This newsletter covers what happened in October and will give you a heads up on what to look for in November and the months following.

In this issue:

Leadership is a process of engaging people based on needs, values, and skills in meeting the future vision of the organization. Peter Scholtes, a leadership guru, aptly refers to one aspect of leadership as an inner journey. Harold Cruse, author, and historian sees leadership as a moral journey that is dependent upon engaging others based on shared values, goals, and needs. The context in which one leads is always value-laden. Leaders make decisions that reflect their operating values. Those values serve as guides for our thoughts, actions, and relationships. Likewise, how we present our values can positively or negatively affect harmony and productivity.

Let me highlight a situation that a staff member, Ed, shared with me. He was extremely agitated as he recounted the following story: "I don't understand Dan, my team leader, and supervisor. I thought that he liked me, or at minimum, respected me. We have worked well together over the past ten months on this project; and, I have received positive feedback on my performance. He is always cordial at work. Yesterday, I ran into him at the mall with several individuals. I greeted him. The other persons in his group spoke. Although I was only three feet away from him, he ignored me. I know that he saw me. Could it be that his refusal to recognize me is due to our different ethnic identities? Or the orientation of those in his group? I don’t understand his actions. What could be the cause? What’s up with that? Given his actions, how can I trust him as a team leader?”

What is the most appropriate step for Dan to take in rebuilding his relationship with Ed? He has a couple of options: (a) ignore the situation, acting as though nothing has happened; (b) initiate a conversation with Ed and apologize for his behavior; or (c) reflect, assess his behavior, and plan how to repair his relationship with Ed, in a way that is respectful, consistent and responsible. Will Dan challenge himself to grow?

Values can build lasting relationships of trust and respect. How leaders operate can build dynamic relationships, energize people and projects, and move organizations to make a difference in people’s lives. A leader’s values impact the head, the heart, and the humanity of those they serve or engage. The values we espouse can yield rewards when used with consistency and thoughtful communication. How do you demonstrate your values?

“Values are a leader's voice.”
Max DuPree (Leadership Jazz)

Recent Board Meetings

Remember, you can find out the Board’s current work by checking the Academy Board Meeting Agendas and Minutes posted on the Academy members’ page:

September 2020 minutes (approved)

October 2020 minutes (not yet approved)

Summary of October Board meeting work:

In October, the Board

• Approved a Conflict of Interest Policy

• Approved a pilot to create a regional chapter

• Approved the members for the 2021 Nominations Committee and the appointment of Stephen Spicklemire to the Information Director position

• Approved the establishment of the position of Academy Historian and appointment of Peter Smith to the new position

• Approved the dates of January 2-4, 2021 for the virtual winter meeting

• Discussed considerations for using certificates to capture deliberately development expertise

• Discussed ways to clarify the roles of directors

• Discussed the possibility of adopting an Advertising Policy for the monthly newsletter

The Next Board Meeting:  Wednesday, November 11, 2020 (10:30 am EDT)

All Academy members are welcome to participate. You will be able to find the agenda for the meeting as well as the needed information to attend through Zoom on the Academy Member site.

We are moving forward in implementing Strategic Plan Priorities. We invite you to join us on this enriching journey.

The Strategic Planning Committee met on September 23 with a focus on how the Academy can become more developmental in (a) elevating our PE performance, (b) collaborating across plan priorities to strengthen communication and outcomes, and (c) developing a monitoring system to support documentation of plan outcomes. All teams are implementing action plans and seeking other members to join them.

Key highlights of the meeting include:

⇒ The DDO team (goal 2) led a developmental centering exercise to prepare participants to work collaboratively and in concert around our collective work. A centering exercise will be a standing practice for future planning meetings.

⇒ The Business Model team (goal 3) presented a calculation of membership value with a focus on membership development and resource development.

⇒ Multiple communication strategies (goal 4), including a significant social media component, are needed to communicate with the membership. This team is developing a communication plan.

⇒ The recruitment, engagement, and professional development of membership (goal 10) is vital to organizational growth and development. This team is assessing the effectiveness of current outreach strategies and collaborating with the communications team.

Join a team and assist us in achieving the Academy’s 21st-century vision of becoming "a recognized leader in the transformation of education through performance-based learning and growth.”

For meeting notes, see Strategic Planning 2020 site: http://www.processeducation.org/moo/moodle/mod/folder/view.php?id=592

Links to the Strategic Plan and the priorities for this year are below.

Current Strategic Plan (2020-2025)  http://www.processeducation.org/docs/sp2020_2025a.pdf

Current Priorities  http://www.processeducation.org/docs/sp2020_2025_priorities.pdf

We are excited to share news about the 2021 Academy Conference: Experiencing Growth in Times of Change June 24-26, 2021. The Call for Proposals is open NOW!

We invite you to share your experience in researching and creating engaging, effective, and growth-oriented practices during this time of challenge and change throughout education. Whether your focus is at the level of the individual, classroom, or institution, we’d love to hear from you!

Attendance will be 100% virtual including synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Please consider making a proposal to present at this exciting virtual conference. Watch for more information during the next couple months. We hope you will embrace the theme and join us to share your insights and experiences as we share Experiencing Growth in Times of Change.

The Call for Proposals includes these four categories

→ Practitioner Sessions  Practitioner focused sessions offered by individuals or a panel

→ Research Sessions  Research focused sessions shared by individuals or a panel

→ Paper Sessions  Sessions including 2-3 brief topical discussions of papers with follow-up dialogue

→ Hall of Innovation Session(s)  Asynchronous sessions promoting or highlighting specific practices tied to Process Education, created with a brief description of the practice accompanied by a 4-5 slide PowerPoint presentation.

The Conference will include additional sessions and features focused on participants desire for maximum interaction with others in attendance. Additional Conference Design Plans under construction:

Keynote Sessions  Individuals ARE invited to share critical messages related to Academy priorities and of interest to all members. Current Academy President on the first day, Incoming President the second day.

Plenary Sessions  Individuals or panels focusing on one specific topic of interest to the entire membership. Members are free to send suggestions for Plenary speakers to the planning committee members.

Other events currently in the pre-planning stages:

Social events  Planned for each evening after the formal sessions conclude. (Examples might include: IJPE, Self-Growth Community, Professional Development, Racial Justice, etc.)

Mentoring Sessions  Pre-Conference or In-Conference opportunities to meet, allowing new participants to request a mentor pre-conference.

Pre-Conference Workshops  for orienting presenters and participants to the technology and conference online experience.

Visit the 2021 Conference website and stay tuned!

I remember when I was in an after school program as a child and I was told by our facilitator that there were actually multiple levels of understanding and that in my regular school lessons we were only learning at the most basic level. This idea blew my mind. Later I would realize that the instructor was introducing us to Bloom's taxonomy. This memory returned to me once I started teaching because I realized that most of my secondary education never went past level 2. Between the inertia of high school and the poorly written objectives mandated by the college I have found it takes some effort to go beyond level 2 learning in many general education courses. While several modules in the Faculty Guidebook address this, perhaps the most helpful is module 2.2.2 Elevating Knowledge from Level 1 to Level 3 by Kip Nygren. This module was chosen by former president of the Academy, Dan Cordon, who has this to say:

"I teach engineering students from the freshman through senior levels. We want to graduate quality entry-level engineers entering the field at Bloom’s Level 3 (application) or better. For me this module captured the exact challenge I work with on a daily basis, and it’s provides a great methodology, some tips, and several examples and techniques that I’ve found very helpful."

Of course many of you have already raised the bar to level 3 (Application) and might be more interested in achieving Working Expertise (level 4) with your students. In that case continue reading into the subsequent section 2.2.3 Developing Working Expertise (Level 4 Knowledge) by the same author. As the leaves start to fall for many of us, let's try raising the bar!

Our news focuses on the review process for the 2021 edition of the International Journal of Process Education. The IJPE Editorial Board has put in place new resources that should be used as authors plan and draft their manuscripts.

All submission guidelines are located on the Guide for Authors page. Here authors will find a multitude of helpful items. Among these are the submission timeline, specifications for manuscripts, the editorial board assessment rubric, and the submission portal (the only way to submit a manuscript).

New this year is the IJPE Style Guide. All authors are strongly encouraged to use this resource to help with all the technical details for their manuscripts! All the important formatting questions are answered in this document. (If you have a question that is not addressed in the Style Guide, please let us know and we will add it!)

The IJPE Editorial Board looks forward to seeing your research.

We are pleased to now feature blog content from Richard Stone... Thanks, Rick! You're welcome to visit his blog as well and fill out the contact form on his site if you'd like to subscribe to his weekly blog.

In the current political environment, the divide between us seems acutely apparent. To better understand how it’s so easy for us to see and understand important issues so very differently, we must look at the biological roots of discord—how we build our memories and beliefs about the world. I think we can all agree that memories are constructed out of past experiences. But it’s a common misconception that memory is primarily attributable to perceptual inputs. If this were the case, why can two people see the same issue from such divergent perspectives? There’s no doubt that our sensory experiences are the stuff of most of our stories about the past. But we suggest that experience, and hence the stories we tell about past events and to describe the world we live in, are fundamentally not a perceptual affair. An interpretative process essentially determines experience and our memories.

In many respects, the fact that we attend to certain stimuli and disregard others is an adaptive response to our environment conditioned by our brain’s processing limitations. There are up to 40 million data points available to our brains from both the external environment and within our body at any moment in time. That’s a large number, and if we were to take in all 40 million bits of data in one gulp, our brains would be overloaded and either shut down or explode. You see, our conscious brains can only process about 120 bits per second, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky.[i] This discrepancy between the available data and our minds’ speed limits sets up an interesting quandary for us. What should we pay attention to? And how do we decide?

As you might expect, it’s a complicated issue. Just listening intently to one person requires that we process nearly 60 bits of information a second. Listening to two people puts us right up against our processing limit. Forget about listening to three people talking simultaneously or following four friends’ conversation in a noisy restaurant. Talking to someone coherently while also attempting to text is virtually impossible. Driving and texting at the same time are comparable in attention degradation to knocking back a couple of martinis before getting behind the wheel of the car. Concerted listening to and comprehending the world of another requires total concentration. Even then, two people listening to the same person talking can easily walk away from that conversation with very distinct conclusions about what was said, what it meant, and what the speaker’s intentions were.

How do we cope with these physical limitations? We become very selective regarding the things we attend to. That’s where interpretation comes in. Here’s a brief example to highlight the issue. Imagine you’re a woman looking into the eyes of your beloved over a candlelit dinner in a fine French restaurant. At the table next to you, two guys are debating the likelihood that your hometown team will make it into the playoffs. If you’ve never even been to a football game in your life and lack any appreciation for the sport’s intricate rituals and rules, their conversation will be like white noise to your ears. Even if they’re speaking at a sufficient decibel level that you can physically hear them, it no doubt wouldn’t matter. If someone asked you later that evening what they were discussing, you’d probably have no idea given how absorbed you were in what your lover had to say.

Your lover, on the other hand, may have had an entirely different experience sitting across from you. While he genuinely adores you, his ear catches a bit of the conversation at the next table. He immediately wondered if he made a wise decision on the bet he made with a good friend in Chicago. Spotting him 6 points on a $500 wager is beginning to seem foolish, and that’s money he won’t have after paying this evening for the bottle of expensive wine, the Crème brûlée, and a pousse-café with brandy. Now he goes down that rabbit hole, regretting his decision, suddenly feeling a chill as worry spreads from his forehead to his toes. What was he thinking when he gave his friend 6 points? All the while, he’s smiling and looking lovingly into your eyes. You ask him an important question, but he is caught off guard because he had unconsciously chosen to split his attention. He gives you a perplexed look. “Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t catch all of that because of all of the noise in here.” You begin wondering whether he’s heard anything you had to say for the past ten minutes. Now, he’s sailing in dangerous waters, all because of his brain’s incapacity to listen to you and the football junkies at the same time!

Csikszentmihalyi refers to this phenomenon as an attentional filter. Most of the time, it’s a boon to our functioning in the world. For the most part, these interpretational filters work unconsciously, screening out all kinds of perceptual data that our mind deems to be irrelevant to the task at hand. “That’s’ why, when you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery that has whizzed by: Your attentional system ‘protects’ you from registering it because it isn’t deemed important.” Things our brain considers essential, we’ll let into our perceptual field. Our minds automatically screen out matters it interprets to be lacking relevancy.

While having a filtering mechanism of this sort helps us function in the world, there are some decided disadvantages. Once an interpretational filter is in place, our receptivity to new information becomes completely impaired. We can miss vital clues and evidence pertinent to our interests or survival in this condition, even if they’re staring us in the face. Just as our gentleman in the restaurant directed his attention based on his interests and concerns, all of us are continually interpreting what is valuable for us and what we can let slide. This is a perfect mechanism to create a chasm of misunderstanding between our world and another person who has constructed an entirely different story from the same raw data. That’s in part why a Democrat and a Republican could each watch one of the recent presidential debates and arrive at really different judgments about who won and why. This issue gets amplified when two people live in distinct worlds—hence the discrepancy between how people in America’s heartland and urban dwellers see the world. Perhaps the more important question is, how can we consciously manage our idiosyncratic filters to understand ourselves and others better?

[i] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/

 94% of college professors rank their work as “above average.” (1) 

In a survey of engineers at one company, 42% thought their work ranked in the top 5% among their peers. (2)

“When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler (a bank robber who rubbed lemon juice on his face in the belief that it would render him invisible), they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.” (3)

This became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — where incompetence masks one’s ability to recognize one’s own incompetence.

Dunning and Kruger suggest that, across many intellectual and social domains, it is the poorest performers who hold the least accurate assessments of their skill and performances, grossly overestimating how well their performances stack up against those of their peers. These are the performers who not only perform poorly, but who believe they perform well. Or, put another way, clueless yet confident.

Kruger and Dunning (1999) argued that this gross overconfidence occurs because those who lack skill simply are not in a position to accurately recognize the magnitude of their deficits. Their incompetence produces a double curse. First, their lack of skill, by definition, makes it difficult to produce correct responses and, thus, they make many mistakes. Second, this very same lack of skill also deprives them of success at the metacognitive task of recognizing when a particular decision is a correct or an incorrect one. For example, to produce a grammatically correct sentence, one must know something about the rules of grammar. But one must also have an adequate knowledge of the rules of grammar in order to recognize when a sentence is grammatically correct, whether written by one’s self or by another person. Thus, those who lack grammatical expertise are not in a position to accurately judge the quality of their attempts or the attempts of other people to write grammatically correct sentences. In addition, because people tend to choose the responses they think are most reasonable, people with deficits are likely to believe they are doing quite well even when they are, in reality, doing quite poorly. [Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent]

It is a statistical probability that everyone reading this sentence has encountered learners (or professionals or peers) who fit into this category. It is also possible that, depending on the skill area, many of us fit as well, a disquieting thought because believing that you don’t could mean that you do! It is notoriously difficult to work with those who aren’t aware that there’s a problem because their attention must be drawn to it –? they must be made to somehow see and recognize it ? before the specific error or propensity to err can be corrected. According to the authors of the study, however,

It seems that poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve. Hacker, Bol, Horgan, and Rakow (4) provided direct evidence for this failure to learn from feedback when they tracked students during a semester-long class. As time went on, good students became more accurate in predicting how they would do on future exams. The poorest performers did not — showing no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback, that they were doing poorly.

Given that feedback (presumably external and from an instructor) seemingly has little power to counter the problem, might self-assessment (internal and conducted by the individual) provide a more useful approach? Though if we admit that the dilemma is not just the error but the inability to recognize the error, we must wonder how useful self-assessment is at countering illusory superiority (the Dunning-Kruger Effect). Are the clueless-yet-confident able to somehow step beyond their incompetence to use self-assessment to improve a performance that they already believe was strong? Doesn’t recognition of incompetence mean that the Improvements area of a self-assessment would likewise miss the areas that truly do need to be improved? If this is something of a Catch 22, what about adding a dimension to the typical SII Self-Assessment that asks the individual to describe the ideal or ‘goal’ performance? Could this serve to begin making the perceptual error visible? It would certainly allow for the current performance to be more clearly compared to strong performance. What do you think? We’d love to know! (Send email to: denna@processeducation.org)

1. Cross, P. (1977). Not can but will college teaching be improved? New Directions for Higher Education, 17, 1–15.
2. Zenger, T. R. (1992). Why do employers only reward extreme performance? Examining the relationships among performance, pay, and turnover. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37, 198–219.
3. Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 (6), pp. 1121-1134.
4. Hacker, D. J., Bol, L., Horgan, D. D., & Rakow, E. A. (2000). Test prediction and performance in a classroom context. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 160–170.

Academy of Process Educators
www.processeducation.org