Archive for the ‘Leadership Books’ Category
Monday, December 24th, 2018
Get It Done: The 21-day Mind Hack System to Double Your Productivity and Finish What You Start by Michael Mackintosh offers sound advice for people prone to procrastination and who suffer from the endless disruptions that exist in our hi-tech world. If this sounds like you be sure to get a copy along with one for your school’s professional development library.
Introduction
- This book is aimed at creative entrepreneurs but I believe that educational leaders can learn from it as well. It makes very big promises, but depending on where you are it should help you focus on what’s important, increase your productivity, and finish your most important projects. It also reminds us all to build in time for rest, relaxation, and celebrating our accomplishments.
Part I – 11 Essential Mind Hacks to Make Things Happen
- 1. The Prolonged Pain or the Short-Lived Pain: If you continue doing things that are inefficient and less effective you are inviting long-term pain. Change in the near term can be painful too, but if it leads to success you won’t have to deal with it in the long-term.
- 2. The Defining Choice: Acting differently and thinking differently is a choice. Keep in mind it is the only way you are likely to get different results.
- 3. The 80/20 Rule: This rule states that 80% of your input or effort leads to 20% of your outputs or results. Therefore, the opposite has to be true that 20% of your effort leads to 80% of your results. The trick is to identify the activities that produce 20% of your output and either do them less or do them when you are not so sharp.
- 4. Good is Good Enough: The old saying “the perfect is the enemy of the good” applies here. It is important sometimes to stop when you have reached the good enough point in a job unless it’s a job that has to be perfect like a computer program.
- 5. The Delusion of Time Management: The idea here is that you only have NOW in terms of doing something. Even if you are thinking about the future you are doing it NOW. Trying to micromanage your schedule is not likely to lead to great productivity. Rather than thinking about managing time, think about managing your thoughts, words, actions, energy, and focus. As you move through the day ask if what you are doing is moving directly toward your goals. Make your most important work a priority. Organize your day to make the most of your energy. If you are a morning person like me, save the most important work for the morning. (Doug: Yes, I’m writing this in the morning.) Recognize when you are a tired, hungry, or distracted and do what it takes to recharge. It’s not how much time you put into something, it’s how much high-quality energy you invest.
- 6. The Resistance: You can’t do something new, significant, and meaningful without resistance so get ready for it. Some can come from your lower self that is comfortable with the status quo. Be alert and look for it within and without so you can take it on.
- 7. Fears and Hallucinations: Fears can be real or irrational. They can be healthy and necessary for success. They can also arise when it’s not required. Unconscious fears include the unknown, failure, and not being good enough. Once you identify them you can accept that they only exist in your mind. This should help prevent the destructive worry that come with them.
- 8. Focus: You don’t want to try to make all of your dreams come true at the same time. The idea here is to bring one idea to completion before you begin another one. Fear could be part of the problem for people who try to do too many things at once.
- 9. How to Overcome Self-Doubt: This can sabotage you before you begin. Michael suggests that you focus on the people who will be helped if you complete what you are doing and realize that self-doubt, like most fears, is also irrational.
- 10. Do It Now: Everything happens in the now, and now won’t last forever. This should help you get going and avoid procrastination.
- 11. Do Less Work to Get More Done: You don’t do your best work when you work too hard. You are more likely to make mistakes and quality is likely to go downhill. Be sure to build rest and recharge into your game plan. Sleeping on a problem or just taking a walk can help you solve it. You are also more likely to screw up your family life and other important relationships. You still have to work hard, but working too hard can even make your sick.
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Sunday, December 16th, 2018
Just in time for Christmas. Here is an executive summary of my recent book. Based on the feedback I received so far, it would make an excellent present for any educators and parents with kids in school. Also, consider getting a copy for any policymakers you know.I hope you like it.
Click here to buy at Amazon
1. Introduction
- Teaching is tricky business. If it were as easy as rocket science, which we seem to have figured out, all students would be learning as fast as their individual brains would allow. This implies that they would learn at their own individual pace, which would cause the gaps between the faster learners and the slower learners to gradually increase.
- Unfortunately, our current set of reforms driven by the corporate/ political complex gives the same tests to students each year based on their born on date, regardless of their ability. It also expects teachers to close the gaps between slow and fast learners. One way to do this is to slow down the fast learners. In this book, Dr. Green explains why the current reforms and out-dated teaching methods need to go and just where we might head.
2. Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science; It’s Way More Complex
- It’s clear that we understand how rockets work as we have sent them all around the solar system and beyond. The human brain, however, which is the learning playground for students and teachers is much more complex and less understood. Promising ideas in education spread slowly, if at all, because of a resistance to change and federally imposed standardized testing. Thanks to the media, however, the public doesn’t realize this and they think that teachers are generally doing a bad job. They also think that all students should be able to achieve at high levels, which is nonsense. We all know that some students are more capable at cognitive tasks than others.
3. The Pressure On Teachers To Get Good Test Scores Makes It Inevitable They Will Cheat
- When the government encouraged by business leaders imposes high-states tests on schools, three things can happen. First, some will cheat and many have. Second, most will try to game the system with endless test prep that brings with it a lot of bad teaching practice. Finally, some will just fail. Schools will be closed and careers will be negatively impacted or ended altogether. This chapter documents some of the cheating and explains the different ways that teachers can cheat. It also suggests that teachers work to create engaging lessons and let the tests take care of themselves. If they do, test scores are unlikely to go down and just might go up.
4. Are You Smarter Than Bill Gates?
- Bill isn’t the only member of the corporate class pushing for test-based accountability, he is just the most famous and has the most wealth to push his ideas. Dr. Green suspects that when Bill wants to cure some disease, he reaches out to experts in the field. When it comes to education, it seems that he thinks he already knows the answers. Meanwhile, it’s hard to find any real expert in the field who thinks the current reforms are a good idea.
5. Failing at the Business of Schools
- Unlike businesses, schools cannot control their raw materials. They just take the students that their parents drop off. Most are also run from the top by a school board composed of elected volunteers who for the most part lack any serious educational expertise. For these reasons, trying to hold schools to business standards makes no sense. It also makes no sense to hold all schools to the same standard as their raw materials vary.
6. Achievement Gaps and Ethnic Groups
- When advocates for blacks, Hispanics, and poor kids see that that whites and Asians perform better on standardized tests, they expect schools to work on closing the gaps. Ironically, if schools did a perfect job of letting every student learn as fast as possible, the gaps would increase. Doug maintains that the best way to close the gaps is to slow down the fast learners, which some schools do well. He also points out that the subgroups themselves are arbitrary and don’t make much sense. For example, why are Spanish speakers the only group based on the language they speak when more people speak English and Chinese? People from China and India are very different in appearance and culture, yet they are in the same group.
Posted in Book Summaries, Education Books, Leadership Books | 2 Comments »
Monday, December 3rd, 2018
Your Starter Guide to Maker Spaces by Nicholas Provenzano tell the story of how he started and built a successful maker space at his school. His guidelines explain what one is, who can help you build one, where it should go, and what to put in it. He explains how it can promote project-based learning and turn failure into a positive thing. Every school should have a copy.
Introduction
- Since making doesn’t have a set curriculum, it should be no surprise that this book is written by an English teacher. The goal is to have students use different tools to demonstrate understanding. You don’t have to be an expert to turn your students lose and it’s ok to fail. This book features Nick’s experiences rather than a pile of research. He claims to be a tinkerer rather than an expert and hopes that you can draw on his work to help jump-start your own and the work of your students.
1. So, What is Making?
- Nick’s definition of making is that it is the creation of something new that was not there before. By being broad and vague it is not constrained. This definition also makes it more inclusive so the everyone can make with anything you can find along with computer code. It is also vital that you ditch the idea that making is for STEM classes. You need to add the arts (STEAM) as the arts bring everything together. You want students to be creators, not just consumers.
- Since some students don’t have a supportive making environment at home, schools need to provide one. They all need to experience problem-based lessons to prepare for life after school. Another key is that teachers have to see themselves as makers. At the least, they make lesson plans. They also make other things and need to be role models when it comes to making. There is also an element of storytelling as just about anything you make has a story associated with it.
2. I Know What Making Is, but Why Should I Care?
- In many schools students don’t have much choice about what they do or study. A maker space gives them choice and freedom if they are making what they want. Creativity and innovation are also often eliminated from the curriculum. Not so in a maker space. You should also design your maker space to support collaboration. Businesses want all of these things and many schools don’t try to build them into students’ lives. Finally, a maker space should be a fun place for students to be. There is no reason why school can’t be more fun than it already is and maker spaces can help.
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Thursday, November 22nd, 2018
Outliers: The Story of Success (©2008, Little Brown: New York, NY) is Malcolm Gladwell’s third mega best seller after The Tipping Point and Blink, both of which are summarized here. Gladwell looks at many notable situations where people or populations stand out from the crowd. He finds that circumstances and effort are more important than talent. There are many lessons here for educators and parents.
The Secret of Roseto
- Roseto is a town in Pennsylvania populated by immigrants from a village in Italy. Although the residents do not have a healthy diet or lifestyle, they do have a very low incidence of heart disease. The entire town is an outlier in this respect. After a great deal of study, it was determined that it was the supportive town culture that helps keep the residents so healthy.
The Importance of Birthdays
- A study of birthdays for stars in hockey, baseball, and soccer shows that players born earlier in the year are more likely to stand out and qualify for better coaching and more playing time. At a young age there is a significant advantage to being born earlier in the year of eligibility. In preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical and mental maturity.
- The birth order effect also operates in schools where the older students in a grade level tend to do better and get placed in higher ability groups. Older children scored up to 12 percentile points higher on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Teachers seem to sometimes confuse maturity with ability. Schools could put all the students born in the first quarter of the year in the same class and do the same with children born in other parts of the year of eligibility. As it is, many educated parents hold their kids back to insure that they will be older than their classmates which gives them a better chance in education and school sports that are based on grade level rather than age.
Time Trumps Talent-What Really Made the Beatles Great
- Psychological studies have demonstrated that all great artists and people with great expertise got there only after putting in at least 10,000 hours of effort or practice. Even Mozart didn’t make great music until he hit this number at the age of 21. It takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
- A club owner from Hamburg went to London looking for bands to play in this club. By pure chance he met an agent from Liverpool who booked the Beatles in his club. Unlike English gigs which seldom lasted more than an hour, the club had the Beatles play for five hours or more a night. All told they performed 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By 1964 they had performed about 1200 times. They were no good on stage when they went to Hamburg and they were very good when they came back.
Tags: Bill Gates, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, The Beatles
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Monday, November 19th, 2018
After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform by Andrea Gabor uses examples of successful and failing schools to demonstrate how the principles promoted by W. Edwards Deming can lead to school improvement. She provides extended histories of reforms in New York City, Massachusetts, Texas, and New Orleans to show how democratic grassroots reforms are more likely to work than the top-down approaches used in most states and cities. Everyone with the power to impact school reform needs to read this.
Introduction: The Quiet Revolution
- Andrea starts by reviewing the work of W. Edwards Deming and how he helped Japanese and then American companies modernize and improve. He found the blame to lie with top management and the answers to come from bottom-up reforms as employees closest to problems were in the best position to solve them. Unfortunately, the corporate-reform industry that has gained ever-increasing influence on how American schools educate children has largely ignored the strategies they used to improve production as they tinker with school reform.
- Business reformers came to the education table with belief in market competition and quantitative measures. Expertise from corporate boardrooms is favored over experience gleaned in classrooms. They also distrust of the education culture. It also came with arrogance, suspicion, and even hatred of organized labor. What is needed, however, is democratic collaboration, iterative improvement, and grassroots participation that is protected from bureaucratic meddling. We should value data as we understand its limits.
- Schools have different goals and cultures than businesses. This makes them less suited to being run like businesses. Three decades of top-down, corporate-style education reforms have proven deeply unpopular and have reaped few benefits. The number of bad teachers is also overestimated by reformers, but efforts to punish low performers has lowered morale and increased turnover. Other business practices like incentive pay have also had a negative impact. The only winners have been the testing and technology industries at the expense of a narrowed curriculum. This book will reveal what has worked, which should guide the next reform effort.
1. Big Dreams, Small Schools, How Entrepreneurial Rebels Built a Movement in New York City
- This chapter takes us through some history of New York City Schools from the 1960’s to relatively recently. It tells of how a number of schools gained success by being small and at the same time allowing teachers to pretty much run the schools. In a sense, they used Deming’s grass-roots ideas to interest students in the learning and act as role models. They shunned standardized testing and looked at other performance indicators. A sense of creative non-compliance pervaded these schools as they bent the rules and looked for cracks in the system. Classrooms were more open and curricula less fixed. There was lots of learning by doing, art, music, and field trips.
A new generation of educational leaders arrived who had no experience teaching. Rather than learn Deming’s principles like industry, they instituted top-down reforms. Even though they saw the success of small schools, they missed the rest of the factors that lead to success. This also included those involved with funding like the Gates Foundation. Unfortunately, the De Blasio administration has increased bureaucracy and shunned the flat organization models of successful schools.
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