Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

Fast Company
magazine in 2005. “Employees used to work
alone in ‘I’ settings. Today, working in teams and groups is highly
valued. We are designing products to facilitate that.” Rival office
manufacturer Herman Miller, Inc., has not only introduced new furniture
designed to accommodate “the move toward collaboration and teaming
in the workplace” but also moved its own top executives from private
offices to an open space. In 2006, the Ross School of Business at the
University of Michigan demolished a classroom building in part because
it wasn’t set up for maximum group interaction.
The New Groupthink is also practiced in our schools, via an
increasingly popular method of instruction called “cooperative” or
“small group” learning. In many elementary schools, the traditional rows
of seats facing the teacher have been replaced with “pods” of four or
more desks pushed together to facilitate countless group learning
activities. Even subjects like math and creative writing, which would
seem to depend on solo flights of thought, are often taught as group
projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited, a big sign announced
the “Rules for Group Work,” including, 
YOU CAN’T ASK A TEACHER FOR HELP UNLESS
EVERYONE
IN YOUR GROUP HAS THE SAME QUESTION
.
According to a 2002 nationwide survey of more than 1,200 fourth-and
eighth-grade teachers, 55 percent of fourth-grade teachers prefer
cooperative learning, compared to only 26 percent who favor teacher-
directed formats. Only 35 percent of fourth-grade and 29 percent of
eighth-grade teachers spend more than half their classroom time on
traditional instruction, while 42 percent of fourth-grade and 41 percent

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of eighth-grade teachers spend at least a quarter of class time on group
work. Among younger teachers, small-group learning is even more
popular, suggesting that the trend will continue for some time to come.
The cooperative approach has politically progressive roots—the theory
is that students take ownership of their education when they learn from
one another—but according to elementary school teachers I interviewed
at public and private schools in New York, Michigan, and Georgia, it also
trains kids to express themselves in the team culture of corporate
America. “This style of teaching reflects the business community,” one
fifth-grade teacher in a Manhattan public school told me, “where
people’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their
originality or insight. You have to be someone who speaks well and calls
attention to yourself. It’s an elitism based on something other than
merit.” “Today the world of business works in groups, so now the kids
do it in school,” a third-grade teacher in Decatur, Georgia, explained.
“Cooperative learning enables skills in working as teams—skills that are
in dire demand in the workplace,” writes the educational consultant
Bruce Williams.
Williams also identifies leadership training as a primary benefit of
cooperative learning. Indeed, the teachers I met seemed to pay close
attention to their students’ managerial skills. In one public school I
visited in downtown Atlanta, a third-grade teacher pointed out a quiet
student who likes to “do his own thing.” “But we put him in charge of
safety patrol one morning, so he got the chance to be a leader, too,” she
assured me.
This teacher was kind and well-intentioned, but I wonder whether
students like the young safety officer would be better off if we
appreciated that not everyone 
aspires
to be a leader in the conventional
sense of the word—that some people wish to fit harmoniously into the
group, and others to be independent of it. Often the most highly creative
people are in the latter category. As Janet Farrall and Leonie Kronborg
write in