I had breakfast with one of my advisees yesterday.  He’s heading into his senior year, and he’s putting a lot of pressure on himself to perform at a very high level across a variety of domains and challenges. Newspaper editor, captain of a team, leader of several clubs, heavy academic schedule: you name it, this kid’s doing it. As we left the restaurant, I found myself saying the same things I’ve said to so many young people over the years:

Me: “Have you put in the work?”  Have you practiced as hard as you can?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “Then you just have to show up [at the contest / test / game / interview / etc.] and do your best.  If you’ve done the work, then you just have to let yourself play the way you’ve prepared to play.”

Today while reading a book called Elite Minds by Dr. Stan Beecham, I found a more eloquent (and studied) version of the above.  As you return to school, and find yourself having similar conversations with the young people in your care, please share it. So many of them are harboring big dreams and a little bit of fear that, when they get up to bat, they won’t be able to hit the ball.  Here’s Dr. Beecham:

Performing at the highest level is not about talent, ability, size, speed, facilities, equipment, weather conditions, or even effort.  It’s about being free.  Free from expectations of self and others, free from criticism, free from fear, and free from “should” and “have to.”

There are many routes to success.  So you shouldn’t be overly invested in a specific outcome or result.  If you are, this will bite you every time.  Freedom means no attachments, no desires, just one very quiet mind that allows you to perform at the best of your natural abilities that have been instilled in you during intentional practice.

When athletes have a great performance, they frequently find themselves being interviewed after the competition.  The interviewer asks a series of questions to discern how they did it. . . .  Usually the athletes start and stop a number of times because, quite frankly, they don’t know the answer to the questions.  Their mind was not thinking.  They were reacting, seeing, feeling, but definitely not thinking.  In most cases, they won’t be able to tell you what happened or how they did it.  Instead, it just happened.  There is very little memory of the event, and time and space tend to be distorted as well.  It was absence, not presence, that had allowed the wonderful to happen.

You must trust yourself and your ability in order to perform at that level.  Ultimately, you can’t will yourself to greatness, but you can trust yourself to greatness if you’ve done your preparation. (152 – 153)

I think this message resonates with me so deeply because I trust so many of the young people with whom I work.  And now I see that it’s my job to help them trust themselves.

I keep a very clean desk in my home office.  (It’s almost the opposite of my desk at work.)

For some reason, no matter how many times I clean off the desk, I leave the following quote from Teju Cole:

What makes an image surreal is not the artful crafting of illusion but the eruption of the accidental into the everyday.

It’s not taped to the wall or the desk.  It’s not framed.  It’s just written on a page I tore out of a magazine I found in an airplane.  Last time I flew to California…

In his book On Trails, Robert Moor reports on a conversation he had with J.L. Deneubourg, a leading thinker on ant behavior, and according to Moor, a “veteran collective intelligence researcher.”

When Moor asked him how he would use his vast knowledge to organize and construct a better city from scratch, Deneubourg replied: “I would like to see the emergence of the town . . . If I was mayor — and the probability of that happening is quite low — my attitude would be very liberal.  My objective would be to offer different types of material to help citizens find the solution that they prefer.”

When Moor asked him to clarify — would he indeed “withhold his expertise and allow the town’s resident’s to plan their own town?” — Deneubourg said, “Yes . . . To believe that you have the solution for another person is a form of stupidity” (86).

This quotation arrives in my life at an interesting time — when I’m about to begin planning my 9th Grade English class.

Reshan and I recently published an article called “Respect Thy Time: How to Stop Calling Meetings that People Hate.”  Yesterday, I read an article with the opposite title but the same intent: “How to Craft Meetings People Love (Really).”  These articles pair really nicely, covering a similar topic from different angles.

In the former article, Reshan and I encourage leaders to define the purpose of their team and then work relentlessly to uncover the best ways to help that team collaborate effectively.  Sometimes that will mean calling a face-to-face meeting, and sometimes that will mean connecting the team through a technology tool (like Trello) to help them work asynchronously.

In the latter article, Eric J. McNulty, Director of Research at the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative, offers concrete steps and mindsets to help us craft meetings wherein attendees give and receive value, and he offers a great test: “One way to find out if people feel a meeting is worthwhile is to make it optional — and see who shows up.” (The hashtag in the title of this blog comes from his article, too.) 

Though we won’t soon solve the problem of meetings, it’s important that those called to our meetings know that we are grappling constantly with format and function.  We might not always succeed in ensuring that everybody loves our meetings, but we can work to send them a clear message — again and again — that we value their time and talents.

I’ve been reading a lot of Stoic philosophy this summer, and this post by Seth Godin lines up with what I find most useful about it (in a work / business context). Those of you not reading Godin’s blog several times a week are really missing out.

After reading Patti Smith’s amazing letter about her friend, Sam Shepard, who died a few days ago, I picked up her book Just Kids.  I’ve been reading it non-stop since then, whenever I have a free moment. When I wasn’t looking, she has become one of the most natural, clear, big hearted writers in America. It’s no surprise, then, that her letter about Sam Shepard is at least partially about how, when they were together, they would work hard at the craft of writing. They would practice together. These things don’t happen by accident.

I’m so pleased to see that my friend, Reshan Richards, is blogging (daily ) again.  He blogs for the same reason Seth Godin blogs — to make sure he is exercising his noticing muscle. And the product is usually some combination of informative, fun, playful, serendipitous, curious, bright, joyful, and/or smart.  The blog reminds me of the first time I really got to know Reshan. We were at a conference and had just presented together for the first time.  He turned to me and said, “we should go out and find some fresh baked cookies.”  And that’s exactly what we did.

For the online version of fresh baked cookies, served fresh daily, tune in to http://www.constructivisttoolkit.com.

Soon I’ll be starting my annual reading vacation (not a vacation from reading . . . a vacation where I read non-stop), so I looked through my book collection to create a worthy pile. Almost immediately, I noticed and pulled down my well worn copy of An Open Life, which is a series of conversations between Joseph Campbell and Michael Toms. I haven’t looked at this book in a very long time.

Here’s a passage I marked over two decades ago, before I became a teacher, wherein Campbell reminisces about seeing a Picasso exhibition.

This winter in New York the big thing for me was the Picasso exhibition, four miles of pictures by this man. At age sixteen, he produced two paintings which were of academic perfection. He had gotten into the academy by passing the exam when he was thirteen. So what do you do with your life if you’re producing academically perfect works at the age of sixteen? Every step afterwards is an innovation. You see it visually as you go from one display room to the next. He was like the growing point, actually the growing point, of the whole twentieth-century pressure of Art into new regions. It’s terrific! (17)

There’s so much to learn from Picasso’s reaction to being “perfect” at an early age (in school I call this “reaching for the A beyond the A”) and to Campbell’s articulate, admiration-tinged assessment.

Here’s section 4 from an article Reshan Richards and I wrote for the NAIS blog.  We’ve been using it with leaders — inside and outside education — to help them shift meeting culture in their organization by paying attention to the way they describe, define, and plan meetings.  

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4. Blended leaders challenge meeting structures and change meeting structures.

A combination of minds and perspectives, i.e., a meeting, can be a wonderful thing, aiding in problem-solving and helping leaders to see around corners. There is more than one way to skin a meeting, though. Consider the following:   

Synchronous, face-to-face, in-person

• Affordances: The most human, most personal way to meet. In a shared environmental context, you can hear tone, pace, and inflection and see facial cues, gestures, and body language.
• Limitations: Interactions are difficult to record or capture (even with note-taking). Such meetings have to be scheduled, requiring pre-meeting effort.

Synchronous, face-to-face, across distance (e.g., via Zoom)

• Affordances: Offers the affordances of in-person meetings minus the shared environmental context.
• Limitations: Technological interruptions can break up the flow of dialogue. Also, setting up this meeting requires onboarding people in the digital “room.” Finally, participants in multiperson meetings won’t always know when/how to chime in.   

Synchronous, phone call/conference call

• Affordances: Tone, pace, and inflection can all be heard, and meeting participants benefit from a shared temporal context.
• Limitations: Meeting participants cannot “read” the room, especially when multiple people are involved. This meeting type also requires effort to schedule and calling instructions.

Synchronous, text based/shared document

• Affordances: People respond and interact in the moment, producing a clear record of the exchange.
• Limitations: Gaining social/emotional information from the exchange is difficult.

Asynchronous, email/shared document

• Affordances: Your team members can continue to work in a different time and place at a time that suits them. This meeting type creates an accessible record of the work.
• Limitations: Without shared temporal context, connection to other participants can be elusive.

The full article can be found here: https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/february-2017/how-to-lead-online-and-off/

 

   

Yesterday at the LLI Memphis Conference, I asked a group to practice what I call “professional sharing.” We were midway through the conference, so I stopped my session and asked the attendees to reflect on their experience thus far by adding their thinking to a Google Doc.  Here’s a lightly edited sampling of what they came up with. 

1.

The most interesting person I have met at LLI so far is George Couros. In addition to being the author of The Innovator’s Mindset, he is a motivational speaker for educators to refresh their mindset and attitude toward their practice in order to unleash the talents of the students in their rooms.

2.

George Couros was very motivating to me. I loved the video he shared of the retired teacher and her legacy. 

3.

The best thing I have learned at LLI so far is that there are many more educators who think like I do and want to find ways to engage their students.  I learned this from talking with a doctoral student at lunch who is working on a dissertation on intonation in the second language classroom. He is studying how people can understand “motherease” or sounds when appropriate intonation is used — even when there are no words being used.

4.

One thing I have learned so far that I will definitely try to implement at my school is setting up a Google site as my class website instead of using wix.com.  I learned this from Jodi Goff, who led a workshop in educator collaboration using Google and how to become a certified Google educator.  

5.

I have learned that Google Forms is so versatile.  I saw how it can be a survey or quiz and, if used as a quiz, will be graded for you.  I learned this from Jodi Goff who is an educational consultant.

6.

At LLI Memphis I have been reminded of the importance of thinking flexibly.  From expanding my use of social media to sharing my thinking and work, to finding new ways to use the space I’m in charge of, whether physical or virtual, I see the value of being collaborative and flexible in a fresh way.  Thank you @sjvalentine and @gcouros for your inspiration to be more intentional.

7.

The most interesting person I have met at LLI so far is Mr. A.  Mr. A who looks to be in his mid-twenties and yet has already taught for 17 years.  Mr. A who knows the rich and deep history behind education in Memphis and yet has high hopes for our children.  Mr. A who seems to be a quiet soul and yet has the cheerfulness to laugh out loud with good people about good stories over good BBQ chicken.  It is a pleasure to have met Mr. A indeed.

8.

The most interesting person I have met so far would be the keynote speaker, George Couros. I loved when he said if you were not tweeting and hashtagging in today’s world, then you are illiterate. The world around us is constantly changing, and if we don’t get with it, we are going to be left behind. He gave me a new outlook on really bringing technology in and embracing it. 

9.

The most engaging session thus far was the keynote speaker. I also went to his break out session. George Couros was engaging, insightful, and had so many concrete examples of why educators must change and embrace technology. We also spent some time working on our Twitter account, and that was helpful.

10.

The best thing I have learned at LLI so far is that, as educators, we need to move from a fixed mindset to an innovative mindset. Instead of having students put their technology (phones, tablets) away, we should consider embracing what they are using and find ways that it can be used in a classroom setting.  They are going to use it anyway so why not use it with them to enhance the lesson.