teachers just told them to work it out. In the business world, slackers are not tolerated for long because they bring down the productivity of everyone. The world of education can't boot the slackers out.  Teachers telling the kids to "work it out themselves" is a cop out for their inability to find a way to motivate the unmotivated student. Not exactly teaching the kids a real world skill, unless that skill is telling co-workers "not my problem."

Did the old layout of the classroom, where every desk was an island, have some merit? Could charter or private schools have a leg up on public schools because they can group kids into the two categories,  highly social learners and introverts, and allow each group work in environments that allow them to progress more rapidly? If public schools could do this, could they have an impact on achievement at the low low cost of rearranging the classroom furniture and providing independent study options?

Technology is not just centered in problem solving.  It also involves an element of dreaming, of creativity. This is one of the reasons America has continued to excel in technology.  We allow our students to dream the impossible. Like Steve Wozniak, we ask the question, "If you could create anything for the future, what would it be?" Other countries, who we are so fond of comparing ourselves to, ask, "Have you memorized information that everyone already knows?"  This gives them great scores on things like the PISA test, but leaves them to wait for someone else to develop the next great "earth changing" thing and then copy it.

STEM subjects may hold the promise of resurrecting America, but only if we allow the introverts who are attracted to those subjects to work in the way they need to work to excel.