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

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.

I recently posed the following question to a group of teens participating in People Change People’s The 6Teens Project: “How would you like adults to respond when you make a poor decision?” One student, whom I’ll call Heather, answered, “We don’t want them to think this one choice is who we are.” For example, if she cut class, she would like her teacher to not view her as Heather: the girl that cuts class.

Heather made a great point. We ought not to define a person by one decision. Such a narrow focus will overlook valuable aspects of Heather’s character, such as how she responds to her poor choice and the corresponding consequences. Our scope of inspection needs to be broader. We would be foolish to attempt to understand a novel by reading only the first sentence of each chapter. (I tried that in middle school. My grade on the quiz corresponded directly to my knowledge, or lack thereof.)

People are like books: between two covers a reader finds conflict, success, failure, and beauty. Our reading literacy, as I mentioned in May’s newsletter, is a gauge of our ability to plumb the depths of a book and comprehend the complexity of plot, character development, argument, and intent. Doing so requires that we develop more than merely our ability to read words. Likewise, the ability to read people—what I call Relational Literacy—requires comparable, if not superior skills. Relational Literacy is the measure of our capacity to truly understand and connect with another person.

Relational Literacy requires two indispensable elements:

1. A desire to learn. We welcome surprising twists and turns in a good book. We ought to do the same with people.

2. Understanding finite events in their larger context. Hold loosely to the actions of another as you would the cryptic lines of a poem. We gain clarity only by reading and rereading the lines with a tenacity to understand.

Developing our Relational Literacy helps us better understand people; their successes, failures, joys, and sorrows. It is true that our choices are in many respects the ink we use to write our life’s story. But we need to patiently let the plot unfold in others. We do well to extend the same patience and empathy to our own life story.

In the foreword to his book Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman differentiates between George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s prophesies for the future. Postman devotes the remainder of his book to demonstrating how Huxley, not Orwell, is right. The following excerpt from Postman’s foreword illustrates how he views these contrasting perspectives:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Postman argues that the media and its ability to amuse us has played an enormous role in our becoming a bibliophobic, information-gluttonous culture for whom truth is as interesting as reruns of Flipper. If Postman is correct, how can we square off with this nearly ubiquitous force? Increase our media literacy.

Years ago I met with a group of teens in a focus group. Part of our conversation included a discussion about the media. One of the teens admonished, “Nothing makes teens angrier than when they realize something is controlling them. If you want teens to resist the power of the media, help them see the ways the media controls them!” He had a point. Teens despise control; recognize how the media controls them and teens might be less likely to fall prey to the media’s persuasion. This is part of the picture, but I think we can build on it.

Media literacy is similar to reading literacy: to be more literate we must grasp the languages to such a degree that we’re able to comprehend the meaning implicit in their message. We must pay close attention not only to what they say, but how they deliver their message. A person is more literate in regard to reading when she is able to not merely read the words, but can grasp the craft of writing, language, plot development, and context. Media literacy is more than hearing and understanding the message from the media. We can broaden our media literacy, as we do with reading literacy, by examining the modes by which media communicate their message.

Grab a magazine and flip to an advertisement. What is the message of the advertisement? Now consider how the ad delivers its message. What tactics does the ad employ to endear you to the product? Where in the magazine does the ad appear and why would that matter? Consider what you would see if you could broaden the frames of the photography in the ad. What are they not showing in the ad and why? What don’t they include in this pseudo-reality that we know to be true about real reality? We can develop similar questions for other media that can help us expand our media literacy.

The media’s power to warp reality is alarming. Yet the task of developing media literacy is not anti-media: It is a quest to understand what the media does to us and its potential to erode our autonomy as free-thinking individuals grounded in reality. A camera, for example, cannot capture reality. “Not only can the camera lie; it always lies,” goes Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous saying. Yet we can readily confuse the images for what is real and true.

What are we to do? We gain independence from the media and regain a footing in reality when we work to comprehend the media languages and how they communicate their messages. We then not only understand media messages, more importantly, we recognize how the media communicates.

Boosting our media literacy is a worthy and difficult task. For more reading on this topic, consider reading more of Neil Postman’s work. Propaganda and The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul, also address this topic with remarkable clarity.

I’ve been reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time since eighth grade. I have fond memories of Ms. Clark reading this classic aloud. She dimmed the lights for a calming, dramatic effect. Her reading was evocative and inspiring. The images of Maycomb are vivid to me even now. The subject matter would prohibit me from doing so, but imagine I instructed my seven-year-old daughter to read To Kill a Mockingbird. She could piece together most of the words and sentences. When she confronted unfamiliar words she could ask for help. By the end of the book she would have a good sense of the story, enough so that she too might be upset and saddened by the injustices Harper Lee so powerfully unfurls. She’s literate, is she not?

As I am coming to understand, the question ought not to be binary; either my daughter is literate, or she is not. Rather, we should ask: How literate is she? Between now and the time my daughter is in eighth grade and more fortified to digest such a book, she will read more about the history of the South. In particular she will likely broaden her understanding of its complex cultural history. Perhaps we’ll even visit. It is sad but true: In the next six years she will expand her understanding of topics related to race relations, prejudice, and injustice. This knowledge will deepen her literacy. When at last she takes up To Kill a Mockingbird her comprehension—and therefore literacy—will be far greater and more meaningful. The joy and heartache she experiences while reading will be more profound.

I am writing this newsletter with a two-fold purpose in mind. First, I’d like to encourage our understanding of literacy to move beyond simple reading and comprehension. A higher degree of literacy enables us to fathom depths of meaning that set the stage for us to consider with greater acumen the questions: What is the author saying? What do I think about this and why? How should I live in light of this literature? Deeper understanding is a prerequisite for being a more circumspect individual and citizen. In a culture super-saturated in propaganda, this kind of thoughtfulness is essential to preserving and promoting a person’s unique identity, and equipping each individual for the task of shaping a strong civil society. Second, I’m setting in place a springboard from which I’d like to explore the importance of boosting our media and relational literacy. In the newsletters that follow you will, I trust, find common threads that have immediate implications for how we choose to interact with our world.

The following exchange—taken from the 1987 film Raising Arizona—between prison inmate Hi (played by Nicolas Cage) and his parole board ranks high on my list of memorable dialogues:

Parole board chairman: They’ve got a name for people like you, Hi. That name is called “recidivism.” Repeat offender! Not a pretty name, is it, Hi?

Hi: No, sir. That’s one bonehead name, but that ain’t me anymore.

Parole board chairman: You’re not just telling us what we want to hear?

Hi: No, sir, no way.

Parole board member: ‘Cause we just want to hear the truth.

Hi: Well, then I guess I am telling you what you want to hear.

Parole board chairman: Boy, didn’t we just tell you not to do that?

Hi: Yes, sir.

Parole board chairman: Okay, then.

Like so much in life, this scene is funny because it reflects something true about human nature. The parole board is dubious of Hi’s claims to reform. They don’t see him as someone capable of making anything other than “bonehead” choices. Our perceptions of others, especially people we consider challenging or complex, inform our expectations of their behavior and abilities. You have probably read studies in which school administrators tell teachers their classes comprise either high- or low-achieving students. The teachers believe this assessment and set expectations commensurate with their perception of student capabilities. Though the classes are actually homogenous, as far as previous performance is concerned, the “high-achieving” students outperform the “low achievers.”

We are all prone to categorizing others. This person is stingy. That person is particular. In many respects we can’t help this, nor is there anything wrong with forming perceptions. How can we not? We can enhance the health of our personal and professional relationships by making these perceptions pliable. Doing so extends to others an opportunity to teach us. When we become students of others we allow them to clarify our perceptions. Our relationships are then more authentic because they are rooted in a more accurate understanding of the other.

I find the following thought experiment to be rewarding, especially in reference to my closest friends and family. Fresh aspects of their character and personality broaden and correct my previous perceptions. They are more real to me. I can relate with them in a way that is more authentic and enlivening. I encourage you to think of one person in your life whom you experience as particularly tricky and enigmatic, then:

1. Imagine this person looking you in the eye and saying, “How do you see me?”

2. Formulate an honest response. Go ahead and generalize like crazy. Wrap this person up in a box and assume for a moment this is accurate. Give your brain permission to think you’ve got this person figured out. What you are doing is creating an accurate assessment of your existing perception of this person.

3. Now brainstorm some alternate perceptions. Over-generalized perceptions don’t have room for exceptions. So hunt for them. To do this you have to swivel around the person to gain unique vantage points. In what settings might this person do something that would broaden your existing perception? Picture this person at home, in a car, in a garden, with a pet, on a plane. How might seeing them in these various settings help fill out your perceptions?

4. In the next week note the exceptions to your previous perceptions. You will have to look hard and not be derailed by the experiences that reinforce your original over-generalized perception. Fighting this tendency is your task. This can only enhance how you relate to, and enjoy, this individual.

Look for and expect others to surprise you. Extend to others the invitation to teach you truths about their character and personality. Grant them the freedom to not only correct existing perceptions, but also add new dimensions to your understanding.

In February’s newsletter I championed a more holistic approach to the field of prevention that addresses the sources of risk behavior. In this second installment I advocate personalization over standardization of educational approaches.

Last week I spoke with the director of a youth organization I’ve been working with for several years. Her group is transitioning from a standardized education model to a more personalized one. The director described the initial training for the original program implementation. “We were basically trained to deliver a script,” she told me. Her observation succinctly captured a core tenet of the standardized approach. Hatched in the industrial revolution to promote a “consistent product” (I grieve to think that we would deign to refer to humans and their ideas as “product”), this relic prevails today. We have come to value standards and fidelity to such an extreme that we have marginalized the very elements that can promote behavior change. Standardized educational methods, while they may be earnest in their desire for bringing about positive change, consume precious resources and limit educational effectiveness and efficiency. To recoup these losses and to bring greater benefit to the youth we serve, I believe we must transition from standardized education to a more personalized model. Personalized education does not mean that we deliver a different program to every student. It means we retool our methods to provide every student with the requisite freedom, trust, and safety to make the education his or her own.

Consider the following: You deliver a “Stop Smoking” message to a group of teens and survey them afterward. You’re encouraged by the test results. In each of the key areas students demonstrate positive responses. Nearly all of the students, for example, agree smoking is not in their best interest. You then sit down with the class and pose one final question, “Can you tell me what this message of not smoking means to you?” Thirty students equals 30 unique meanings—and it is at the level of meaning that we must operate if we are to make a positive difference. It’s all too feasible that we could find consistency among student recall that would make the industrialist proud. The questions on the survey only help you measure how well you do in standardized terms. But accurate recall does not make for better decisions, for the simple reason that a student’s ability to recall data has little to do with whether the data has any meaning—and therefore any power. Behavior change is preceded by a process wherein meaningless content becomes meaningful. Personalized education encourages students to partake in this process.

One simple step you can take toward helping students make your message their own is to pose these questions that pertain to meaning during your presentation:

What do you think about this message? How do you relate to this message? How might this message affect your life? If this message seems irrelevant, please, by all means tell me in detail how this seems irrelevant.

Note the freedom and multiple points of entry these questions offer students.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Prevention education should have standards for content. Standards help provide consistency and program fidelity, components that are essential at a number of levels, not the least of which are assessment and evaluation. So while content is something we should define in clear terms, the process of learning–in order to be meaning-filled and potent–should encourage exploration and student process. The message has to progress from being ours to being owned by the students; from being pertinent from our perspective, to becoming a transformative element in how students see themselves and the world. Only when students personalize our message can we have any confidence that our work is effective. To ensure the most promising outcomes possible we must retool our training and implementation.

I was presenting on this topic a couple weeks ago in Florida when one participant noted what I believe is the primary reason we shy away from personalizing education, no matter how much good we think this will bring to students: “It feels really vulnerable,” she said. She got it. More than our fear of getting in trouble for not fulfilling standards, there is a deeper fear, multifaceted, that sabotages our efforts. I suspect, based on my own experience, it’s one of the most powerful fears–fear of the unknown. We wonder, “If I give students freedom, what might they say or do?” This is one reason we’re drawn to standardized education. In it we discover safety and control. It provides a Trojan horse within which we can house our fears. We do well to recognize this, enter classrooms anyway, and open the horse. An honest assessment of our fears is a bold first step that will help us be more effective.

Each of us hopes that our work in prevention education will help youth surmount substantial obstacles. We address this goal in prevention education best not by telling students about something, but instead helping them come to know our message in a personal way. Only then can the power and richness of this message help create the positive change we all seek.

Let’s pretend you have a serious weed problem in your yard. Possible solutions include:

1. Applying weed killer

2. Enhancing the soil and planting more grass

Carrying this analogy to the realm of prevention programs and policies, my observation is that most efforts have concentrated on “killing the weeds” by setting up funding streams that target specific risk behaviors among youth. Risk behaviors such as alcohol and tobacco use, sex, and suicide, all have their own funding streams. The idea behind these streams is to create programs that focus on reducing the prevalence of a particular behavior. Having worked in prevention for some time now, I’ve developed two main concerns with this approach:

1) “Prevention” as a term doesn’t seem helpful. There are times we certainly want to prevent things. I prevent my two-year-old from running into the road, for example. I’ve counseled youth and tried to prevent them from taking their own life. But prevention should describe only a portion of my efforts. Instead of trying to keep youth from doing certain things, we should inspire youth toward something better. When I think of the term “prevention” I picture standing in a doorway. Above the door is a plaque with the name of the behavior I’m trying to prevent. I don’t need to say a thing. My position says it all: Don’t go into this room. But what do we know about human nature, especially youth? They are intrigued most by what we forbid. By trying to block the behavior we may be drawing attention to it. I believe that if we can inspire youth toward something better, we have hope of succeeding in guiding them away from poor choices.

2) Risk behaviors travel in clusters. Anyone in the field of prevention will agree. Teens who smoke pot are more likely to drink alcohol, have sex, and so on. But our government addresses each of these behaviors not as facets of a whole, but as separate isolated behaviors. There are excellent programs that have long known this and attempt to address the interconnected nature of the behaviors. But this should be the norm, not the exception. Federal resources that fund such programs would do well to allocate their funding in ways that mirror the reality in which these risk behaviors occur.

There are groups and some funding that address the relational and environmental landscape–the soil–in which youth grow, some of which is downright uninhabitable. I hope this holistic approach will become the standard, for it’s at the level of the soil that we infuse youth with the nutrients to grow. Rather than restricting our view of youth to a single, undesirable behavior, we should target deeper elements that give rise to behavior, healthy and unhealthy.

Another tragic side-effect of these splintered funding streams is that the process encourages cronyism and adverse competition. Each prevention field has within it strong, vocal camps that fiercely defend their territory. They believe they are right, others are wrong. They believe they deserve the money more than others. They really believe this. In some cases, they are right. There are many organizations whose efforts deserve recognition and accolades. These groups should inspire others to serve youth in profound ways. But what happens all too often is that organizations within a field square off against each other and against other fields–forgetting that we are here to serve youth, not ourselves.

Prevention groups can encourage work that changes the lives of youth, no matter what funding source paid for it. We can work to develop and refine programs that appreciate the complexity of risk behaviors. Programs can address not merely behaviors, but the deeper causes of behaviors–like one’s sense of self-efficacy, worth, and personal beliefs and values. The behaviors are most conspicuous, but we should not identify them as the primary problem.

Jamie Oliver caught my attention last month when he received the prestigious TED Prize for his work to “create change on both the individual and governmental level.” I had been aware of his work to encourage people in England to make healthier choices in their lifestyle and diet. Many of you are probably aware of Oliver’s efforts to ban unhealthy food in England’s schools in favor of a diet based on fresh, nutritious fare.

Fewer people may be familiar with Fifteen Foundation, which Oliver started in 2002. Each year his foundation trains teens in the restaurant business. Most significant to me is that these teens often have criminal records, a history of drug use, and other high-risk behavior. At first glance these youth don’t necessarily commend themselves to the culinary arts. What’s clear is that Fifteen Foundation is the vehicle for human enrichment. While Fifteen’s cadets become exceptional chefs, more importantly the Foundation encourages youth to develop character, self-respect, and ambition.

Trusting relationships between mentors and young people are at the heart of this remarkable enterprise. The training process utilizes an apprenticeship model in which the master chef shadows the apprentice. Mentor-chefs introduce youth to food, farming, and cooking. Throughout the apprenticeship they also help the youth with a range of personal challenges.

None of this good work would be possible without a funadamental shift in perspective on the part of Oliver and his staff. Most of the world sees these youth as destined to a life of crime, drug use, and dependency on government resources. Fifteen Foundation views youth through a different lens–seeing beyond the exterior and behavior, the coarseness and tattoos, to unique humans endowed with brilliance, gifts, and promise.

Eating good food is not only healthy, it can also be beautiful. Oliver, through the vehicle of food, is introducing youth to a higher plane of living. I hope he inspires you as he has me, and that we all can find ways to emulate his quality of mentorship in our own relationships.