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Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
In 2003, officials in Garden Grove, California, a community of 170,000 people wedged amid the suburban sprawl of Orange County, set out to confront a problem that afflicts most every town in America: drivers speeding through school zones. Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. So city engineers decided to take another approach. The signs were curious in a few ways. In other words, officials in Garden Grove were betting that giving speeders redundant information with no consequence would somehow compel them to do something few of us are inclined to do: slow down. The results fascinated and delighted the city officials. The signs leverage what’s called a feedback loop, a profoundly effective tool for changing behavior. A nifty idea, but how to make it happen? Related:  Mentoring

How Leaders Become Self-Aware - Anthony Tjan by Anthony K. Tjan | 9:01 AM July 19, 2012 A plethora of people, courses, and self-help guides profess to lead you by the hand to the promised land of business success. The problem is that things are always messier than the how-to’s make them out to be. This is why it is often better to consider less the specifics and more the principles and qualities that bring success. In my experience — and in the research my co-authors and I did for our new book, Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck — there is one quality that trumps all, evident in virtually every great entrepreneur, manager, and leader. Without self-awareness, you cannot understand your strengths and weakness, your “super powers” versus your “kryptonite.” That self-awareness is a critical factor for business-building success is not a new insight. 1. 2. 3. This is the trinity of self-awareness: know thyself, improve thyself, and complement thyself.

Onboarding and Mentoring: how to create a monster (contributor) Onboarding and Mentoring: or how to refine raw talent into a loyal professional and a monster contributor. It’s happened to all of us. At some point in our career, we’ve started a new job, excited about the seemingly boundless possibilities, maybe eager to get a fresh start. Looking forward to that first week, I think we universally hope for at least two things: 1) time and attention from some of our colleagues, to help us understand and adjust to our new work environment, and 2) patience from our manager as we get up to speed, until we can contribute at a significant level. And, wouldn’t that be great? But what actually happens? I want to focus on how we can do this better, and specifically what I am doing to make this better. I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve never done this before at quite this level of magnitude. So, here is what I’ve got: Hiring – It all starts here. Hiring is obviously big enough to be its own post topic, so I won’t linger here. 1. a. b. c. 2. 3. Thanks Ryan

Metacognition And Learning: Strategies For Instructional Design Do you know how to learn? Many people don’t. Specifically, they don’t know how to look inward to examine how they learn and to judge which methods are effective. That’s where metacognitive strategies come in. Improved metacognition can facilitate both formal and informal learning. But let’s start at the beginning. What is metacognition? Metacognition is often referred to as “thinking about thinking.” The Two Processes of Metacognition Many theorists organize the skills of metacognition into two complementary processes that make it easier to understand and remember. Knowledge of cognition has three components: knowledge of the factors that influence one’s own performance; knowing different types of strategies to use for learning; knowing what strategy to use for a specific learning situation.Regulation of cognition involves: setting goals and planning; monitoring and controlling learning; and evaluating one’s own regulation (assessing results and strategies used). Metacognitive Strategies

Your Employees Want the Negative Feedback You Hate to Give - Jack Zenger , and Joseph Folkman by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman | 1:00 PM January 15, 2014 Would you rather hear positive feedback about your performance or suggestions for improvement? For the last two weeks, we’ve been compiling data on this question, and on people’s general attitudes toward feedback, both positive and corrective. So far we’ve collected it from 899 individuals, 49% from the U.S. and the remainder from abroad. Before we tell you what we found, we suggest you take the same assessement here so you can put our findings within your own personal context. What our assessment measures is the extent to which you prefer to give and to receive both positive and corrective feedback. The graph below shows, on average, the degree to which the participants in our initial sample tend to avoid or prefer giving and receiving positive and corrective feedback. The first column indicates that roughly the same number of people prefer to give positive feedback as those who do not.

How Do We Measure What Really Counts In The Classroom? The world is caught up in an Information Age revolution, where we are all evaluating products, restaurants, doctors, books, hotels, and everything else online, but education has not yet moved past the standardized assessment, which was invented in 1914. Frederick Kelly, a doctoral student in Kansas, was looking for a mass-produced way to address a teacher shortage caused by World War I. If Ford could mass produce Model T’s, why not come up with a test for “lower order thinking” for the masses of immigrants coming into America just as secondary education was made compulsory and all the female teachers were working in factories while their men went to the European front? Even Kelly was dismayed when his emergency system, which he called the Kansas Silent Reading Test, was retained after the war ended. That’s just the beginning. With eRubric, the teacher decides, on any assignment, which categories apply and how to weight them.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Agility » Blog Archive » My First Job Spoiled Me This is a little story about how I learned the right way to manage people My First Job: Age 13 or 14 When I was a kid, if I wanted something (like a slot-car, or a pellet gun), I could wait for my birthday or Christmas and hope my folks could afford to buy it for me, but beyond that it was pretty much up to me. So I pulled weeds, sold garden seeds door-to-door, sold Christmas and greeting cards door-to-door, sold grapes on the roadside, delivered newspapers as a back up for friends who had paper-routes. Typical kid stuff for that day. But those little jobs never brought in much money for the amount of work, so I decided to get a “real” job. There was a plant nursery about a mile from my home, and they occasionally hired teens to water plants, move stuff, mix soil, plant seedlings into nursery cans, and similar nursery work. Lesson One: Treat everyone nicely The day I started, the Mr. Mr. Lesson Two: Continuous Improvement Mr. Me: “I’ll do that” Mr. Bill: “Hey Woody, I’m glad Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr.

Ideas About Games and Learner Assessment Harrisburg Presentation Resources Here are some resources from my presentation in Harrisburg. Defining and Exploring Gamification from Karl Kapp Here is some additional information. Articles and Blog Entries of Interest 8 Types of Stories to Effect Change Storytelling and Instructional Design Eight Game Elements to Make Learning More Intriguing Games, Gamification and the Quest for Learner Engagement Gamification, […] Continue Reading → 2014 DOE Symposium Conference Resources Here are my resources for the 2014 DOE Symposium Conference. Continue Reading → Great fun at ITEAA Conference & Introduction of Exciting Game-Based Learning Modules Last week I had a chance to attend the ITEAA Conference which is the conference of the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association. Continue Reading → Instructional Games and Narrative Instructional games work best when there is a narrative that provides the learner with the proper context for the learning that needs to take place.

Why positive encouragement works better than criticism, according to science 6.2K Flares Filament.io 6.2K Flares × I’ve written about positivity before, in terms of cultivating a positive outlook for yourself. What I want to write about today is cultivating positivity in your workplace, particularly if you’re a leader. How positivity affects our brains To start with, let’s look at how positive and negative emotions work in our brains, and what we can learn from that. Positive emotions generally work in an opposite way to negative emotions. That is why exercising often makes us happier, especially if we choose to go for a demanding work-out. In the face of negative events, our brains struggle to perform at their highest—or even normal—capacity. This shift in control to the low road favors automatic habits, as the amygdala draws on knee-jerk responses to save us. 1 When we’re stressed or scared, for instance, we struggle to think clearly, to coordinate well with others, to take in new information and to come up with new ideas. Positive encouragement and communication

In brave new world of online ed, Smarterer wants to track what you’re actually learning When Boston-based Smarterer launched in late 2010, it was conceived as a way for people to quickly show others what they know. But, two years later, the company says it’s stumbled on to an important lesson: especially with the emerging crop of education startups, life-long learners need a way to assess their progress for themselves. To that end, Smarterer (see disclosure), which uses crowdsourced tests to measure skill mastery, is shifting its attention away from being a site for public validation to being a platform to track personal learning. “We started with the vision of you’re doing this because you want to prove to the world what you know – it was more about reputation management [and] trying to get the job,” said co-founder Dave Balter, who is also the CEO of marketing firm BzzAgent. People want to track personal growth For example, he said, just three percent of active users this year have shared a Smarterer score externally. Identifying areas of strength and weakness

Boss Labels Employee "Under-Achiever" For This... Sometimes Negative Feedback is Best - Heidi Grant Halvorson by Heidi Grant Halvorson | 8:00 AM January 28, 2013 If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be “critical” or “negative” when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode. It’s incredibly frustrating. But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Hang on, you say. And don’t people need encouragement to feel confident? In many cases, yes. Confusing, isn’t it? It’s important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times. As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information. In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions. But what about motivation?

The three things you always have You always have three things. The three things are your answers to these questions: It’s common to confuse #2 with #3. Some people get stuck on the feelings for the past and never move on. Feelings are important as that’s how we know who we are. Venting, dwelling or celebrating serve the purpose of being present with how we feel. For example, lets pretend I was : What happened: I was attacked by wild terrorist bears. How you feel about it: sad, scared and angry. What you’re going to do next: stop running naked in a suit made of beef hot dogs, which terrorist bears are known to love to eat, at the terrorist bear exhibit at the zoo. There you go. #3 leads to an action that leads to a new set of three things. And to conclude, here’s my three things: What happened: I wrote this post. How do you feel: Glad someone is still reading this. What are you going to do next: Wait to see if you leave a comment.

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