In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell introduces a study by the social psychologist Howard Leventhal at Yale University, who produced two kinds of booklets detailing the risks of tetanus. Some of the booklets were what he called “high fear” versions and included explicit text and color images about the horrors of tetanus. The other “low fear” versions minimized the risks of tetanus and did not include the images.

The results of this study were notable. Students who received the high-fear booklets were more persuaded of the risks of tetanus and the need for shots, and more inclined to report that they intended to visit the campus health clinic for a vaccine. But all the differences between the two groups vanished when Leventhal looked at how many students actually went to the clinic to receive a vaccination–a scant 3 percent. Leventhal tried the study again with one simple change: the addition of a campus map to the booklet. This raised the vaccination rate equally in both the high-fear and low-fear groups to 28 percent.

Adding the map, Gladwell points out, moved the information from something abstract to something more personal. “And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable,” he writes.

This study highlights a reality we can easily forget: When things become personal they become powerful. Until a concept becomes personal it has little power to influence the decisions we make. We can help people make healthier choices by aiding them in the process of translating the abstract and impersonal into the concrete and personal.

In college I volunteered for Project Open Hand, a nonprofit organization devoted to meeting the nutritional needs of people living with HIV and AIDS, as well as the homebound, critically ill, and seniors. Our job was to prepare and deliver hot meals to people infected with AIDS in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. Most of these people were so ill they could not leave home. Handing a hot meal to another human being living in the shadow of death forever altered my understanding of the disease and its victims. The concept of AIDS became powerful to me because it became personal.

This is the task of education: to make something abstract more personal. This translation must take place for us to say in truth that we and the people we serve have learned anything at all. Whether we experience something firsthand or not, process is what morphs a concept into something more meaningful and personal. Think of process like digestion: We derive sustenance from what we eat by breaking it down and making it part of our bodies.

Are you up for a challenge? The following is an exercise I introduce during my Epic workshops with youth development and prevention organizations. I will give a copy of my new book, The Teen Age, to the first three people who do the following:

1. Commit to trying the following steps.

2. Let me know how it goes.

I’ll coach you through the process ahead of time if you’d like. Send me an email or give me a call. If you are an administrator or director, see if one of your staff will try it.

To increase student process and learning:

1. Begin with the message you bring with you to those you serve. Take, for example, a message about the risks of underage drinking: Being under the influence of drugs will likely damage your health, relationships, and your future.

2. Introduce process to help students break down and personalize the message. A great way to do this is to ask students what questions they have about this truism. They may ask, for example, “What does it mean to be ‘under the influence?’” or, “How can alcohol damage my relationships if I don’t hurt anyone while I’m drunk?” Collect as many questions as you can from students. This helps pique student curiosity–an essential key to process.

3. Trust the process. Ask good questions. Listen. Facilitate dialogue among students. The clarity and meaning that emerge from this will stun you. Keep in mind that the value of process lies in students arriving at their own personal conclusions, not mimicking yours. We short-circuit process if we jump in with our answers before students have had time to process their ideas.

4. Summarize the discussion. Work with students to coalesce the dialogue into a succinct synopsis.

5. Motorize the summary. A more personal understanding led more students at Yale to the campus health clinic. How will a more personal, meaningful understanding of your message influence students’ decisions? Work with your students to arrive at clear, measurable objectives.

Download the three free tools from the Epic website to strengthen this process even more.

I look forward to hearing how your individual processes unfold.

It’s great to be working with you to promote positive change in the lives of others!

Best,

Andrew

Tags: adolescent health, community prevention, prevention program, prevention programs, Talking with teens, teen behavior, youth development

I remember double-checking my pencil before Scantron tests in school to be sure it was a bona fide no. 2 yellow. I feared what would happen if I had used another kind, a no. 2.5, for instance. Over time I came to believe there was but one kind of pencil with which I must select just one answer—and hope that both were correct.

Whether or not we employ the proper pencil, we can’t choose just one single answer to solve most problems in the real world: A doctor is trying to find what might be causing her patient’s unusual symptoms; Apple is trying to figure out its antenna snafu on the iPhone 4; newspapers are trying to figure out how to stay in business. In each case individuals are tapping into their ingenuity to creatively address problems.

Jacqueline Novogratz, Founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, is a model of such ingenuity. In 2001 Novogratz established the Acumen Fund to help address a significant problem: global poverty. The Acumen Fund oversees investments of more than $30 million designated for health care, housing, energy and water.

As we enter a new academic year, how are we preparing our children to tap into and express the kind of ingenuity we see in a person like Jacqueline Novogratz? Sadly, we’ll occupy much of students’ time in preparing them to navigate a no. 2 pencil through a field of Scantron bubbles.

Our educational standards should speak to real challenges being addressed by people like Novogratz, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute—a “think-and-do tank” committed to solving energy resource problems. Such educational standards would then be based on “the actual activities of competent, confident learners when they are genuinely engaged in learning,” to quote Neil Postman in Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Imagine educational standards that:

1. Reward creativity

Irrespective of the outcome, the emphasis of this approach would be on helping students access and exercise their creativity.

2. Reward collaboration

Students would work together, share ideas, sort out conflicts, pool ideas and possible solutions. Real problems require collaboration. That’s what makes solving them fun!

3. Reward failure

Instead of punishing failure and wrong answers we would help students appreciate the instructive power of failure. Failure is among the most potent instructors on earth. Why punish it?

Students entering school this year will bring to the classroom boundless curiosity and problem-solving abilities. Standardized testing is at cross-purposes with the cultivation of these invaluable human resources. In some cases tests are necessary, of course. But we should treat them like holiday decorations; they should gather dust through most of the year. Spend the rest of the time helping students engage with and make sense of life, so they can flourish Novogratz-style. For the groups I’m privileged to serve, this is my resolution for the new school year.