Birth2Work Radio Show

So what is media literacy? It is an expansion of the idea about how competent and able a person is in communicating with symbols (i.e. sounds, letters, and pictures). The Center for Media Literacy defines it as “the entire process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating media.” Most agree on the basic definition of literacy as being able to read and write on paper. But today literacy also means being able to comprehend and reveal meaning in all our current tools of communication, such as film, public speaking, text messaging, acting, and computer graphics. Someone who is media literate, then, can communicate using a variety of media and technology to share meaning, and is able to critically think about the construction of that media and its meaning when made by others. But why does media literacy matter? Think for a moment about all of the media you may use in a single day, from radio, to cell phone, computer, or DVDs. Then think about how much time each one of those devices demands, not just from you, but from your children. On top of that, you are not fully in control of your own personal devices because of the careful placement of products and advertising messages within them. Everyone knows that advertisers are trying to sell you stuff in commercials. How much more do you have to understand? More than understanding the mechanics of how media is made, and the surface level understanding that advertisers want you to buy their product, a media literate person understands the financial, political, emotional, and branding symbols that make up the entire finished media product. Moreover, the media literate person recognizes that the final media product may not be as blatant as a commercial, but more discreet, as on product placement, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. Media messages are pervasive, and a fully literate person today not only understands the sounds, letters, and pictures told by family and friends, but he is able to identify and distinguish the symbols and messages of media. This ability to truly understand what you are seeing and listening to is a learned skill. It is not innate. For thousands of years we shared the human story between and among ourselves either orally, as the native cultures shared stories about their daily activities around a fire, or by painting pictures on cave walls. Advancing oral traditions created the wandering story teller, and then we began writing our stories down. Each of these methods called on us to engage a broad range of our own senses – we saw, listened, and analyzed, spoke, and drew about what we did in our every day lives—or maybe what our ancestors did. But we sorted out and internalized what we were told based on comparing what we heard with our own life experiences. Our ancestors had to have rich perceptive skills because they depended on them for life. Now, roll forward several hundred years and in comes technology. Thrusting pictures, sounds, and stories on us with breathtaking rapidity, technology now introduces us to innumerable worlds with which we most likely have no real life experience. Suddenly we find ourselves intimately isolated from each other in a world drowning in media. And every industry that relies heavily on technology to promote itself, has failed to expand the number of people who want to innovate or be part of it in the future. Now instead of our own activities, we watch others do it through media. Where are the hordes of new and upcoming musicians in a world where music is everywhere? We don't dance much on our own now. We let professionals sing our national anthem because we have lost our national voice. Few of us have confidence enough to cook a fresh meal for our families, but we watch others while eating take-out. What happened? It is beginning to become obvious that a wholesale rush into electronic engagement without barriers has come at the expense of human contact. Small children identify more with the life of Hannah Montana

This program is a collective tribute to the work of Dr. H. Stephen Glenn. Our guest, Dr. Bruce Colston, was a personal friend of Dr. Glenn’s, a protégé, and eventually a Master Teacher of Dr. Glenn’s work. Dr. Glenn is also the gentleman to whom B2W co-founder Rick Stephens and I dedicated our book, The System: Igniting the Soul of Commerce. One of the many areas in which Bruce and I see eye to eye, is in the extraordinary value of sharing the work and research of Dr. Glenn to as many people as possible. It resonates with everyone. Every day, Birth2Work is involved in inspiring stakeholders in communities to align and integrate actions towards creating environments that support the building of capable people for the future. This work is rooted in the results of Dr. Glenn’s analysis of nearly 3000 studies of human behavior and interaction that served as a foundation for his popular books to follow. He served four Presidential administrations and won many honors along the way for his skillful synthesis of data, in which he uncovered the reasons why America’s high school graduates, in 1963, turned achievement downward for the first time in American history. Dr. Glenn’s written works, that resulted from his research over the years, including 7 Strategies for Developing Capable Students and Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World, as well as the follow-up training series, were a huge success and a monumental achievement. They are what inspired us to continue to acknowledge and acclaim his work and adopt his principals for raising capable kids along the way. Dr. Glenn’s books are exactly what people who work with youngsters and teens need right now, and we are honored to further share and discuss his work with Bruce. Through Bruce’s experience, we get a deeper insight into the man and his process for identifying the seven critical skills and perceptions necessary to be successful in life. These skills and perceptions do not naturally emerge as one grows up. Nor can they be taught in the classroom. Kids spend just 12% of their young lives in school classrooms, after all. These seven qualities must be taught by and practiced with parents and caregivers in the other 88% of their young lives. And that’s why this radio program is the beginning of our series called “The Other 88%.” In this show, and in coming weeks, we will further develop the idea of the roles and responsibilities of parents and community stakeholder leaders for creating the citizens of tomorrow. What has made itself abundantly clear is that the use and understanding of technology, as well as one’s own social capacity, are both necessary for the capable worker and citizen of tomorrow to thrive. Technological interfaces continue to grow more and more simple. There’s a reason 5 and 6 years olds are able to write their own iPhone applications, for example. Technology isn’t getting harder to use, it’s getting easier and more ubiquitous. What it can’t be is a stand-in for human contact. Because what we know to be true about every situation in which the highest available technology was utilized, is that humanity made the difference. Capable people – those who believe they can, that they matter, that they are not victims, that are self-disciplined, communicate well with others, are responsible and accountable for who they are, and show good judgment—are the ones that fully understand how to apply technology to life. They do not stand behind technology as a substitute for living. - Elane V. Scott www.Birth2Work.org

This week, as Americans, we observe a holiday of historical significance to our country. The first holiday to celebrate the abundance of the fall harvest evolved over time to celebrate family and offer thanks for the bounty in our lives. Sometimes the bounty is family, sometimes health, or financial resources, and always there’s a certain amount of thanks for the turkey, stuffing, and pie. But at its origins, this holiday began as a celebration of abundance and community. When the pilgrims and Native Americans first came together over dinner, these two disparate groups recognized their shared fate. They became stakeholders of their mutual success. With that, the Birth2Work Radio program we are sharing with you this week is about the value in, and necessity of, community. At the recent high school drop out prevention summit that Birth2Work helped to facilitate, we actually gave CDs of this program to each of the 500+ attendees. Our guests are Robert Sampson, Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, and Mario Small, Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. These two are nationally revered voices in the conversation on the importance of social efficacy, that is, “the willingness of neighbors to intervene on behalf of the common good in a community,” as defined by Sampson. Both men have done extensive academic research on the topic, finding conclusively that the scaffolding supporting successful communities has little to do with money and resources. Communities thrive when neighbors look out for one another, when all adults call on all young people to be in school, when everyone holds each other accountable for keeping the streets clean. Environs matter. Discipline matters. A shared understanding among a group of people that what one does intimately affects their neighbor’s success, and that each can help his neighbor to ensure mutual success and abundance, is what the Thanksgiving celebration honors. I invite all of you to download this program and to listen with your “holiday ears.” As you share the joys of friends and family, with everyone doing their part for the shared success of the holiday dinner, consider the value in expanding that commitment to your community-at-large. Because while the harvest might be easier to acquire today, the opportunities in recognizing and acting with the greater good of the community in mind is the same today as it was in 1621. Activities by the people for the people of a community are the best investments in its future. - Elane V. Scott www.Birth2Work.org

Dear Valued Stakeholder, As with every show we present on Birth2Work Radio, we are extremely proud and honored to welcome today’s guest. One of the notable things about today’s guest though, is that you’ve probably already crossed paths with her in the general media. Oprah, Time Magazine, and a New York Times best-seller all tend to get a person’s name and story into the public consciousness pretty fast! But it was not for her notoriety that I was humbled to speak with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor for today’s show - the fifth in our wide-reaching health series- it was to hear the words of a scientist describing how her mother helped her to heal after technology had done all it could. Dr. Jill (as she likes to be called) repeats parts of her deeply personal and profound story about her eight year journey to recovery after experiencing a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996. On paper, Dr. Jill’s recovery would tend to read more as fiction for a large part of the world’s scientific community, not because of a lack of understanding for the possibility of some stroke recovery, but for the extent of her recovery. After brain surgery to remove a tumor the traditional medical view for anyone having a stroke of her magnitude was to leave them without much hope for a life of any value. There was not much more they could do for her with known technology. So everyone moved on, except her mother, who, when confronted with her daughter’s limp body, responded with a biological instinct. She wrapped her arms around her as she did when Jill was a baby, and went back in time. Jill, she thought, needed to move and rebuild her brain/body connection just as she had done when she was a child. Movement was mandatory. Her mother’s instincts and her commitment were spot on. Dr. Jill’s recovery is now a sparkling ray of hope for millions. Eight years later, with only some loss of memory serving as a daily reminder of something physical that was taken away, Dr. Jill has stepped onto the public stage to tell her story of her physical recovery. (Watch the taped presentation she did for a recent TED conference to get the full story. It’s linked to below here in our media section.) What happened to her professionally, in her own scientific community, though, is a different story. Our conversation yielded an “ah hah” for Dr. Jill, as well. “What if,” I asked her, “other mothers used the same process she put you through for your brain recovery to optimize their own babies growth and development? What might happen?” Dr. Jill hadn’t thought about it and expressed delight at the opportunity to consider it. “No one else has every asked me that question!” Because of her re-established ability to articulate, as an adult, what her brain went through to become whole again, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor has been able to give language to processes and stages of development in the growth of the relationship between brain and body that mothers and care givers have intuited throughout time. At Birth2Work, we believe that Jill Bolte Taylor's recovery is a fantastic story of how technology can technically help some someone to stay alive and how biology and a mother's instinct can help someone to truly live. - Elane V. Scott www.Birth2Work.org

Few key words drive business leaders' conversations these days more than "creativity" and "innovation", especially when they're talking about the workforce. Today's competitive work environment typically requires more than the ability to do the same task over and over. It requires an ability to see new and better ways to improve current tasks or make up something new altogether. Old skills may have been worth $25 an hour to businesses that needed a pair of reliable hands and a steady eye to watch the assembly lines. But those jobs have generally gone away and a new breed of worker has emerged. This one thinks differently, knows more, and looks for ways to add value to the job he or she is doing every day. Technology is a mandate and is speeding things up in the office and at home, but do the many programs and pieces of hardware inspire real creativity, or just reaction to the creativity of others? There is an intense global interest in how to promote real creativity and how to identify the conditions under which it flourishes, yet few really seem to know how to define it. On this Birth2Work Radio program our guest is Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, an internationally recognized speaker and leader in the development of tools for teaching and sharpening creativity. He discusses with me and co-host Rick Stephens the necessity for creativity in the workplace, the use of unprecedented technological tools that can support innovation, and the unintended consequence of the loss of opportunities to practice being creative in our youth because our education systems are required to constrain differences in learning in order to meet test goals. What is creativity? As Robinson defines it: creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. Largely, the public eschews its own sense of creativity, pushing it into the realm of a select few, and usually only those in the arts. But in business, leaders are now cultivating organizational dynamics where creative ideas are routinely sought and encouraged. But, no matter the discipline, it takes confidence to try something new. That means when stretching to try out an original idea, there must also must be freedom to fail, as opposed to mistakes being stigmatized. There has to be a culture where it’s OK to make mistakes in order for creativity to thrive. Consider this story about the scientist Jonas Salk who, when asked where he got the courage to go on trying after he failed so many times to find the cure for polio, quickly relayed that his mother never criticized him when he made a mistake. One morning, at a very tender age, he tried to use his full (though small) hand to pull the milk bottle from the refrigerator. When it went crashing to the floor he glanced quickly at his mother who stood nearby and she just shook head and smiled. “I guess you’ll have to figure out another way to get milk for your cereal.” And she turned back to he work. This story well illustrates one of Robinson’s key principle on creativity: it is tough to be creative in the abstract. Creative people are in control of something, like Salk was in charge of his personal experience, or others in charge of a well-developed skill, or a body of knowledge, and those people have likely been validated for one or all of those things. They can then take their experiences or their knowledge and with a little imagination, conceive of whole new systems and/or applications. That is creativity! Life experiences at home like the one Salk talked about, and programs and lessons (at school) that encourage young people to make things up and figure things out are what ready them to become successful adults. It is important to learn to question, in all forms, and put new knowledge to use right away. People who are ready for a lifetime of gainful employment and active citizenship, who add value to their companies, innovate ideas for their own businesses, and/or serve in their families and communities are both creative and

Fix the System, Not Just the Problem

* * * ##Dear Valued Stakeholders, Our series on the understanding of systems thinking in the six economic sectors of government, business, health, media, education, and non-profits has drawn responses from listeners all over the country. It is not surprising. People who have grown up in industrial societies often get enthused about systems thinking and dynamic modeling because they believe that in the analysis of the interconnection of so many moving parts, it just might be possible to predict the future! Alas, it is not so. For example, self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems such as our guests have talked about are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable by reducing the actions of the whole system down to the parts and trying to understand them. In truth, when dealing with the interplay and dance of systems in our lives, we can never fully understand them. They are full of uncertainty and for any objective, other than the most trivial, we can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship with any systems behavior, each other, or institutions we create if we try to do it from the role of the conqueror, a lesson we have learned from each of our guests. In this series we have been talking with people who have used the systems thinking approach to shape sustainable businesses. We have engaged Ray Haynes (6/23/09), an aerospace and corporate business leader who works inside and outside of his profession to foster the development of engineering and leadership talent. We have talked with Phil Schlechty (6/30/09), founder of the Schlechty Leadership Center in Louisville, Kentucky who trains successful education administrators, with a strong focus on the importance of relationships between schools and the communities they serve. Becki Donatelli (7/7/09), Chairman of Campaign Solutions, founder of NextDoorSearch.com and NextDoorPolitics.com, talked with us about how she is bringing national campaign and fundraising success closer to the community level. Last week, we talked with Dr. Peter Levy (7/14/09) about lending his professional stature to the support of individuals and families, encouraging them to value care with a focus on the whole body system, instead of just the parts. Today we bring systems thinking in the attention of media folks Linda Seger, a long time Hollywood script consultant, and writer and published author, Pamela Jaye Smith, Both women can display significant resumes packed with worlds of creative writing and consulting and end up taking this discussion far beyond the media sector. Similar to systems thinking is what our guests call “web thinking” (not the internet web, visualize spider webs). It's the idea that interconnectedness and collaboration yields greater results, more often, than solo action. Just as the director of a movie (or mayor of a community) holds a vision and acts as the ultimate decision maker when necessary, by seeking out engagement from the leaders of the different departments (the "parts") he/she ultimately succeeds in improving "the whole." Leaders don’t have to be hierarchical to be effective and yet very often, leaders, for their own myriad reasons “go it alone.” Linda and Pamela discuss the application of web thinking in the professional entertainment industry today, but also go deeper into the stories and myths that inform creative minds and how that affects the innovations they create. Join us for a rich and tantalizing peek at the worlds of two women who play well in the Hollywood scene, but most often prefer to rely on the web of relationships they have built for success in luck, love, life and learning! 

In honor of the celebration of the Moon Landing, Rick and I sat down and gave our musings about that historic event while in Alpine, Texas where the first astronauts tested the first lunar lander. Enjoy our commentary in a specially recorded program just for the moon landing. It has never lost its luster as the most sophisticated, systems thinking project ever conceived and carried about by human kind.

*“Education is a people profession. Not a program profession.” – Jim Cox* ##Dear Valued Stakeholders, I used to be one of those people who thought that I wasn’t very good at math. I didn’t have any strong feelings about it, but I didn’t put a lot of effort into excelling at it either. Somehow, like many youngsters then and now, I had deluded myself into thinking I just wouldn’t use math when I got away from school and into my “real life”. If you’re smiling now, you are likely one of those who did well in math from the get-go. Or you are one of those who, just like me, figured out later that mathematical thinking is required for life. (Period!) No one can get by without mentioning something in the language of numbers – distances, sizes, frequency of occurrence, savings, retirement accounts, bank balance, bandwidth, costs, percentages, time, weight, intensity, endurance, dates – the list is endless because every action we do in life can be measured as some fraction of a bigger picture. Data that drives our world is delivered as numbers, then analyzed, studied and reported out as proof of change, no change, or need for change. We are a data driven world. The question is, with all the numbers that are tossed about in the media and between colleagues, how do we know what the numbers mean? For educators and the general public, school-wide test scores are an example of numbers acquired to assure the public that their schools are delivering a quality education to their young. These test scores have become so pervasive in the conversation about quality education that many people accept them as being just that - accurate measures of quality. But is that really true? Our guest on today’s B2W Radio program, Jim Cox, is about to give you the rest of the story. Jim is held at the highest level of respect and trust among education leaders throughout the state of California and the rest of the country as someone who knows how to make difficult measurement and statistical concepts easier to understand and apply. Jim doesn’t claim to be a statistical expert in all economic areas, but in his charmingly curmudgeon style, he makes it very easy for others to learn some tough mathematical processes needed to operate in today’s data driven education environment. He has a love of numbers and is clear about what they do and don’t tell us. He is a consultant, facilitator, and evaluator for school districts engaged in school restructuring, testing, and other forms of assessment and program evaluation. But Jim’s enthusiasm for data isn’t so much about the numbers themselves; it’s about what the numbers hide and what they reveal. He’ll talk about how, when used thoughtfully, measurements can have a huge impact in support of truly valuable programs, or they can be used to destroy others. As a citizen, a business leader, and a parent, you need to know the difference. The key to using data is to first define the word. One of the six steps in the Birth2Work process for aligning communities to solve some of today’s complex problems is to “agree on common language.” That means we don’t assume we agree on what key words mean when we are working together. Here’s an example. My radio co-host, Rick, often talks about an experience he had when listening to a county superintendent give data some years ago, about how few students drop-out from the schools he was in charge of, compared to the rest of the state and the country. The superintendent reported his drop out average in a single digit number. Just that morning, in the local paper, Rick had been reading about the astonishingly high number of dropouts in the state and found the superintendent’s number suspect. “Really?” he questioned. Rick thought for another moment, deciding he and the superintendent weren’t defining the term “drop out” in the same way. He framed a different question, “What is the average drop out rate of students who start high school as freshmen...

*“Education is a people profession. Not a program profession.” – Jim Cox* ##Dear Valued Stakeholders, Taking tests of any kind has to be right up at the top of the list of life’s most stressful experiences. Your heart may pound, your hands may sweat...then you get to the test site and the room has no air conditioning, so you’re overheating. Finally you get around to taking the test but you’re unfamiliar with the format and half the questions are about things you haven’t even studied. Sounds like a nightmare, right? Now consider that the results of the test you are taking actually won’t affect you. They affect your teacher…your school…the school district. Now you don’t really care so much, so you start filling in “C” all the way down the answer column. But what you don’t realize is that it’s the cumulative results of these tests that will yield numbers used to evaluate the performance of educators. The results of standardized test scores determine the rank that every school gets locally, regionally, and nationally. So how can the true quality of instruction offered by a school be fairly evaluated given all these outside factors? Our returning guest, Jim Cox, has been a teacher and student in the world of education and statistics for 40 years. And he asked the same question. When schools started getting assigned labels such as “best” or “worst” (mostly by the media) based on reported test scores, the schools that scored the highest were automatically titled “the best” and the ones that scored the lowest were called “the worst”. But Jim realized from his own experience that that was not a fair corollary. The issues noted above (physical environment, test taking attitudes of the students and teachers, familiarity with the material, and test-taking ability) are four of the six variables that come together to produce student test scores and, ultimately, produce the score that a school gets. The fifth variable is demographics. Not socio-economic demographics, but things such as the percentage of non-English speakers or special education students that take standardized test and, therefore, affect school averages. The sixth reason test scores come out the way they do is quality of instruction. So the continuum “best schools = highest test scores” is not accurate. In our conversations on this program with Jim, our goal was to provide some critical insights into the hidden world of test taking and why test scores alone can’t help us plan for the future. Why then do we put so much attention on them? Because test scores are half of the data picture needed to DO something to improve long-term performance. Just what are the TWO types of data that are crucial to performance improvement? The first type is test scores; better known as outcome data. The second type of data is process data. Process data describes the quality of the programs and steps taken to improve performance. Test scores may be a status report of what knowledge or capabilities someone had at a particular moment in time, but they do not help us know anything about the quality of preparation or programs that the test taker experienced before taking the test. That process data is critical because it’s only the process that can be changed in the future. What do we mean by process data versus outcome data? What we need to know to improve academic test scores, or any scores for that matter, is really about the process of how we prepare ourselves and about the environment we are tested in. We discuss the quality of programs, measures of success, and what we mean when we talk about the characteristics of a high quality program. No stakeholder leader’s understanding of how to attract and retain quality citizens, businesses, education institutions or other major services in a community would be complete without an ability to understand how to continuously improve the quality of programs that serve them. Here is how. ![Elane V. Scott](/sites/www....

*“As go the schools, so goes the nation.” – Larry Ausmus* ##Dear Valued Stakeholders, Parents running their children around as they get ready for the start of the new school year is a familiar ritual for most of us in towns across America. It’s as if there is a natural order in the world for a little while as we prepare for another year of education and activity to get underway. One of my own favorite back-to-school rituals was one I learned from a terrific motivational speaker, Hilary “Zig” Ziglar, many years ago. In one of his speeches to a family audience one evening he revealed a little secret about how he talked with his daughter’s teacher on back-to- school-night. He said he would take the teacher aside and quietly let her know that his daughter had had a really amazing summer. She had grown and matured in so many ways and he was convinced that this was going to be her best year ever. He just wanted the teacher to know that he was going to be her partner and together they would be a team and share the work and the excitement of helping her have that really great year. Zig Ziglar let the teacher know he was going to share her responsibility for his daughter’s education that year. He was a stakeholder, just as the teacher was a stakeholder, in her education and future success. I like this story because it does precisely what we talk about every week on this program. It points to an alignment around shared vision of success, shared responsibility, and shared language for equal accountability. I did exactly the same thing every year with my daughters and their teachers and I can attest to its value in setting expectations early. On this program, we invite you to listen to education stakeholder Larry Ausmus, an exciting motivational speaker with 38 years of experience in education administration, teaching and human resource management. Our conversation is lively, rich with specifics, and just the right tone for anyone who wants to understand who the OTHER stakeholders in your children’s education are (such as the administration, school board members, and community leaders, local businesses, and parent groups). Educating a child is a team effort, just like playing a ball game, or drill team, or being in a theater production. Larry’s stories from real world experiences will delight and energize you about finding your own “one story” and give you confidence to let the other education stakeholders know you are there to be part of your child’s education team. 

The Education System Beyond the Classroom - It's Everyone's Responsibility

Want Parents to Engage? Pull Down the Barriers.

Technology + Relationships ➞ Innovation