TeachingNaked

I recently read Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning by José Antonio Bowen (2012). My Department Chair, Dr. Joyce Farrow, put this one on my radar screen. Thankfully. 

 

My top takeaways:

·       Education has become, and will increasingly be, a highly competitive marketplace. Adaptability and nimbleness will win the day.

·       Design of learning tasks must be framed in a customized and personalized way for the individual learner.

·       We each have a personal epistemology, in that we take what we have learned (knowledge and skills) and frame it against our own contexts (beliefs, motives, aspirations, needs). 

·       Technology is a tool. Like all tools, it can be leveraged to accelerate movement toward desired outcomes -- in our case, LEARNING -- or if wrongly chosen or poorly deployed, it can inhibit the learning.

·       As educators, our product is LEARNING, not the diploma or degree.

·       In educational institutions, the educators/teachers had better be the most passionate and aggressive learners. If not, they will rightly be deemed irrelevant.

 

My favorite quotes:

 

“The problem of teaching, therefore, is not getting the facts but the context from my brain to yours.” (p. 87)

 

“Bain (2004) came to the same conclusion: The best teachers focus on challenging students in a supportive environment where failure is tolerated.” (p. 93)

 

“Today’s employer now expects anyone coming for an interview to have studied the organization’s website carefully.” (p. 151) 

 

“Every profession is becoming more like law and medicine: there is now more information than anyone can memorize and more need for analysis.” (p. 184)  

 

“Record companies fought the demise of the CD because they mistook the delivery system for the product.” (p. 259)

 

Dr. Bowen wrote this book in 2012. I read it 12 years later. He proved to be downright prescient in some of his predictions about where education was/is going. Sadly, we remain mired in some of the same educational paradigms from which he was trying to lead us.

 

Worth the read for those who love education.

Artful_Inquirers

The best leaders I know, in both personal life and professional, are masterful inquirers. At almost every encounter with members of the team, they find a way to ask questions that keep us focused both on the direction we're heading and the way we are spending our precious resources (both tangible and intangible) in pursuit of that direction.

Here are some examples of the questions that Artful Inquirers put before us regularly:

How clear are we about the direction we are heading?

In what ways are we spending our time, effort, resources well in this pursuit?

What expenditures of our time/effort/resources seem not to be moving us toward our vision?

How clear are we, both as teams and as individuals, about the roles we are being asked to play?

How might we be clearer about the vision we have chosen, and why we have chosen it?

These types of questions, and variations on them, serve to cause deep reflection and tightening of alignments. Both are good things.

By the way, these are not posed as hypothetical questions. Thinking and dialogue are required responses.

BlameThrowers

All of us who work in organizations deal with Blame Throwers. 

Blame Throwers are masterful at distancing themselves from responsibility for and ownership of impactful and needed work. They regularly manage, beyond that distancing, to either overtly or covertly turn blame for things that go wrong toward others.

The best leaders I know mitigate BlameThrowing by use of some helpful techniques:

• They clearly and in writing codify who is responsible for what in the organization.
• They meet regularly with Team members, both individually and in groups, to tease out pain points and bottlenecks in organizational work. EVERYONE is offered opportunity to suggest solutions and ideas for improvement, with commensurate responsibility for implementing adopted solutions.
• They discuss all organizational business in the context of the espoused outcomes. Another way of saying they keep conversations "business" and refuse to let it be "personal."
• They quickly, and with dignity, move non-producers off the Team (the producers are very rarely also BlameThrowers).

Transparency is key in keeping the BlameThrowers at bay. They sorta like cockroaches running from light in that respect.

Openness

Openness is a virtue.

Openness implies a willingness to...    

• Treat others respectfully
• Listen, deeply and carefully
• Understand, as clearly as possible
• Seek areas of possible agreement
• Examine and re-examine, on continual loop

Openness does not imply that we can/will agree on every issue or topic, across the spectrum.

Complete and total adherence to the position, thinking, and/or standards of another is more an indication of cultist behavior than it is of openness.

Openness is an immensely challenging intellectual and emotional exercise, for it forces us to critically look inward as we are simultaneously looking outward.

GoodRight

Doing good is harder than not.

Adopting good habits is more difficult than the opposite.

Choosing service over self-interest is an extremely onerous commitment.

Creating ecologically sustainable systems is tougher than consumptive practice.

Insisting on fairness and respectfulness is more challenging than deferring to privilege.

If doing good is such a tough slog, why would we go to the trouble? 

Because doing Good is the Right thing to do.

We are not alone in the journey. Now is an excellent time to push the process.

DisasterFoilers

We make thousands of decisions each day. The higher up the leadership ladder we reside, the number of decisions grows.

Well-crafted policy and ethical judgment are key to making sound and consequential decisions. Those are foundational to efficacious day-to-day operations.  

Crises, however, have a nasty way of shouldering themselves into our workdays. Rarely do those issues rise to the the level of true emergencies; but, sometimes they do.

Two variables that almost always result in either poor or less-than-optimal decisions are Fear and Urgency. When we are making decisions grounded in either of those we are at great risk of making mistakes. 

The best antidote to that "Fear-Urgency disease" is to practice diligently, as a team, the craft of forecasting and anticipating. When the "surprises" don't really surprise us, we are in much better position to make sound and beneficial decisions. Disaster(s) foiled!

Grit

I recently read Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth (2018). This book has been the subject of much chatter in recent years.

 

My top takeaways:

·       Showing up………is a large part of the battle. (Dr. Mike Moses taught that it’s at least 90% of the outcome.)

·       Talent x Effort = Skill _ Skill x Effort = Achievement

·       Enthusiasm is quite common. Endurance is the rarity.

·       The genesis of passion is authentically enjoying what you do (or are doing).

·       Purpose ripens passion.

·       Experts don’t just practice, they practice deliberately.

·       Almost any occupation can be a job, or a career, or a calling.

·       Purpose…..is our WHY?

·       A bad day is a terrible time to quit.

·       Grit can be an element of culture.

 

My favorite quotes:

 

“Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort. Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them.” (p. 42)

 

“Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time.” (p. 64)

 

“One form of perseverance is the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday.” (p. 91)

 

“For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance.” (p. 114)

 

“Author and activist James Baldwin once put it this way: ‘Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.’” (p. 183)

 

“My husband Jason and I are raising our girls according to the Hard Thing Rule: Do something that requires deliberate practice, don’t quit in the middle of the season or the semester, and pick the hard thing yourself.” (p. 278)

 

 

This book was every bit as good as the chatter it has generated would suggest.