Find a group that holds you and stretches you

Join or form a steady group where you are accepted as you are and regularly meet perspectives different from yours.

Pourquoi ça marche

One of the three major findings of the 2001 study was the power of the learner cohort as a “holding environment.” For learners with a Socializing way of knowing it gave emotional support, made it comfortable to ask questions, and let them recognize commonalities that helped them manage differences rather than feel threatened by them. For a mind made up by its relationships, meeting difference inside relationships it already trusts lowers the threat difference otherwise carries, and steady contact over months gives a new perspective time to become one’s own.

Comment faire

1. Look for a group that meets regularly over months, not a one-off event — a study circle, a peer coaching group, a class that stays together.
2. Check for two things: people you feel accepted by, and people whose backgrounds or views genuinely differ from yours.
3. Commit to a stretch long enough for trust to form before judging whether it is working.
4. After each meeting, note one perspective you heard that you would not have reached alone, and one thing you said that you would normally have kept quiet.

Données probantes

Kegan’s group (NCSALL, 2001) followed 41 adult learners across three programs over a year or more using repeated interviews. They describe the cohort as a holding environment for academic learning, emotional support, and perspective broadening, and report that at the site where learners started and finished together, eight of sixteen showed a more complex way of knowing in their final interviews than when they entered. (observational)

A small qualitative study in adult basic education with no comparison group; it cannot separate the cohort’s effect from the rest of the program.

Sources

• Kegan, R., Broderick, M., Drago-Severson, E., Helsing, D., Popp, N., & Portnow, K. (2001). Toward a New Pluralism in ABE/ESOL Classrooms: Teaching to Multiple “Cultures of Mind.” Executive Summary, NCSALL Reports #19a. Harvard Graduate School of Education / National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy.

Erreur fréquente

Choosing a group where everyone already agrees. That gives the holding without the stretching; the study describes the cohort’s value as both support and contact with outlooks unlike your own.