Perspective Taking

I wanted to spotlight something else from the July 25, 2013 CT Public Radio show I referenced in my posting about the Darien Special Education complaint.  (From my other posting about the status of the Windsor Patch, I asked myself, What is the one thing that you would want to communicate in your last Patch posting or comment?  This is the answer to that question.)  ............ At about the 35th minute of the show, Ellen Galinsky is asked, "what is Perspective taking?"   The answer goes something like this:  "It is understanding how other people think and feel.  It is knowing that your vantage point is not the only vantage point.  It is like the business principals - know what your customer wants."    .............  Why is this the last thought that I would want to convey in this forum?  Because it is what I have been trying to convey since my first comment in November.  Praising the organizational efforts of Jill Jenkins, in bringing the NAACP to Windsor, led to consequences for me.  I did not know that perspective taking is what I was trying to do.  We will all need to learn the meaning of the perspective taking skill if Windsor is to close its achievement gap.  (Now I understand better why Rosie Miskavitich and I have been advocating for the CT Department of Education free multicultural responsiveness training.)  ............  Anyway, below is the link to the CT Public radio show.  And a part of a different interview where the question is, What is perspective taking?:

Trouble with Special Ed in Darien and Galinksy on Minds in the Making

Ellen: At the Families and Work Institute, we conduct an ongoing nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce. Over the years, we find that bosses who have children or elder care responsibilities are rated the most positively as bosses by their employees-they are more likely to keep employees informed of what they need to know to do their jobs well, have realistic expectations for employees' performance, recognize employees for doing a good job at work, and are supportive when employees have work problems.

I have been asked repeatedly, why this is so. In some ways, it's a counter-intuitive finding-having kids or elder care responsibility makes you a better boss-really?

My assumption is that having children and/or elder care responsibilities help bosses learn the skill of perspective taking-to become more adept at recognizing what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes, to understand what others think and feel. It includes empathy but goes far beyond it. Thus, when they supervise employees, bosses can take the employees' perspectives into account and manage them more effectively. Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a person widely acclaimed for his great leadership style, says that one of the leadership skills he works hard on cultivating is listening to and understanding the men and women in the armed services he oversees.

Research on children's development supports this interpretation. Children who become more adept at perspective taking are more likely to be ready for school and succeed in school because they are more skilled at understanding and interpreting teachers' expectations; they perform better on literacy tasks because they can understand the behavior of the characters in the books they are reading; and they are less likely to get into fights with other kids because they are more skilled at making sense of other kids' behavior and less likely to jump to false conclusions about what is going on.