The science of willpower: Kelly McGonigal on sticking to resolutions It’s the second week in January and, at about this time, that resolution that seemed so reasonable a week ago — go to the gym every other day, read a book a week, only drink alcohol on weekends — is starting to seem very … hard. As you are teetering on the edge of abandoning it all together, Kelly McGonigal is here to help. This Stanford University psychologist — who shared last year how you can make stress your friend — wants you to know that you’re not having a hard time sticking to a resolution because you are a terrible person. Perhaps you’ve just formulated the wrong resolution. McGonigal has, for years, taught a course called “The Science of Willpower” through Stanford’s Continuing Studies program and, in 2011, she spun it into a book, The Willpower Instinct. First question: why is willpower such a struggle? It’s a great question. The reason that so many things can trigger that kind of conflict is because that’s the essence of human nature. That is actually very freeing. Yes! Yes.
Why we need creative confidence In 2012, IDEO founder and longtime Stanford professor David Kelley took the TED stage in Long Beach and shared a deeply personal story. It was the tale of his own cancer diagnosis, of finding a lump in his neck and being told he had a 40% chance of survival. This was clearly a sobering moment, but he wasn’t sharing the story to seek our sympathy. Rather, he wanted to talk about his resulting epiphany. “While you’re waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things,” he said drily. “I thought a lot about: ‘What was I put on earth to do? His conclusion: “The thing I most wanted to do was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way.” Innovation is scary. The main thing that seems to work is to have a bunch of experiments where people dig in. So how do you embed innovation in an organization? The first thing a client doesn’t want to hear is that it’s probably a 10-year process. At Stanford, it’s clean. So what next?
Starting From Scratch: A Public School Built on Dreams of Students and Parents Getty District public schools have a bad reputation for being static and slow to change. But a public school district near San Diego is proving that collaboration between motivated teachers, engaged parents ready for a change and progressive leaders can lead to a dramatically different way of approaching public education. Poway Unified School District’s student population is steadily growing as families move into new housing developments popping up nearby. All last year five teachers and two administrators researched school models, drew on business practices and used design thinking principles to combine the most inspiring practices into a new school. “The really unique thing about the school is the fact that it really involved parents, asking them to help design what the school would be like,” Collins said. “They wanted students to really like and enjoy school,” said Megan Power, one of the five teachers who designed the school. The afternoon is what Power calls “deep dive time.”
How Long It Takes to Form a New Habit by Maria Popova Why magic numbers always require a grain of empirical salt. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle proclaimed. When he became interested in how long it takes for us to form or change a habit, psychologist Jeremy Dean found himself bombarded with the same magic answer from popular psychology websites and advice columns: 21 days. In a study carried out at University College London, 96 participants were asked to choose an everyday behavior that they wanted to turn into a habit. This notion of acting without thinking — known in science as “automaticity” — turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a central driver of habits. The simple answer is that, on average, across the participants who provided enough data, it took 66 days until a habit was formed. It’s like trying to run up a hill that starts out steep and gradually levels off. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
The Elephant and the Rider Every now and then I come across a metaphor that really sticks and helps me think differently about something I see every day. The metaphor helps me look at these situations with a new lens, and, as a result, think, feel, and act more effectively. I’ve heard of several ways to think about our thinking. I’ve heard of the left-brain and right-brain. I’ve heard of the emotional side and the rational side. This time, the metaphor is the Elephant and the Rider. In the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard , Dan Heath and Chip Heath write about the Elephant and the Rider. The Two Systems: The Emotional and the Rational Side Our brain has two systems at work – an emotional side and a rational side. “The conventional wisdom in psychology, in fact, is that the brain has two independent systems at work at all times. The Planner and the Doer Modern behavior economists think of the two systems as the Planner and the Doer. The Elephant and the Rider Metaphor Photo by Swami Stream.
Designing Professional Learning The Designing Professional Learning report provides a snapshot of the key elements involved in creating effective and engaging professional learning in a globally dispersed market. Whether you are developing professional learning from scratch, enhancing an existing program or evaluating professional learning for yourself or others, the Designing Professional Learning report provides detailed guidance on how to configure and/or evaluate your own context-specific model/s. Following analysis of a broad range of professional learning activities, a Learning Design Anatomy was developed to provide a framework for understanding the elements of effective professional learning. Each learning design element is framed by a detailed series of questions that challenge users to refine and clarify aims, intended learning outcomes and the most effective ways in which to engage—taking into consideration the unique context for learning. Designing Professional Learning report 778KB PDF International Partners
William James on Habit by Maria Popova “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.” “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. I found this interesting not merely out of solipsism, as it somehow validated my having had the same breakfast day in and day out for nearly a decade (steel-cut oats, fat-free Greek yogurt, whey protein powder, seasonal fruit), but also because it isn’t a novel idea at all. When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. James begins with a strictly scientific, physiological account of the brain and our coteries of ingrained information patterns, exploring the notion of neuroplasticity a century before it became a buzzword of modern popular neuroscience and offering this elegant definition: Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
A Brilliant Question Not Essential There is a difference between essential questions and brilliant questions. While essential questions touch upon the most important issues of life, they are rarely brilliant. Essential questions touch our hearts and souls. They are central to our lives. They help to define what it means to be human. Most important thought during our lives will center on such essential questions. What does it mean to be a good friend? In contrast with essential questions, brilliant questions are important for their power to unlock mysteries and open doors. What will it take to win her heart? Brilliant questions may also be essential, but they almost always deal with strategy and change of some sort. A Vivid Example In studying important figures from history we might ask the essential question, "What kind of person was Joan of Arc or Matthew Flinders?" But all this gathering may not bring us to the heart of the matter. Here is where the brilliant question comes into play. Where did Joan go wrong?
Interview: Elizabeth Green, Author Of 'Building A Better Teacher' Teacher effectiveness is a hot topic in education circles right now. How do you measure it, and how can you improve it? What type of teachers should schools keep, and who should they let go? Elizabeth Green says that it's not, as some people assume, a question of personality or charisma. Great teachers are not born, they're made, she says — and there's much more to teaching than being "good" or "bad" at it. Her book, Building a Better Teacher, explores teaching as a craft and shows just how complicated that craft can be. Green studied teaching methods in both American and Japanese classrooms over the span of six years. Interview Highlights On teaching math in the United States versus in Japan One of the differences is the number of problems in a single class period. On the importance of mentorship Another thing that holds our country back is that we have this culture of privacy around teaching. Elizabeth Green is the cofounder of Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site that covers education.
The Psychology of Self-Control by Maria Popova “Everyone’s self-control is a limited resource; it’s like muscle strength: the more we use it, the less remains in the tank, until we replenish it with rest.” Ever since psychology godfather William James first expounded the crucial role of habit in how we live and who we become, modern psychology has sought to figure out how we can rewire our bad habits, maximize our willpower, and use habits to optimize our productivity. People naturally vary in the amount of self-control they have, so some will find it more difficult than others to break a habit. Fortunately, Dean points out that there are a number of strategies we can use to counter our depleted willpower. The rest of Making Habits, Breaking Habits, while erring on the self-helpy side at times, does distill a number of compelling findings from psychology labs into surprisingly useful insights on making everyday life not only more livable but also more joyful. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions by Terry Heick Essential questions are, as Grant Wiggins defined, ‘essential’ in the sense of signaling genuine, important and necessarily-ongoing inquiries.” These are grapple-worthy, substantive questions that not only require wrestling with, but are worth wrestling with–that could lead students to some critical insight in a 40/40/40-rule sense of the term. I collected the following set of questions through the course of creating units of study, most of them from the Greece Central School District in New York. Or maybe I’ll make a separate page for them entirely. See also 8 Strategies To Help Students Ask Great Questions Many, Many Examples Of Essential Questions Decisions, Actions, and Consequences What is the relationship between decisions and consequences? Social Justice What is social justice? Culture: Values, Beliefs & Rituals How do individuals develop values and beliefs? Adversity, Conflict, and Change How does conflict lead to change? Utopia and Dystopia Chaos and Order Creation Sources
The Psychology of Getting Unstuck: How to Overcome the “OK Plateau” of Performance & Personal Growth by Maria Popova “When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.” “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself,” William James wrote in his influential meditation on habit, ”so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances.” As we’ve seen, one of the most insidious forms of such habitual autopilot — which evolved to help lighten our cognitive load yet is a double-edged sword that can also hurt us — is our mercilessly selective everyday attention, but the phenomenon is particularly perilous when it comes to learning new skills. In the 1960s, psychologists identified three stages that we pass through in the acquisition of new skills. Color restoration of archival Einstein photograph by Mads Madsen The Mozart family on tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, and Nannerl.
50 Questions To Help Students Think About What They Think - TeachThought contributed by Lisa Chesser Using the right questions creates powerful, sometimes multiple answers and discussions. Aristotle said that he asked questions in response to other people’s views, while Socrates focused on disciplined questioning to get to the truth of the matter. Ultimately questions spark imagination, conjure emotions, and create more questions. The questions asked by a teacher or professor are sometimes more glaringly valuable than the information transferred to the students. Those questions spark a thought, which leads to a fiercely independent search for information. If students are the ones gathering that information then they’re the ones learning it and student-driven learning cements lessons into the students’ minds making any lesson more powerful with this strategy. The questions are unrestricted and open the mind up to unfettered thought, perfect for innovation and understanding. See also our 28 Critical Thinking Question Stems For Classroom Use Logical Questions 1.
The metamorphoses of the self-employed And so it continues. Yesterday’s labour market statistics showed that the self-employment figures are up once again. Close to 75,000 more people became self-employed in the last 3 months of this year, which means we’ve seen an increase of around 340,000 over the last 12 months alone. A report we published a few weeks ago takes a closer look at who these people are, why they’re starting up in business, and what being self-employed means to them personally. Our attempt was to paint a much richer picture of what life is like for the self-employed, and to show how complex and diverse this community really is. While we dug much deeper than most – for example, by creating a typology of self-employed ‘tribes’ – it still feels as though we only scratched the surface of this group. A common theme that came up time and again in our interviews with business owners was that it took around 2 years for their venture to finally ‘begin working’. How do we do this?