Dr. Gregory Walton
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Are you a member of the community in good standing? And by treating us in such an aggressive manner, they raised that question. And if they hadn't apologized, we would have held on to that question. We would have hated them, frankly. My parents said later, are you going to sue them? We were like, no, actually, we liked them a lot when they left. We were proud to have an interaction with them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
We were glad that they were going to protect the cabin. But that was because they did that apology work at the end. And that was what those folks at San Quentin had not experienced.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I did a guest lecture with Jennifer once in San Quentin, and it was the best teaching experience of my life. The students are so eager to learn and so ready to explore the world and go beyond their immediate circumstance. It's like the most beautiful representation of education that we all can have, that kind of pinnacle of learning and exploring something new.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And they were all in it for all the right reasons. And that was absolutely an experience of awe. And that moment too, that moment back at the cabin when the officers apologized, that was also, I think, a moment of awe where the experience completely shifted.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It was a very small act that they did to take that apology, but the reason it was so important is because it helped us set aside the question, are we people in good standing here? All of us want that in a community, right? All of us want to be members of a community in good standing, whether you've done something wrong or not, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
If you haven't done something wrong, you certainly don't want to be falsely accused. And if you have done something wrong, then that may need to get raised. There may need to be a repair for that. But you also want to be treated with grace and as a person who can improve.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So if you think about who is it like most fundamentally that you want to become, what is it that you're going to want to do? Those questions are central to that. So you think about a school setting, like school is for the purpose of helping a person develop and become something new that they aren't yet.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
where you think about a work setting, a work setting is for the purpose of being able to execute on a mission, ideally to create a good or a service or a product that's going to be meaningful and important for other people in their lives. So to be able to belong within those settings is to be able to work towards the most fundamental goals that we have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Nested within that question is the question of, can I do this? If there's a particular difficult task that you're facing, a skill that you haven't learned yet, like for me, learning how external microphones work, as we talked about earlier. then that could become a barrier. It could become a barrier to your ability to actually realize the dreams that you have for yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then in the end, a lot of that's about identity. And identity is a very complicated, multifaceted thing. It's not just up to you. It's also how other people are seeing you, whether other people are going to see you and treat you in ways that allow you to become that kind of person that you want to become. Or are they going to pigeonhole you or put you in a box or constrain you in some fashion?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So those questions get to kind of the deepest aspirations I think that we have for our lives, for who we want to be and the good that we want to do and the communities that we want to be part of and the impacts that we want to have on others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Yeah, so first I just want to give credit to Uri Bronfenbrenner, who's the origin of that idea, who was one of the developmental psychologists, one of the founders of Head Start. I don't know if you ever saw the Disney movie Encanto, but Encanto is all about a person who's struggling within a family dynamic. So the main character, Mirabelle,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
lives in a family in which everyone has a miraculous gift. One person can read the future. Another person can change the weather. Another sister is super strong. And Mirabelle has no gift. And she feels early in the movie like that means that she's less them. That means that she maybe doesn't belong in the family, that she can't contribute to it at the least.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And the family home metaphorically falls apart as her doubts are increasing. But in the end, it's Maribel who pulls the family back together and rebuilds the family home on a firmer foundation. And the last song, the beautiful music by Lin-Manuel Miranda is the last song Her mother sings to her that there's this beautiful ceremony.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's almost like a wedding ceremony where they have the new house and Mirabelle is going to be presented with a gift. And her family and friends are lined up on two sides like an aisle. And she walks down the aisle, almost like a wedding, but it's not a wedding. And they present her the doorknob of the front door for the house. And they sing that they love her just for who she is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Just you is the refrain. And so that sense of unconditional regard that you are valuable just unto yourself and you can grow and you can do great things and we believe in that, but that is a firm foundation for love. If you feel like classic research by my colleague, Carol Dweck on fixed mindsets shows that When you praise children for their intelligence, you say, you're so smart.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
That makes children unresilient when they face setbacks. So if you keep telling kids, oh, you're so smart, you're so smart, you're so smart, and then they fail at something, it's easy for them to infer, oh, maybe I don't have that magic ingredient smartness. Maybe I'm not so smart. There's a similar dynamic with love itself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
If the pretense is that you are loved or admired or respected or valued, that's just because of some gift that you have, that's a shaky foundation for a relationship. And so the start has to be that unconditional regard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I recommend it, especially if you have an eight-year-old around.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I was a college sophomore at Stanford, and Eleanor McAbee was a very prominent social and developmental psychologist at Stanford. She was already retired when I was a sophomore, but she had written a new book. The book is called The Two Sexes, Growing Up Apart and Coming Together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's about childhood peer groups, what boys' groups are like, what girls' groups are like, and then how those two groups come back together in adolescence. So we read the kind of proof of the book. The book wasn't yet complete and she was using our reading as final feedback as she made final edits to the manuscript itself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then a year later, she gave me a copy of the published book and I opened that up and I looked and on the inside cover, she had written for Greg, who does think like a psychologist and may become one, Eleanor Maccabee. And that's a marvelous gift, right? It's this representation of who a person, who I could become. And it helped me to organize my efforts to think about that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It helped me to understand that dream, to recognize that idea. And it helped me to organize my efforts at Stanford and after Stanford to start to work towards that image. It gets to the heart of that Uri Bronfenbrenner quote. Every child needs at least one person who has an irrational attachment to them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
There's sort of two things that I really appreciate about that in particular, about that quote. One is at least one adult, like having at least one adult, just one can make an enormous difference. And the second part is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
The word irrational, it's particularly powerful when the young person is not there yet, when they're struggling, maybe they're getting into conflicts, they don't understand the math yet, they're having difficulty, and there's no basis yet for that faith that older person, that mentor can provide, but they can see in that person that potential.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then showing that young person that potential, they give them a kind of North Star to work towards. That's at the heart of lots and lots of research, lots of field experimental research, including our work with lifting the bar and many other settings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But I think what's really important is to understand how and why these questions come up for all of us in circumstances, whether it's a question like, does my partner really love me when you're having a conflict conversation? Or whether it's a question like, is this kid just an F up as they come back to school from juvenile detention?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I think there's a lot of complexity here. There's a lot of reasons why people don't feel seen. One, you can certainly talk about the way that social media has changed how people see each other. Social media is all about representations of self that go into a space and seeing other people's representations of self.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
That's a very foreign and different thing than what people have experienced in our communities and relationships over millennia. It's a very different way to interact socially. I also think that a really important ingredient in this is stereotypes because what a stereotype is literally a kind of pre-definition of a person. It pre-defines who somebody is based on some category membership.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And that pre-definition might be, it might be positive, but it might also be negative. Either way, it's probably simplifying and kind of pigeonholing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And when people are interacting across lines that are defined by stereotypes, then it's very important that you create spaces, sometimes very intentionally, so that people have the ability in their interactions to have really honest, direct communications that say, here's who I am, here's what I'm working toward, here's how I had to be seen, and here's how we can interact well within this context.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So that people, two people, for example, can interact with their full humanity rather than just on the basis of simplifications.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
yeah let me give you an example of that space between so like one in the psychological literature there's a whole like research tradition on color blindness and multiculturalism so when people are thinking about how like race relations should work and how you should see each other across racial lines like one kind of ideology is oh we should just see people for who they are we should ignore color
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
and another ideology is oh we should value and recognize the kind of identities that people have and maybe make those primary and surface them directly and there's a way in which both of those ideologies in their extreme form are really problematic right so the colorblindness ideology can erase the real identities that people have the lived experiences that they have that come from those identities to pretend that everybody's the same when they're not
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
to pretend that real inequalities don't exist, for example, when they really do. It can erase important aspects of people's self. But the other side of that can also be pigeonholing. If all is somebody's group identity, then you don't actually see the person as a whole person either. All is, for example, a white woman or a gay man or an African-American woman. You just see a category.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
You don't actually see their full humanity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So what we need to get to in general is we need to be able to recognize that identities and group identities and backgrounds are important and play a role, but that we're also always interacting with individual people who have their individual goals and dreams and aspirations and background and personalities and foibles and quibbles and silliness and everything else, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So we actually have to have human kinds of connections, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I think there's so much of our lives today that involves blame that's pejorative. And it would be easy to look at a teacher, say, who's reacting in a punitive, hostile manner to a student and judge them and say that there's something wrong with them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
One of the things that Catherine did is she did a series of studies, low-income settlements in Nairobi, and she brought residents of these settlements into a lab space, essentially, and she gave them aid. So she gave them a small amount of cash aid, what's called an unconditional cash transfer. And what she did was she just manipulated how she represented that aid.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And in one case, the representation was the standard kind of representation that you see when you're thinking about aid, the kind of representation that dominates aid programs generally, which is we're giving you this money because you're poor, basically. Like people are in need, people have need, and so therefore we're giving people money. And that has a certain logic to it, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But put yourself on the other end of the stick. Imagine yourself being the recipient of that, receiving a handout because you're poor. That's marginalizing. It marginalizes the agency that you have, the strength that you have to work towards your goals. So Catherine tested two alternatives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
and the alternatives people again received the same aid but she represented it specifically in terms of the agency of the people who are receiving that aid we're giving you this aid so you can work towards your goals we're giving you this aid so you can work toward and support your community's goals And with that, people felt far better upon receiving the aid.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They were more confident in their ability to succeed in their major goals in life. They felt less stigmatized. And they were more likely, when they were given the choice to watch videos that were fun, silly videos like soccer highlights or little comedy sketches, or to watch videos that were showing
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
teaching business skills relevant in the local informal economy, like how to calculate profit, how to invest in a business. People who received the agency-focused representations were more likely to watch those second kind of business development videos.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So often when we give aid, we are implicitly or explicitly saying to people, we're giving you this because you're pathetic and you need the money. And that's a double-edged sword.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Like people may need the money, people may be desperate, but that undermines their agency at a time when they really need that strength and agency to work upward and contend with the challenges that life has presented them. So the lesson from that work is about giving aid explicitly in terms of the agency and the strength of the people who are receiving it and their ability to execute on that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's really about Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
, , , , , ,, P P P P P P P P Paurplplplplplplpl product , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P particularly when it's a white teacher, giving that feedback to a black student, that can sustain students' trust over the rest of the school year. And then it can have this litany of downstream benefits.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It reduces conflicts in eighth grade. Kids are more likely to get on track, to be on track or above track performance levels in the transition to high school. And literally that one note at the beginning of seventh grade in one randomized controlled trial increased the rate at which African-American kids went to a four-year college on time after high school.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So, like getting that transition right, getting back to that belief that the teacher has in you can change a person's life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I remember being in fifth grade and thinking about the middle school that I would go to. It seemed very large and they were going to be all these new kids and all these new teachers. And I was going to have to find my way and I might get lost.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And we knew that those feelings that anybody has in the transition can get laced with worries about racial mistrust and whether teachers are gonna have your back and whether they'll be supportive of you and whether they'll value you there. So they might be particularly present for kids of color. So we did these interviews with seventh grade students. We heard their stories about that transition.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then we retold those stories as parables for a new group of sixth graders. What we found then was that particularly for African-American kids, African-American boys in our control condition where they didn't get this belonging content, they showed this rise over the course of sixth grade in disciplinary citations for subjective things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
This is being cited for things like being disrespectful or disobedient. And then when seventh grade started, they started the year low in disciplinary citations. But they again showed the same rise, this spiral going essentially a spiral downward of conflict with adults. And at the end of seventh grade, they started to conclude that the school was racist, that they didn't belong there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then when eighth grade started, it was just all bad. They had high levels of these subjective citations, high levels of objective citations. They felt like they didn't belong from the beginning of the year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's good company. I'll say that. Yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But when we did that belonging exercise, when we shared stories that made it normal, that it's worried for you can worry at first about whether you belong in the transition to the big middle school, that it can get better with time, that you can learn that teachers have your back. then black boys never showed those patterns. They never showed that spike in conflict in sixth grade.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They didn't show it in seventh grade. They didn't conclude that they didn't belong at the end of seventh grade. And when eighth grade started, they were good and they stayed good. And so that was two 30-minute sessions, two 25 to 30-minute sessions at the beginning of sixth grade. And the ultimate effect was to reduce disciplinary citations for black boys
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
over the next seven years through the end of high school. And it was all about how they were thinking about their relationships with teachers and whether teachers could be trusted and would support them, whether or not it was normal to have worries about that and whether that could improve with time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Yes, the Lifting the Bar intervention, which is the focus of that spotlight, integrates conceptually that belonging work for tweens, plus an intervention that my former student, Jason Akana-Fua, who is a professor now at Brown University, developed for teachers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And the goal of that empathic discipline intervention was to give teachers kind of ideal representations of how to work with kids when they misbehave. That is to pull them closer, to listen to them and understand where they're coming from, even when they're being irrational, to stay in those relationships and support their growth from within those relationships and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
That intervention has now been tested three times. A new trial just came out from the United Kingdom two months ago, led by a team in England. And it reduces suspension rates for kids reliably.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So kids whose math teacher in middle school gets randomized to that intervention versus a control are less likely to get suspended from anywhere in the school environment that year and even into the next year in our data.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So the lifting the bar intervention, like the empathic discipline intervention, is trying to elicit from teachers their very best teacher self, like the ideal representation of what it means to be a great teacher for a kid who might be struggling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And to do that, what we do is we create a platform for kids to be able to say who they are, their goals and values in school, and the challenges they face directly to an adult who they choose who might be able to help them. And so this is getting to the irrationality in that Uri Braun from Brenner quotes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Absolutely. And it's like a flashbulb memory for me, actually. I was 14 years old and I was in high school and I was learning. I was in a student group, just a totally student-run organization that was interested in students' experience in inequality by race and gender and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Imagine you're teaching 10th grade English and you'd get told by the principal, this kid's coming back to school. He's going to be in your class from juvenile detention. Like all you know is that this kid was in juvie. And that's a really powerful stereotype in American society. Anybody would have thoughts like, what problems is this child going to cause? Is he going to be disruptive?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Does he even care? Might he even be violent? I wonder what crime he committed. There's all sorts of thoughts that are not healthy thoughts for a teacher to have if they wanna have a strong relationship with the student that actually helps the student grow. And the worst part is the student is fully aware of those thoughts too, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
This is a palpable stereotype that's in the air and the student is worried they're gonna be seen in that light and the teacher is vulnerable to that and there they are and it's not good. And so what we do in Lifting the Bar is we create a platform It's designed to get teachers into that place of irrational faith.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So the platform ultimately produces a series of questions for the student where they're asked, okay, who's an adult in school who isn't yet but could be an important source of support for you? And what would you like that person to know about who you are as a person, the values you have in school, the goals that you have in school, challenges you face that they can help with? And kids produce
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's hard to describe just how beautiful what kids write here. They say things like, I want Ms. Sanchez, my math teacher, to know that I'm a good kid and I like to learn and I'm struggling with the math because I haven't been in school very much and I have trouble paying attention sometimes and I'd help with that. Very simple, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
The kids are saying to adults they care, and they're saying to adults, here's how you can begin to help me and support me in my transition back to school. And then we give that content to that teacher. So we write a letter to that teacher, and the letter says all kids need strong relationships in school, especially when they're in difficult circumstances.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
This child has chosen you to be that adult for them. And here's what they would like you to know about them. Please help this child in their transition back to school. Help them in their relationships with other people. And the letter itself is very much treating the teachers as the professionals they are. There's no accountability here. There's no reports that the teachers have to file.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
That these are reasonable questions, like it doesn't help us to suppress them and push them away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
There's nothing in particular that the teachers have to do. The only ask in the letter is please reach out to the students soon. And then the letter says, thank you for your work. You're on the front lines for all of our children. It's just asking a teacher to stand up and be the professional that they are. And when we give teachers that letter, they do stand up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
In fact, about a third to a half of the time that we hand deliver the letter, Teachers actually cry upon receiving the letter. We had a delivery in Chicago Public Schools not long ago. Our partner in Chicago delivered the letter. The teacher didn't cry, but the teacher said, I think you've made my week. And then the teacher said, no, I think you've made my year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
persistence of inequality in American life, we would go to sixth grade classrooms and lead role-playing exercises with students about how identities worked, for example. And in the course of that, at that same time, I read this early piece in the Atlantic Monthly that my now colleague, Cloud Steele, wrote about what's called stereotype threat and what
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's like the opportunity to be that person for a young person is the reason why one goes into teaching. It's not for anything else. It's obviously not for the pay or the comfy working conditions or something. It's like the opportunity to actually be that adult who can make a difference for a young person in need.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And what the intervention does is it unleashes that potential that's in the teacher and that's in the student that is otherwise stymied and they can't connect because the stereotype is driving them apart. We found in our first randomized controlled trial that this reduced recidivism.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
So kids who got this letter delivered were 40 percentage points less likely to recidivate back to juvenile detention than kids who didn't get the letter delivered. So it can, I think, be profoundly important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I think the Barbie movie was like summed it up. Am I enough? Am I enough? There's lots of ways that people don't feel enough. You don't feel like you belong. You don't feel like you're the right kind of person. You don't feel like you can really trust somebody. And there's lots of forms of that question. You feel like you're treated as less than, but that in some ways is the higher order question.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I also appreciate your emphasizing to follow the questions. I think there's so much of our lives today that involves blame that's pejorative. And it would be easy to look at a teacher, say, who's reacting in a punitive, hostile manner to a student and judge them and say that there is something wrong with them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But I think what's really important is to understand how and why these questions come up for all of us in circumstances, whether it's a question like, does my partner really love me when you're having a conflict conversation? Or whether it's a question like, is this kid just an F up as they come back to school from juvenile detention? that these are reasonable questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Like it doesn't help us to suppress them and push them away. Instead, we can see them. We can understand that they're coming from the context that we face, the culture that we live in. We don't have to be defensive about them. And when we do that, and when we put them in the space between us, you can say, I'm struggling with this question. How can I think about this question?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
You can do that for yourself. You can do that with a friend. That's how we make progress. That's how we start to spiral up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Claude did was he looked at racial inequality in test performance. And he showed that in standard kinds of conditions, when you present a test as evaluative of people's ability, you saw white students do better than Black students. And in math context, you saw men do better than women.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Thank you, John. This is coming from a whole community of people who are fantastic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But what was amazing to me, but like literally blew my mind, was that he then looked at the exact same test scores, but he changed how he represented the test. He presented the test to people just as a puzzle exercise, a verbal puzzle solving trial, and suddenly black students' scores soared. And in math, when you did similar things with math, women's performance scored. At the time in the 90s,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It seemed like there was nothing so fixed and hardwired and built in as test performance. It seemed like a true barometer of someone's educational opportunities and the abilities that they had. And yet here was this social psychologist just changing the representation of the task and suddenly people's performances were jumping all over the place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I was like fascinated and I was tantalized and I wanted to understand more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
That was just before that. My mother was doing research in Indonesia on the island of Java. And so in the summer before eighth grade and the summer before ninth grade, we took these two very extended family trips to Indonesia. And on the second one, my parents were more ambitious, and they took us to some very remote areas. They took us to the island of Sulawesi.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then we flew from little town to little town and then bus to other towns. And we then were in central Sulawesi and we contracted with a local Canadian missionary who had a small plane, a little prop plane. And he flew us to this very remote village called Rompi. And in Rompi, We plan to hike and explore and meet the local people. It's a place where there is a dirt runway.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
There were people watching, came to watch the plane land. There was no restaurant, no hotel. So there was a small wooden shack at the airport, and we contracted with a local woman to bring us meals. And the woman, my mother asked her a standard question in Indonesia, which is, how many children do you have? And she said that she had four children.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then my mother asked the next standard question, which is, and how old are they? And the woman said, five, four, and one. And that was all that she said. And the next day, a village headman from a neighboring village came, and my mother asked him about the challenges that he faced as a head person in the village.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And one of the things he said was he talked about infectious diseases like cholera, for example, and malaria. And he said, these don't usually kill adults. They can debilitate adults, but they do kill a lot of children. And we felt the absence of that one child. I think that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
having an experience like that, especially at that kind of age, at the age of 13 or 14, when you're just a young adolescent becoming aware of the world, it really put my problems in context. Like the drama of middle school and high school was no longer that dramatic. There were big problems in this world. And it also helped me think about what it would mean to help, what it would mean to support.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
What does it mean for a person with more to give to a person with less? And how do you facilitate other people in their becoming, in their agency, rather than get in the way? I had this image of, oh, people could just cut this person a check. You could just give this person money. And
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They might need the money and the money might be valuable, but it would sap the local agency, it would sap their dignity and respect to build their communities the way that they were trying to build their communities. That help often has to be given in ways that are hidden and invisible and supportive rather than that take over.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
This is a complex story and it really is a story within a story. So my grandparents, my great grandparents, in fact, homesteaded in Eastern Arizona in the early part of the 20th century. And my grandmother has a, she grew up in part in this area outside of Show Low, Arizona.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And as they had this big old ranch, and then when the ranch was sold, they saved part of it for a small cabin that my grandmother and my grandmother built starting in the 1930s. They hand built this cabin, this adobe cabin in the mountains there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then many years later, it became a sort of family place, a place that we always go, a place that's always been built and there are new projects all the time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
many years later i took my now wife lisa to the cabin for the first time on a memorial day weekend and we had a lovely day we hiked around we explored the local mountains and the canyons and the gullies we looked for arrowheads and pottery shards and then we went to sleep this is a cabin with no electricity no running water it's on about 45 acres of land so it's very remote
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
It's like dirt road upon dirt road to get there. And in the middle of the night, like at 10 o'clock, like we'd gone to sleep at nine o'clock, we were awoken by these flashing lights. We sat up in bed. There were voices shouting. There were these flashlights, high powered flashlights probing into the room, the bedroom, the one bedroom in the place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And people started shouting, come out with your hands up. We didn't know who this was. And it was very scary. It was terrifying. And I was scheduled to teach in Psych 1 the following week about race and crime and the way that race can affect how police officers interact with people who they're suspecting of potentially being violent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
Worked by a researcher named Josh Carell at the University of Colorado. And so it crossed my mind right in that moment I'm glad that neither Lisa or I have dark skin because that would make this dangerous situation even more dangerous. So I stumble out into the kitchen area and they shout, put your hands up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
I put my hands up, I come to the outside and I ask them before I open the door, I say, who are you? Because I don't even know who they are. And they say, we're the sheriff. And so I open the door and I step out and I'm immediately pushed to the ground. And Lisa behind me is as well. And we're handcuffed on the deck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And then they start to, they Mirandize us, wondering what it is that we're being accused of, what has happened. And I'm thinking about the fact that we're hours and hours from the county seat. I'm scheduled to teach next week. So I decide to talk to them. And they say, did you commit a robbery? And I say, I committed no robbery. And they say, but these boots, they match the boot prints.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And these dogs let us up. There's nine men, young men with bulletproof vests. This is like crazy. With bulletproof, for me, it's crazy. Bulletproof vests and guns pointed at us and a sniffer dog all around us on the deck. And they're shouting at us and they're belligerent. And eventually they ask, they separate us and they ask me moment by moment, what did we do during the day?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And they ask Lisa similar questions. And I walk this through and then they start to relax a little bit. They undo my handcuffs. We walk down to the flats below the cabin to look so we can show them exactly where we walked. And I deduced that they're starting to figure out where it was that they lost the trail, where they got the trail wrong. The story goes on and on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
But the very important part is that at the end, when they decided that it wasn't us who had apparently committed this robbery, the person who committed it was about an inch shorter than me and has blonder hair than me and not quite me, but almost me. Then they were so kind and they were so gracious. And they said... We're so sorry for interrupting your vacation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They apologized to us like once, twice, three, four times. Multiple officers did this. They came back up to the cabin. They said, oh, we thought this cabin was abandoned, but this cabin is beautiful. Look at this camera. When was it built? We have a cast iron stove like that. Oh, look, this is the book your grandmother wrote about the building of this cabin. I'm so interested in this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They were kind and they repaired the damage that they had done. And what was most powerful then was that I recorded a version of this story and I shared it with my colleague, Jennifer Eberhardt. Jennifer Eberhardt is an expert social psychologist, an expert in race and crime. She read a wonderful book called Bias. She was teaching a class at the time at San Quentin Prison.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
She played my recording for the prisoner students that she had at San Quentin. The prisoner students were unsurprised by the story. all the way through up until the end. They were not surprised by the terror of people pointing guns at you. They were not surprised at having been accused of something that they hadn't done.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
They were not surprised at the indignity of being handcuffed, about being treated as a kind of base physical threat. But what they were surprised at was they had never had that apology. They told Jennifer after the story that there were countless times where they had been accused of doing something that they, in fact, had not done.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593
And even when the officers realized that they hadn't done what it was that they had been accused of doing, they still said, well, maybe you didn't do that, but we'll get you next time. There was no apology. And for us, that was so important because the officer's behavior had raised this question. It was like a very fundamental question. Are you a good and decent member of the community?