Self Control- Part 2

 

 

Week of :    9/9/13-9/13/13

Theme:  SELF CONTROL

 

     Date               Announcements            Greeting             Sharing                 Activity

Tuesday   a.m.	This morning we will hear the speeches of our Student Government contenders.	n/a	n/a	n/a
Tuesday p.m.	To the Gym!	Group Bingo		Who are We? Activity
Wed	Grade Level Meetings 7/8 Marine Lab 6	n/a	n/a	n/a
Thursday	How well do you practice self control?   (Write your name on the meter)	Cumulative List Greeting  Football Style		Marshmallow Video (on Blog)
Friday		Football Greeting		Counting Game

 

Tuesday  – a.m.       Student Government Speeches

Tuesday -- p.m.       See last week’s Bulletin J

Announcements:    

Greeting: 

Share/Activity: 

 

Wednesday                          Grade Level Meetings / 6^th grade to Marine Lab!

 

Thursday

Announcements:   “How STRONG is your self-control?” – Advisors: draw a horizontal line on your white board:    ___________________________________________________________________________________________

                            0                                                                     5                                                                          10

            NO self control                                               Medium Self Control                         Strong Self-Control

Ask students to rate their self-control as they come in to the room by marking the line and putting their name.

 

Greeting:      Cumulative List Greeting – The Cumulative Greeting we’ve done before (wherein each person greets everyone who has preceded her) but with the twist that a list is added.  In this case, each person says his/her favorite NFL Team or “none” if a football non-fan.  As the greeting accumulates, each new greeter repeats what those before her have answered.  Leader asks first but answers last, after greeting has made its way around the circle. [Because focus & listening are forms of self-control!!]

Activity:  Show Marshmallow Video :  http://scdsmsadvisory.blogspot.com/search/label/Marshmallow%20Test

Friday

Announcements:  

Greeting:      Football Greeting – There are four types of “scores” in football: touchdown = 6 points. field goal = 3; safety = 2; extra point = 1.  Students stand in a circle and select someone to begin.  If he chooses a touchdown, he greets the sixth person to his right; the greeted person and the greeter both sit down.  The next person to the right chooses a play (touchdown, safety, field goal or extra point) and play continues until everyone has been greeted.

 

Share:                       

Activity:        Counting Game – This is a simple counting game where as a group, students try to count to the highest number possible without anyone speaking at the same time.  If two or more students say a number at the same time, then the group must begin again.  Advisors don’t give any more instructions than that.  Typically, the same students who like to dominate in class, like to call out more than their fair share of numbers (good discussion for self-control for those who like to be the “boss”).  It is also interesting to see who struggles to take the risk to say a number at all (sometimes it takes a lot of self-control to go out on a limb, if it’s against your nature to take risks).  Also interesting to see who expresses frustration, who resorts to put-downs, who offers encouragement or gets the group to develop a system that increases success!

 

Exerpted from The New Yorker:  www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer‎

 

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Although Carolyn has no direct memory of the experiment, and the scientists would not release any information about the subjects, she strongly suspects that she was able to delay gratification. “I’ve always been really good at waiting,” Carolyn told me. “If you give me a challenge or a task, then I’m going to find a way to do it, even if it means not eating my favorite food.” Her mother, Karen Sortino, is still more certain: “Even as a young kid, Carolyn was very patient. I’m sure she would have waited.” But her brother Craig, who also took part in the experiment, displayed less fortitude. Craig, a year older than Carolyn, still remembers the torment of trying to wait. “At a certain point, it must have occurred to me that I was all by myself,” he recalls. “And so I just started taking all the candy.” According to Craig, he was also tested with little plastic toys—he could have a second one if he held out—and he broke into the desk, where he figured there would be additional toys. “I took everything I could,” he says. “I cleaned them out. After that, I noticed the teachers encouraged me to not go into the experiment room anymore.”

Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

Most of the children were like Craig. They struggled to resist the treat and held out for an average of less than three minutes. “A few kids ate the marshmallow right away,” Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor of psychology in charge of the experiment, remembers. “They didn’t even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare directly at the marshmallow and then ring the bell thirty seconds later.” About thirty per cent of the children, however, were like Carolyn. They successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist.

The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies, Mischel moved on to other areas of personality research. “There are only so many things you can do with kids trying not to eat marshmallows.”

But occasionally Mischel would ask his three daughters, all of whom attended the Bing, about their friends from nursery school. “It was really just idle dinnertime conversation,” he says. “I’d ask them, ‘How’s Jane? How’s Eric? How are they doing in school?’ ” Mischel began to notice a link between the children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to wait for the second marshmallow. He asked his daughters to assess their friends academically on a scale of zero to five. Comparing these ratings with the original data set, he saw a correlation. “That’s when I realized I had to do this seriously,” he says. Starting in 1981, Mischel sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school. He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to “cope well with problems” and get along with their peers. He also requested their S.A.T. scores.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Carolyn Weisz is a textbook example of a high delayer. She attended Stanford as an undergraduate, and got her Ph.D. in social psychology at Princeton. She’s now an associate psychology professor at the University of Puget Sound. Craig, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and has spent his career doing “all kinds of things” in the entertainment industry, mostly in production. He’s currently helping to write and produce a film. “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person,” Craig says. “Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff.”

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

Mischel’s main worry is that, even if his lesson plan proves to be effective, it might still be overwhelmed by variables the scientists can’t control, such as the home environment. He knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ” ♦