Elliot Aronson University of California at Santa Cruz
In William Wharton’s provocative novel Birdy, one of the protagonists, Alfonso, a Sergeant in the army, develops an instant dislike for an overweight enlisted man, a clerk typist named Ronsky. There are a great many things that Alfonso dislikes about Ronsky. At the top of his list is Ronsky’s annoying habit of continually spitting. He spits all over his own desk, his typewriter, and anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. Alfonso cannot stand the guy and has fantasies of punching him out. Several weeks later, Alfonso learns that Ronsky had taken part in the Normandy invasion and had watched, in horror, as several of his buddies were cut down before they even had a chance to hit the beach. It seems that his constant spitting was a concrete manifestation of his attempt to get the bad taste out of his mouth. On learning this, Alfonso sees his former enemy in an entirely different light. He sighs with regret and says to himself: “Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.”
Do you like your job? If you do, then you probably work in a place where the people involved like one another, work well together, are supportive of one another, and are respectful of one another’s minor idiosyncrasies and different styles of working. You are in a working situation where you feel respected and feel like an important member of a team—no matter what your job is.
Let me put some meat on those bare bones, by going into detail in my description of a highly supportive hypothetical work environment: In this well-functioning office, the people who work closely with one another are attentive to and supportive of individual differences in ways of working. For example, your immediate coworkers know that, after a meeting, Ned likes to shut himself in his office to work alone for a while. On the other hand, you and Chris enjoy working out some bugs in the project over coffee in the cafeteria or while exercising in the company gym. Sue and Sandy say they get their best ideas on their noontime walk. When the team comes back together, everyone has something valuable to say. The boss is a straight-up guy, too. Even though he supervises close to a hundred employees, he knows your name and remembers that you like to play the banjo. He can be a tough taskmaster—sometimes a little too tough—but he listens well and is almost always fair.
There’s some petty office politics, of course—that can hardly be avoided. But it’s no big deal and doesn’t keep you awake at night. Most people just ignore it. It helps a lot that the men and women at your company get along pretty well together. There is a little competitiveness and a little envy but, for the most part, people root for each other, cooperate with each other, and are pleased by the success of a colleague. People can relax and even occasionally make innocent jokes, and nobody minds. Most people are happily married or happily single; no one’s on the prowl.
You enjoy the Friday casual day, when everyone knocks off work early for the company get-together with pizza and basketball. Some of the basketball players were varsity athletes in high school or college. They’re still really good and still love to play, but there aren’t any company sports heroes or anything dumb like that. Nobody lionizes them like they did in high school; here they’re just regular guys. The superstars in your organization are the ones who come up with creative ideas and support others in developing their ideas; they are also the ones who land the big contracts or really shine at their jobs. You can see that they’re on the fast track to upper management. But even if you’re not one of them, you still feel good about your role because you are always aware that you have something important to contribute, and the success of the superstars enhances things for everyone.
When things aren’t going so great at home, you can always count on your coworkers to give you a sense of perspective and cheer you up. Things have been tense at home since your loudmouthed brother-in-law came to visit; your daughter’s hair is a different color every week; and your son says he wants to use all the money he saved from his summer job to buy a motorcycle. By contrast, work seems like a refuge, filled with “normal” people who understand how trying home life can be. And if you have a really serious problem, the company has professional counselors you can talk to.
Things aren’t perfect. There is often a lot of pressure and too much unnecessary drudge work. Occasionally, it’s hard to rip yourself out of bed early in the morning to go to work, but you know they’d miss you if you didn’t show up. Even with the deadlines and the ridiculous paperwork, you feel good about your job. You feel comfortable; you know you belong there. And that makes all the difference.
Now try to imagine a truly unpleasant work environment—a work environment from hell. You and your coworkers are constantly competing against one another in order to impress management. When you come up with a good idea, you can feel a chill in the air; instead of congratulating you and supporting your idea, your coworkers seem annoyed that they hadn’t come up with that idea themselves. When you screw up at a work assignment, your coworkers are quick to smirk; sometimes they tease you or taunt you. Although you always considered yourself a warm and supportive person, after a few months in this environment, you even find yourself experiencing pangs of envy when one of your associates does well and feelings of joy when one of them commits a stupid blunder. Within your office, there are a definite in-group and out-group. Interestingly enough, people in the in-group are not necessarily the most skillful, the hardest-working, or the most productive workers. Indeed, the people in the out-group may be very good at what they do, but they also tend to be rather shy or awkward; they don’t dress fashionably. One is obese.
You are in neither the in-group nor the out-group, but somewhere in between. When you go to eat in the company cafeteria, you are always at a loss as to where to sit. You wish you would feel welcome by the in-group members—but you aren’t. You don’t want to associate with those in the out-group out of fear that doing so might lower your status in the office. You would like to be in the in-group, but it’s not clear how one accomplishes that. Some of your coworkers in the in-group are actually untalented at their jobs, but they are good at things that strike you as irrelevant to the work that needs doing: One is a good golfer; one is a good basketball player; one is flirtatious and looks good in tight sweaters. Even the boss seems to favor these colleagues.
Sound wacky? It is. In such an atmosphere, no business could hope to retain its best employees—or succeed. But that’s precisely the way it is at most high schools. Do you know of any high schools where the academically brightest and most cooperative students are the ones who are invariably liked best by their peers, where members of the debating team or the philosophy club are generally held in higher esteem than members of the football team? Do you know of any high school where off-beat, idiosyncratic behavior is actively encouraged or even tolerated?
It is almost a cliché for us middle-aged people to sigh wistfully and say, “I wish I were young again,” but I suspect that most of us are choosing not to remember many of the harsher aspects of our teenage existence. If push ever came to shove, very few of us would really want to go back to high school. Nobody wants to deal with the academic demands of six different teachers, the emotional turmoil of adolescent hormones, feelings of inferiority if you’re not a jock, a superstar, or physically attractive, loneliness if you don’t have your own tight group to hang with, plus coping with parents who “just don’t get it” and may be unreasonable, unsupportive, or unsympathetic. It is no wonder that students often prefer their after-school job at a fast-food restaurant to studying Renaissance art or the physics of space flight. What is more rewarding about frying burgers than learning about art or astrophysics? As illustrated by the hypothetical example at the beginning of this chapter, a positive work environment, even at a fairly menial job, can offer far more than a negative school environment. As employees, young people often experience the kind of teamwork, camaraderie, and responsibility that is often missing at their school.
A truly positive work environment is as exciting for what it is not as for what it is. In a positive work environment, there is an absence of put-downs, taunting, and exclusion. People don’t go around humiliating one another. No one gets lionized for irrelevant and unattainable (for the rest of us) attributes—like being a fast runner or having bulging muscles or bulging breasts. People are respected for who they are. Differences are not simply tolerated, they are celebrated.
What can schools do to make the classroom environment as appealing to young people as their after-school jobs? You can’t do it by adding prayer in the classrooms or posting the Ten Commandments on the bulletin board. You can’t do it by forcing kids to call their teachers “sir” and “ma’am.” You can’t do it even by adding wonderful classes on Renaissance art or medieval history—as valuable as these courses might be. The best way I know to accomplish this is to restructure students’ academic experience. I’m not talking about the content of the courses, but about the atmosphere created by the process of learning. In many respects, how a topic is learned is more important than the content of what is learned.
There are many ways to convey information to students. The teacher can lecture on a topic like World War II. Or students can read the facts about World War II in a textbook. The teacher can assign students to do their own research in the library, or have students interview people who served in the military or lived through the war period in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The teacher might require students to work individually or in groups. Students might be required to take a test, write a term paper, or give a talk to demonstrate what they have learned. One could use the format of a quiz show where the teacher asks questions and the students show their quickness and mastery of the subject by raising their hands as soon as they know the answer.
Each of these methods of conveying information sends a different message to students. Teachers who lecture send the message that they are an expert source of information. Teachers who dispatch students to the library send the message that it is useful for students to become skillful researchers, as well as learn about the topic at hand. Teachers who require students to interview a war veteran convey the implicit message that not all important information is contained in books. Teachers who run their class like a competitive quiz show indicate that quickness as well as knowledge is important.
The point is that students learn something from the process (the manner in which the product is attained or communicated) even while they are focusing on the content of the assignment. If students are required to take lecture notes, read textbooks, raise their hands as soon as they know the answer, and take tests graded on a curve, then the academic environment is designed to encourage students to compete against each other. When the grades come out, some students are big winners, some big losers, and most fall in the nameless middle zone. Students who have six classes like this may come to see life as competition—outside the classroom as well as inside it.
That’s the atmosphere in most classrooms in this country—separating winners from losers. Perhaps that is why most of us tend to treat losing like a contagious disease. Most youngsters want to keep as far away from it as possible. The winners and those in the middle ground try to differentiate themselves from the losers. They don’t associate with them; they taunt them; they want the losers to just “get lost.” But, unless they drop out of school, losers don’t disappear. In most cases, they simply suffer in silence, retreating further and further from the mainstream. The more they are ignored or taunted, the further away they drift. On rare, but significant, occasions, they explode—doing serious damage to themselves or others.
Many schools have attempted to counteract the negative influences of excessive competitions. It would be hard to find a preschool or elementary school that did not actively encourage children to share, work harmoniously with others, and behave respectfully and cooperatively. Many elementary schools now have students sit in small groups at tables, rather than in rows of individual desks. Many schools focus a lot of attention on children with academic or behavior problems, going out of their way to include them as full and valued members of the class.
On the other hand, it would be hard to find a high school or middle school that goes out of its way to demonstrate a high value on inclusion and cooperation among all students. It is true that some schools have attempted to reduce the competitive atmosphere in the academic arena by eliminating tracking, opening Advanced Placement classes to all students, and doing away with class rankings and valedictorians. But these attempts miss the mark. Indeed, many parents and students view these strategies as an empty exercise in political correctness that serves only to penalize serious students who work hard. After all, no one would seriously entertain the idea of randomly assigning students to the starting lineup of the school’s varsity football team, or playing intramural sports without scores or team rankings.
Attempts to enforce cooperation in the classroom can also backfire if not carefully designed. Simply assigning students to work together in groups to produce a joint report does not guarantee true cooperation. Most often the group dynamics of an unstructured “cooperative” situation of this sort mirror the larger competitive classroom dynamic. The one or two most able or most motivated students put themselves forward to do most of the work, while simultaneously resenting the fact that they are carrying the load for the entire group. The less able or less motivated students end up doing little, learning little, and feeling inadequate. These so-called “cooperative groups” are cooperative in name only.
The problem with cooperative learning assignments is not that they don’t work. It is that they need to be carefully structured to work as intended. One successful model, with a three-decade track record, is the jigsaw classroom. “Jigsaw” is a specific type of group learning experience that requires everyone’s cooperative effort to produce the final product. Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece—each student’s part—is essential for the production and full understanding of the final product. If each student’s part is essential, then each student is essential. That is precisely what makes this strategy so effective.
Here is how it works: The students in a history class, for example, are divided into small groups of five or six students each. Suppose their task is to learn about World War II. In one jigsaw group let us say that Sara is responsible for researching Hitler’s rise to power in prewar Germany. Another member of the group, Steven, is assigned to cover concentration camps; Pedro is assigned Britain’s role in the war; Melody is to research the contribution of the Soviet Union; Bill will handle Japan’s entry into the war; Clara will read about the development of the atom bomb.
Eventually each student will come back to his or her jigsaw group and will try to present a vivid, interesting, well-organized report to the group. The situation is specifically structured so that the only access any member has to the other five assignments is by listening intently to the report of the person reciting. Thus, if Bill doesn’t like Pedro, or if he thinks Sara is a nerd, if he heckles them, or tunes out while they are reporting, he cannot possibly do well on the test that follows. In order to increase the probability that each report will be factual and accurate, the students doing the research do not immediately take it back to their jigsaw group. After doing their research, they must first meet with the other students (one from each of the jigsaw groups) who had the identical assignment. For example, those students assigned to the atom bomb topic will meet together to work as a team of specialists, gathering information, discussing ideas, becoming experts on their topic, and rehearsing their presentations. We call this the “expert” group. It is particularly useful for those students who might have initial difficulty learning or organizing their part of the assignment— for it allows them to benefit from paying attention to and rehearsing with other “experts,” to pick up strategies of presentation, and generally to bring themselves up to speed.
After this meeting, when each presenter is up to speed, the jigsaw groups reconvene in their initial heterogeneous configuration. The atom bomb expert in each group teaches the other group members what she has learned about the development of the atom bomb. Each student in each group educates the whole group about his or her specialty. Students are then tested on what they have learned from their fellow group members about World War II.
What is the benefit of the jigsaw classroom? First and foremost, it is a remarkably efficient way to learn the material. But even more important, in terms of the present discussion, the jigsaw process encourages listening, engagement, and empathy by giving each member of the group an essential part to play in the academic activity. Group members must work together as a team to accomplish a common goal. Each person depends on all the others. No student can achieve his or her individual goal (learning the material, getting a good grade) unless everyone works together as a team. Group goals and individual goals complement and bolster each other. This “cooperation by design” facilitates interaction among all students in the class, leading them to value one another as contributors to their common task.
In 1971, it was my privilege to witness this process unfold in Austin, Texas, in the very first jigsaw classroom ever held. My graduate students and I invented the jigsaw strategy that year, as a matter of absolute necessity, to help defuse a highly explosive situation. The city’s schools had recently been desegregated and, because Austin had always been residentially segregated, white youngsters, African-American youngsters, and Mexican-American youngsters found themselves in the same classrooms for the first time in their lives. Within a few weeks, long-standing suspicion, fear, distrust, and antipathy between groups produced an atmosphere of turmoil and hostility, exploding into inter-ethnic fistfights in corridors and schoolyards across the city. The school superintendent called me in to see if we could do anything to help students learn to get along with one another. After observing what was going on in classrooms for a few days, my students and I concluded that inter-group hostility was being exacerbated by the competitive environment of the classroom.
Let me explain. In every classroom we observed, the students worked individually and competed against one another for grades. Here is a description of a typical fifth-grade classroom that we observed:
The teacher stands in front of the class, asks a question, and waits for the children to indicate that they know the answer. Most frequently, six to ten youngsters raise their hands. But they do not simply raise their hands, they lift themselves a few inches off their chairs and stretch their arms as high as they can in an attempt to attract the teacher’s attention. To say they are eager to be called on is an incredible understatement. Several other students sit quietly with their eyes averted, as if trying to make themselves invisible. These are the ones who don’t know the answer. Understandably, they are trying to avoid eye contact with the teacher because they do not want to be called on. When the teacher calls on one of the eager students, there are looks of disappointment, dismay, and unhappiness on the faces of the other students who were avidly raising their hands but were not called on. If the selected student comes up with the right answer, the teacher smiles, nods approvingly, and goes on to the next question. This is a great reward for the child who happens to be called on. At the same time that the fortunate student is coming up with the right answer and being smiled upon by the teacher, an audible groan can be heard coming from the children who were striving to be called on but were ignored. It is obvious they are disappointed because they missed an opportunity to show the teacher how smart and quick they are. Perhaps they will get an opportunity next time. In the meantime, the students who didn’t know the answer breathe a sigh of relief. They have escaped being humiliated this time.
The teacher may have started the school year with a determination to treat every student equally and encourage all of them to do their best, but the students quickly sorted themselves into different groups. The “winners” were the bright, eager, highly competitive students who fervently raised their hands, participated in discussions, and did well on tests. Understandably, the teacher felt gratified that these students responded to her teaching. She praised and encouraged them, continued to call on them, and depended on them to keep the class going at a high level and at a reasonable pace.
Then there were the “losers.” At the beginning, the teacher called on them occasionally, but they almost invariably didn’t know the answer, were too shy to speak, or couldn’t speak English well. They seemed embarrassed to be in the spotlight; some of the other students made snide comments—sometimes under their breath, occasionally out loud. Because the schools in the poorer section of town were substandard, the African-American and the Mexican-American youngsters had received a poorer education prior to desegregation. Consequently, in Austin, it was frequently these students who were among the losers. This tended unfairly to confirm the unflattering stereotypes that the white kids had about minorities. They considered them stupid or lazy. The minority students also had preconceived notions about white kids—that they were pushy show-offs and teacher’s pets. These stereotypes were also confirmed by the way most of the white students behaved in the competitive classroom.
After a while, the typical classroom teacher stopped trying to engage the students who weren’t doing well. She felt it was kinder not to call on them and expose them to ridicule by the other students. In effect, she made a silent pact with the “losers”; she would leave them alone as long as they weren’t disruptive. Without really meaning to, she gave up on these students, and so did the rest of the class. Without really meaning to, the teacher contributed to the difficulty the students were experiencing. After a while, these students tended to give up on themselves as well—perhaps believing that they were stupid—because they sure weren’t getting it.
It required only a few days of intensive observation and interviews for us to have a pretty good idea of what was going on in these classrooms. We realized that we needed to do something drastic to shift the emphasis from a relentlessly competitive atmosphere to a more cooperative one. It was in this context that we invented the jigsaw strategy. Our first intervention was with fifth-graders. First we helped several fifth-grade teachers devise a cooperative jigsaw structure for the students to learn about the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. We divided the students into small groups, diversified in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, and made each student responsible for a certain portion of Roosevelt’s biography. Needless to say, at least one or two of the students in each group were already viewed as “losers” by their classmates.
Carlos was one such student. Carlos was very shy and felt insecure in his new surroundings. English was his second language. He spoke it quite well, but with a slight accent. Try to imagine his experience: After attending an inadequately funded, substandard neighborhood school consisting entirely of Mexican-American students like himself, he was suddenly bused across town to the middle-class area of the city and catapulted into a class with Anglo students who spoke English fluently, seemed to know much more than he did about all the subjects taught in the school, and who were not reluctant to let him know it.
When we restructured the classroom so that students were now working together in small groups, this was terrifying to Carlos at first. He could no longer slink down in his chair and hide in the back of the room. The jigsaw structure made it necessary for him to speak up when it was his turn to recite. Carlos gained a little confidence by rehearsing with the others who were also studying Eleanor Roosevelt’s work with the United Nations, but he was understandably reticent to speak when it was his turn to teach the students in his jigsaw group. He blushed, stammered, and had difficulty articulating the material that he had learned. Skilled in the ways of the competitive classroom, the other students were quick to pounce on Carlos’s weakness and began to ridicule him.
One of my research assistants was observing that group and heard some members of Carlos’s group make comments such as, “Aw, you don’t know it, you’re dumb, you’re stupid. You don’t know what you’re doing. You can’t even speak English.” Instead of admonishing them to “be nice” or “try to cooperate,” she made one simple but powerful statement. It went something like this: “Talking like that to Carlos might be fun for you to do, but it’s not going to help you learn anything about what Eleanor Roosevelt accomplished at the United Nations—and the exam will be given in about fifteen minutes.” What my assistant was doing was reminding the students that the situation had changed. The same behavior that might have been useful to them in the past, when they were competing against each other, was now going to cost them something very important: the chance to do well on the upcoming exam.
Needless to say, old dysfunctional habits do not die easily. But they do die. Within a few days of working with jigsaw, Carlos’s groupmates gradually realized that they needed to change their tactics. It was no longer in their own best interest to rattle Carlos; he wasn’t the enemy—he was on their team. They needed him to perform well in order to do well themselves. Instead of taunting him and putting him down, they started to gently ask him questions. The other students began to put themselves in Carlos’s shoes so they could ask questions that didn’t threaten him and would help him recite what he knew in a clear and understandable manner. After a week or two, most of Carlos’s groupmates had developed into skillful interviewers, asking him relevant questions to elicit the vital information from him. They became more patient, figured out the most effective way to work with him, helped him out, and encouraged him. The more they encouraged Carlos, the more he was able to relax; the more he was able to relax, the quicker and more articulate he became. Carlos’s groupmates began to see him in a new light. He became transformed in their minds from a “know-nothing loser who can’t even speak English” to someone they could work with, someone they could appreciate, maybe even someone they could like. Moreover, Carlos began to see himself in a new light, as a competent, contributing member of the class who could work with others from different ethnic groups. His self-esteem grew and as it grew, his performance improved even more; and as his performance continued to improve, his groupmates continued to view him in a more and more favorable light.
Within a few weeks, the success of the jigsaw was obvious to the classroom teachers. They spontaneously told us of their great satisfaction about the way the atmosphere of their classrooms had been transformed. Adjunct visitors (such as music teachers and the like) were little short of amazed at the dramatically changed atmosphere in the classrooms. Needless to say, this was exciting to my graduate students and me. But, as scientists, we were not totally satisfied; we were seeking firmer, more objective evidence—and we got it. Because we had randomly introduced the jigsaw intervention into some classrooms and not others, we were able to compare the progress of the jigsaw students with that of the students in traditional classrooms in a precise, scientific manner. After only eight weeks there were clear differences, even though students spent only a small portion of their class time in jigsaw groups. When tested objectively, jigsaw students expressed significantly less prejudice and negative stereotyping, were more self-confident, and reported that they liked school better than children in traditional classrooms. Moreover, this self-report was bolstered by hard behavioral data: For example, the students in jigsaw classrooms were absent less often than those in traditional classrooms. In addition, academically, the poorer students in jigsaw classes showed enormous improvement over the course of eight weeks; they scored significantly higher on objective exams than the poorer students in traditional classes, while the good students continued to do well—as well as the good students in traditional classes.
You might have noticed a rough similarity between the kind of cooperation that goes on in a jigsaw group and the kind of cooperation that is necessary for the smooth functioning of an athletic team. Take a basketball team, for example. If the team is to be successful, each player must play his or her role in a cooperative manner. If each player was hell-bent on being the highest scorer on the team, then each would shoot whenever the opportunity arose. In contrast, on a cooperative team, the idea is to pass the ball crisply until one player manages to break clear for a relatively easy shot. If I pass the ball to Sam, and Sam whips a pass to Harry, and Harry passes to Tony who breaks free for an easy layup, I am elated even though I did not receive credit for either a field goal or an assist. This is true cooperation.
As a result of this cooperation, athletic teams frequently build a cohesiveness that extends to their relationship off the court. They become friends because they have learned to count on one another. There is one difference between the outcome of a typical jigsaw group and that of a typical high school basketball team, however—and it is a crucial difference. In high school, athletes tend to hang out with each other and frequently exclude nonathletes from their circle of close friends. In short, the internal cohesiveness of an athletic team often goes along with the exclusion of everyone else.
In the jigsaw classroom, we circumvented this problem by the simple device of shuffling groups every eight weeks. Once a group of students was functioning well together, once the barriers had been broken down and the students showed a great deal of liking and empathy for one another, we would re-form the groupings. At first, the students would resist this re-forming of groups. Picture the scene: Debbie, Carlos, Tim, Patty, and Jacob have just gotten to know and appreciate one another and they are doing incredibly good work as a team. Why should they want to leave this warm, efficient, and cozy group to join a group of relative strangers?
Why, indeed? After spending a few weeks in the new group, the students invariably discover that the new people are just about as interesting, friendly, and wonderful as their former group. The new group is working well together and new friendships form. Then the students move on to their third group, and the same thing begins to happen. As they near the end of their time in the third group, it begins to dawn on most students that they didn’t just luck out and land in groups with four or five terrific people. Rather, they realize that just about everyone they work with is a good human being. All they need to do is pay attention to each person, to try to understand him or her, and good things will emerge. That is a lesson well worth learning.
Students in the jigsaw classroom become adept at empathy. They come to understand students like Carlos with empathy. Empathy is what Bill Clinton is getting at when he utters that well-known phrase, “I feel your pain.” When we watch a movie, empathy is what brings tears or joy in us when sad or happy things happen to a character. But why should we care about a character in a movie? We care because we have learned to feel and experience what that character experiences—as if it were happening to us. As infants and children, we experience empathy for members of our family and close friends. But most of us do not experience empathy for our sworn enemies. Thus, when watching an adventure movie such as Star Wars, most youngsters will cheer wildly when spaceships manned by members of the Evil Empire are blown to smithereens. Who cares what happens to Darth Vader’s followers?
Is empathy a trait we are born with or is it something we learn? I believe we are born with the capacity to feel for another person. It is part of what makes us human. I also believe that empathy is a skill that can be enhanced with practice. If I am correct, then it should follow that working in jigsaw groups would lead to a sharpening of a youngster’s general empathic ability because to do well in the group, the child needs to practice feeling what her groupmates feel. To test this notion, one of my graduate students, Diane Bridgeman, conducted a clever experiment in which she showed a series of cartoons to 10-year-old children. Half of the children had spent two months participating in jigsaw classes; the others had spent that time in traditional classrooms. In one series of cartoons, a little boy is looking sad as he waves good-bye to his father at the airport. In the next frame, a letter carrier delivers a package to the boy. When the boy opens the package and finds a toy airplane inside, he bursts into tears. Diane Bridgeman asked the children why they thought the little boy burst into tears at the sight of the airplane. Nearly all of the children could answer correctly—because the toy airplane reminded him of how much he missed his father. Then Diane asked the crucial question: “What did the letter carrier think when he saw the boy open the package and start to cry?”
Most children of this age make a consistent error; they assume that everyone knows what they know. Thus, the youngsters in the control group thought that the letter carrier would know the boy was sad because the gift reminded him of his father leaving. But the children who had participated in the jigsaw classroom responded differently. Because they were better able to take the perspective of the letter carrier—to put themselves in his shoes—they realized that he would be confused at seeing the boy cry over receiving a nice present because the letter carrier hadn’t witnessed the farewell scene at the airport.
Offhand, this might not seem very important. After all, who cares whether kids have the ability to figure out what is in the letter carrier’s mind? In point of fact, we should all care—a great deal. Here’s why: The extent to which children can develop the ability to see the world from the perspective of another human being has profound implications for empathy, prejudice, aggression, and interpersonal relations in general. When you can feel another person’s pain, when you can develop the ability to understand what that person is going through, it increases the probability that your heart will open to that person. Once your heart opens to another person, it becomes virtually impossible to bully that other person, to taunt that other person, to humiliate that other person—and certainly to kill that other person. If you develop the general ability to empathize, then your desire to bully or taunt anyone will decrease. Such is the power of empathy.
Recall that as a lead-in to this chapter, I quoted form the novel Birdy that touching statement by Alfonso: “Before you know it, if you’re not careful, you can get to feeling for everybody and there’s nobody left to hate.” Yes, that is the power of the jigsaw method—it builds empathy among students who frequently disliked and distrusted one another and were motivated to reject, taunt, and fight with one another. After experiencing jigsaw for a couple of months, they literally ran out of people to hate.
Cooperative learning strategies are effective. Students learn the material as well as, or better than, students in traditional classrooms. We have almost thirty years of scientific research that clearly demonstrates this. The data also show that through cooperative learning the classroom becomes a positive social atmosphere where students learn to like and respect one another, and where taunting and bullying are sharply reduced. Students involved in jigsaw tell us that they enjoy school more and show us that they do by attending class more regularly. It goes without saying that the scientific results are important. But on a personal level, what is perhaps even more gratifying is to witness, firsthand, youngsters actually going through the transformation. Tormentors evolve into supportive helpers and anxious “losers” begin to enjoy learning and feel accepted for who they are. Occasionally, I am privileged to receive spontaneous, unsolicited letters from young men and young women who, many years earlier, had undergone such a transformation. To give you some of the flavor of this experience, I would like to share one such letter with you.
I am a senior at——University. Today I got a letter admitting me to the Harvard Law School. This may not seem odd to you, but let me tell you something. I am the sixth of seven children my parents had—and I am the only one who ever went to college, let alone graduate, or go to law school.
By now, you are probably wondering why this stranger is writing to you and bragging to you about his achievements. Actually, I’m not a stranger although we never met. You see, last year I was taking a course in social psychology and we were using a book you wrote called The Social Animal, and when I read about prejudice and jigsaw it all sounded very familiar—and then, I realized that I was in that very first class you ever did jigsaw in—when I was in the fifth grade. And as I read on, it dawned on me that I was the boy that you called Carlos. And then I remembered you when you first came to our classroom and how I was scared and how I hated school and how I was so stupid and didn’t know anything. And you came in—it all came back to me when I read your book—you were very tall—about 6 1/2 feet—and you had a big black beard and you were funny and made us all laugh.
And, most important, when we started to do work in jigsaw groups, I began to realize that I wasn’t really that stupid. And the kids I thought were cruel and hostile became my friends and the teacher acted friendly and nice to me and I actually began to love school, and I began to love to learn things and now I’m about to go to Harvard Law School.
You must get a lot of letters like this but I decided to write anyway because let me tell you something. My mother tells me that when I was born I almost died. I was born at home and the cord was wrapped around my neck and the midwife gave me mouth to mouth and saved my life. If she was still alive, I would write to her too, to tell her that I grew up smart and good and I’m going to law school. But she died a few years ago. I’m writing to you because, no less than her, you saved my life too.
I think you will agree that it is a beautiful letter. For me, it is just about he most moving letter I have ever received. But when I read the signature I was startled to discover that it did not belong to the boy that I had in mind—the boy who in my previous writings I had referred to as “Carlos.” The young man who wrote me that lovely letter was mistaken.
I have a clear memory of sitting there with the letter in my hand thinking about that young man and how wrong he was. But after a few minutes, I fell into a reverie in which I began to realize that perhaps that young man was not mistaken after all. That is, although I had a specific fifth-grader in mind when I wrote about Carlos, there are a great many children who come pretty close to fitting that description. In my reverie, I began to grasp the implications of the possibility that there are thousands of youngsters all over America who think they are Carlos. And, in the deepest possible way, they are all Carlos. Carlos is any child who has been the unhappy recipient of put-downs, taunting, rejection, and loss of self-esteem—but who has managed to turn that around because the structure of the classroom changed, creating a different set of responses. To the child involved, it feels like a miracle. To the social psychologist, it is another vivid example of the power of the situation: What looks like a small, simple change in the structure of a social environment can have an enormous impact on the experience of the people in that environment....
Excerpted from Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine, Chapter 6, pp. 125-153. © 2000 by W. H. Freeman & Co. Reprinted by permission.