HIP Education teaches students to act with integrity and to resist such behaviors as bullying, negative conformity and passive indifference.
Past research has demonstrated that psychological interventions on mindset, belonging, and values-affirmation can positively impact student achievement and help close the academic gap for non-Asian minorities as well as women in scientific fields. The HIP education pilots explore whether similar interventions can be developed from the Situational Awareness and Social Fitness models, centered on psychological processes involved in learning, social interactions, well-being, and self-selected change, and whether they can be adapted to a classroom setting as a supplement to students’ regular curricula across a broad range of ages and cultures.
Over the 2010-2011 academic calendar year, three pilot intervention programs were conducted by the Heroic Imagination Project in two schools. These pilots met once a week for one or two semesters, and social-psychological interventions were administered to students in three domains: Situational Awareness, Social Fitness, and Mindset. The goal of the interventions was to help students identify and initiate positive change within key psychological processes critical to their long-term success in school, careers, and interpersonal relationships and to encourage a pattern of wise and effective acts of everyday heroism. Key topic included: the power of situations, Social Fitness as a life-long learning and practice model, and a growth mindset regarding intelligence and person theory.
Click here to watch the students in our Foothill Pilot program describe their experiences.
Our Goals
One of the primary goals of our education program is to arm students with the science of social influence. It is an original HIP hypothesis that teaching students about the psychological processes involved in group dynamics through research examples and real world stories, while simultaneously engaging them in skill-building activities to mindfully resist negative forms of social influence, will help render students less susceptible to:
–Outgroup prejudice and discrimination
–Social roles and expectations
It is our goal to widen each student’s range of adaptive responses to any social situation and to decrease the chance that they will be persuaded to act against their better judgment and to increase the likelihood that they will take responsibility in an unclear situation and help others in need.
We also teach students to successfully initiate social change. Students are taught how to leverage their resources, set goals around social issues, and create effective plans to achieve those goals. They are taught to counter their ‘small-success blindness’, by finding things that are going well in a mixed system, and to reverse engineer those ‘bright spots’ to generate success in a new domain. Deal with adversity/challenge.
Our curriculum comes primarily from three broad areas:
–The Situational Awareness Model
–The Social Fitness Model
–Carol Dweck’s Mindset
