Celebration of Failure

If we didn’t learn from failure and just gave up when we failed, no one would be walking. It takes a lot of falling down before one futures out how to stay upright. In those situations, the failures are small and are low pressure. It is not a person trying to take their first steps in a crowded gym as the center of attention. We have often said that school is the junior varsity level of life. You are not yet in the bright lights with a big Friday night crowd. It is Thursday afternoon in front of parents, who mostly are there to cheer for their kids. It is that lower pressure, productive failure that makes us better the next time around. It seems that failure was never anything to fear until a person goes to school. Once we are at school, one learns early on that if you don’t succeed, others may laugh at you or say something mean. After enough of that kind of response, no wonder kids are hesitant to volunteer or to put their whole selves into their work. What if they try their hardest and others don’t appreciate it? Rosamund and Ben Zander encourage people to participate fully by plugging into “‘the electric socket for possibility, the access to the energy of transformation’…by finding the tempo and lean our bodies to the music; dare to let go of the edges of ourselves…participate” (Zander & Zander 121)! 

Ultimately, we are looking for our students to outlearn not only those in the school, but around the world. To do that, they need to become dynamic learners who are willing to fail in order to learn (Staats 228). Celebration of failure appears in almost every discussion or explanation of success. The difference between those who end up being successful seems to revolve around reflection and asking questions. It does take courage of sorts to continue after failure, but sometimes there is no choice. The difference between laterally bouncing from one failure to the next is taking the time to stop and think about what happened and why. Possibly the failure was due to focusing on the wrong strength, the wrong details or ignoring an important detail.

Staats, Bradley R. Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive. Harvard Business Review Press, 2018.

Zander, Rosamund Stone, and Ben Zander. The Art of Possibility. Penguin Books, 2002.

Attributes for Success

 In his book Work Rules!, Lazlo Bock identifies four attributes that Google uses to identify strong candidates. First is general cognitive ability, which works for them because their business involves solving specific difficult problems. The second is leadership, more specifically emergent leadership where a person leads when their skills are needed by the group. That is a quality Arete could use in interviewing future students, or math teachers. The third is "Googleyness," which is a combination of willingness to have fun, be humble and conscientious. This would translate well into Arete almost directly. The fourth attribute is Role-Related Knowledge where they check that the person can actually do the job they are applying for. They believe that anyone who is curious and open to learning will figure out the right answers most of the time. We have found that curiosity may be the most important attribute of successful Arete students, along with leadership, teamwork and work ethic, but that may be related to curiosity. Despite us looking for the same type of people, Bock does not mention most of the qualities we associate with successful students in our program. I wonder if those are implicit Googleyness, or if they feel they can develop those qualities. 

Learning is Natural Law

Over the course of history and in different cultures, education has taken many different forms. In the thousands of years people have been going to school, no one has created the "perfect" way of teaching others. According to Yuval Noah Harari, "corporations are fictional stories created by human beings. Microsoft isn't the buildings it owns, the people it employs or the shareholders it serves--rather, it is an intricate legal fiction woven by lawmakers and lawyers. (W)e treat corporations as if they are real entities in the world like tigers or humans" (Harari 2018, 246). School, like business, is a creation of humans and can be changed to fit our needs. It is not natural law. We have come to accept the "rules'' of school i.e. sitting in desks, listening to lectures, taking notes, taking tests, and receiving grades are all part of the "rules." The word "learning" has come to be the equivalent of "school." As in the frequent student answer answer to the question: "Do you love learning?" is answered with "No, I don't like school."

Learning is natural law. Everything with a brain learns throughout their lives. Only humans go to "school."

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Five Minutes of Excellence

Instead of "Think Big. Do Something Awesome! Change the World," Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies disagrees. He wants people to focus on the small. Do something super cool by the end of the day...excellence is the next five minutes...Make the next five minutes rock" (Ferris 2018, 228)! The idea that we have been focusing on the big picture for years and have been somewhat disappointed with the outcome may be a result of putting too much emphasis on the future. Possibly focusing on the small, the next minute or five and putting together a series of five minute wins is the most accessible way to feel successful.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin      Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Experiential Flux Capacitor

Through either being ridiculed themselves or seeing others in that situation, people above  elementary school age  become adverse to risking being wrong or making a mistake. Avoiding failure is not reducing risk. A different risk emerges. The new risk is one that avoids anything new and then the person misses out on a new experience, or merely an experience. In his book Visible Learning for Teachers,  John Hattie contends that one quality of creating an environment for learning is to make mistakes expected (Hattie 26). This concept is similar to the Trojanball concept of encouraging kids to foul out of basketball games. If one fouls out, they have been playing harder for longer than other players. Usually, players are reprimanded for fouling out or for getting too many fouls. We wanted maximum effort from our players every second they were on the court and it started with everything we did in practice. Every drill, every day either the coaches or the other players themselves pushed their teammates to play hard either through their example or verbally. The difference in the classroom is the lack of actual cheering for others, and that students who are on the team are there because they choose to be. 

Seth Godin believes that one should work with the term “flux” rather than risk since flux means movement. Everything we do involves movement, either forward or backward. Not trying something new is actually moving backward since the gap between where a person is at the start compared to the others widens when one chooses not to undertake an activity that others are doing. 

Godin, Seth. Poke the Box: When was the last time  you did something for the first time?. Do You Zoom?, 2011.

Hattie, John. Visible Learning For Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning. Routledge, 2012.

Importance of Asking Questions

"I am smart enough to answer the question, but am I smart enough to ask it?" This question from the book This Will Make You Smarter is supported many times over from the problem solving protocol 5 Why's to Yuval Noah Harari's statement "I would rather ask questions I cannot answer than to have answers I cannot question" (Harari 2018, 216). Again and again, seeking enlightenment, the truth or information is best done through asking questions and seeking the answers. Where does one learn more--from answering a trivia question, or asking why that situation developed in the first place? Whether it is in school, science or life, being able to ask questions is better than being able to answer someone else's questions.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Pink, Daniel. To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 

2012.

Learning Is Embarrassment

Learning is growth. It brings vitality to life and is one of the reasons childhood is so magical. Kids are constantly learning and if they make a mistake, often it is easily overcome. "Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough," according to author Alain de Botton (Kleon 2014, 197). the embarrassment does not have to be public. It is embarrassing when one learns the actual lyrics to a song, rather than some nonsense that they originally thought it was. After a while, one may forget their previous understanding of it, but the key was not to be satisfied with what was thought to be known. Being open to new experiences and learning is a vital link to growth.

Kleon, Austin. Show Your Work! :10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered. Workman, 2014.

Wearables and Individuality

"Wearables." Whether it is an Apple watch, fitbit or even a cellphone, we are generating data that we hand over to corporations every day and we do so willingly. Granted, our willingness to use a new app or device clouds our thinking in terms of all that we are giving away. Everytime we download a new app it asks for invasive permissions which usually include location, photos, contacts, searches among other sensitive bits of information. We can use our fingerprint or our face as a way to open our phones, both of which will be painful, difficult and costly to change. As Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 intimates, the government will not demand people give away their information. People will happily give it away through their own choice.

Yuval Noah Hariri likens it to when the Europeans swindled Africans an Native Americans out of "entire countries...for colorful beads and cheap trinkets" (Harari 2018, 79). The problem is, now that we have started to do it, how do we stop? For me to have reduced costs for my health insurance, the insurance company requires biometric data exams once per year. They have an app that tracks my location which is used to tabulate "points" when I walk into a fitness center and stay for at least 30 minutes. Throughout the year I am required to earn a set number of points to keep my lower cost health insurance. Who does this information belong to? It seems like it should belong to the individual, but it is being given to a corporation who can store it and use it for a variety of purposes of their own choosing.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Think! Learn! Change!

 "Think Big! Do Something Awesome! Change the World!" This collection of statements came out of frustration years ago with a class of juniors who said “How can you expect us to choose anything we want to learn about and research it? We have never done that before!” I was stunned.  While they may not have been the hardest working group, I thought giving them the option to learn about anything they wanted would fire them up rather than lock them up.  This has become a mantra with which we begin each Genius Hour session. It is easily chanted or repeated as a class, but each part has to be undertaken with equal vigor. There were semesters or years where we missed the mark because students focused on the third part and felt they had to raise money rather than doing something they are truly interested in doing. They may learn about a topic, but most of their time was spent in doing the logistics of an event. It doesn't come off quite as pithy, but using Tim O'Reilly's lines "Work on stuff that matters," and "Create more value than you capture" could create more of the vision we are seeking for what has become one of our signature events (Ferris 221). "Think Big" stands on its own, because we want students to challenge themselves to do something beyond what they may have done before. Thinking big is about giving themselves confidence in their capabilities--and maybe even swagger.

"Do Something Awesome" was not a self evident statement. Doing something awesome could mean playing a video game that is awesome, watching a video that is awesome or hang out with friends, which may be awesome as well. The revised phrase should be "Learn Something Important" In the past, we have begun the semester saying those words, but lately haven't directly defined what we mean by each sentence. The whole goal behind Genius Hour is to pursue a topic that has always been intriguing but has never been a priority, or maybe it has been and they want to delve deeper. It may be a problem that exists in the world that the student wants to solve, or something else. Once a topic is identified, the first charge is to learn as much about it as possible. That will involve reading, experiencing it first hand and interacting with experts among other things. They should be able to explain why it is important and to whom it is important. That will lead to the third part, which recently has been the stickiest.

Where they become most confused is with "Change the World." "Change the World" does not mean raising money. It means take what you have learned out into the world and do something that matters. That is where they can "create more value than (they) capture." Taking their learning and giving it to the world in a way where it will benefit others at a magnitude greater than 1 is the goal. If, after doing the learning, a person is twice as good at something, the good they do for others or the learning they give to others should be greater than twice as much. That may mean it benefits one  person. It may mean benefiting many more. It does not mean benefiting 7 billion people, but it may. Making others' lives better is not directly correlated with a dollar amount.

Genius Hour, Think Big, Do Something Awesome, Change the World, Learn Something Important, Arete Academy

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Elasticity

 The world is generally moving away from a rigid fixture of job title and job skills. The norm is becoming where a person's skills are valued, but their experience in different fields may yield even more than if that one person stayed in their "lane." Daniel Pink refers to the "elasticity" of skills and how they must include being able to convince others to join your vision Pink 2012, 36). This idea of elasticity was thrust upon the world in the last year. People who have been working at their jobs for 30 years suddenly had to revamp everything while they worked from home, many of whom are still working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. They will have to undergo a second bout of discomfort when they go back to working in the office. This idea that going back to what was previously done will make a second upheaval in people’s lives seems to have escaped many in the education world, be they teachers, administrators, parents or students. 

Now is the time to embrace change and take advantage of the learnings that we have (or should have had) over the last year regarding what is important, what we should keep and what we should get rid of. 

Pink, Daniel. To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 

2012.

Overcome Obstacles

 In general, to find success, people need to become comfortable being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable means there is a chance for failure. It is the mind saying "This may not work." The idea that failure may happen should be encouraged, especially in school. If "life is the obstacles," according to Janna Lavin, Tow Professor of Physics at Barnard College of Columbia University, and "our role is to get better at navigating" them, then school is a perfect place to practice failure (Ferriss 52). The key in learning from failure is to reflect on it. In their book Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett and David Evans have created a unique matrix for doing just that. Their strategy is to categorize your failures into one of three categories, screw up, weakness, growth opportunity. It all comes together in the reflection on the type of failure. Is this something that can be applied to future situations?

Burnett, William, and David J. Evans. Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works for You. Vintage Books, 2018.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Mission One

 It is easy to get caught up in checking social media, email and other busywork and it feels like we are really getting stuff done. Being able to identify those times and refocus is a challenge. Ishita Gupta says that "every day is a new chance to choose" (Godin 2010, 206). Adam Robinson, Chess master and investor asks himself the question, "Am I rehearsing my best self?" If the answer is no, then how does one reset? Robinson breaks it down to a granular level when he identified there are 86,400 seconds in a day and every one of them can be used to reset our actions and attentions and recover to become our best selves (Ferriss 192). One way to do that is to create a personal mission statement to check actions against. That mission statement should be flexible enough to be used in school, at work, and with friends and family.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Maps for Artists

 There is no map for being an artist. Once a person creates a map to be an artist or a leader, others who follow it are no longer artists, or leaders. They are following a prescribed path, or painting by numbers. Bringing the artistry into anything requires forging one's own path. Whether it is writing, painting, or science, the artists figure out what to do next. They are not told.

Think about the games calling on players to choose a card and do what it says. Candyland is a perfect example. There is no thought involved (other than deciding to take the shortcut). The player picks a card and does what it says. Yay! I got two yellows!

Education is flush with this type of activity. Rubrics are one of the major reasons this is the case. A rubric does not require a person to push themselves to their limit of creativity. It limits thinking and the impetus for ultimate success. In a world teeming with wicked problems that can only be solved with original thinking and new solutions, instead of schools embracing diversity, we embrace common assessment, to the detriment of student and teachers by ignoring some of their most ardent interests and areas of expertise.

Godin, Seth. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Portfolio, 2010.

Wear Rain Gear

"There will be weather." One of my favorite quotes from Bill Beaster, my one-time middle school industrial arts teacher, basketball teammate, now friend, was his retort to a comment questioning whether he really wanted to bike since it was supposed to rain for his weekend bike ride. Everyone knows that we can't change the weather, but Bill has an understanding about the weather. By being proactive, he also can overcome non-ideal conditions to still have fun.

The key in our everyday lives is to understand the things we can change and the things we cannot change based on effort. Bill Burnett and David Evans call those things effort can't change gravity problems (Burnett and Evans). Bill Beaster didn't succumb to the idea that it was going to rain and change his plans, he overcame the weather by putting on rain gear--pretty simple.

Seth Godin gives us a graphic way of looking at the problem in his Quadrants of Discernment (Godin 2010, 181) . The x axis is passion and the y axis is attachment. We want to live in the upper right corner of discernment and passion, where we are choosing the types of problems or projects that our passion and effort can change, ones that make us a linchpin. The bottom left quadrant is where the passive person who feels they cannot create change lives. They are the whiners.

Burnett, William, and David J. Evans. Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works for You. Vintage Books, 2018.

Godin, Seth. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Portfolio, 2010.

Isn’t That Interesting

Thinking scientifically, or maybe like an entrepreneur is a powerful way of approaching things, whether they turn out well or not. The thoughtful reflection about the answer to the question, "Isn't that interesting?" takes any situation to a new level through the careful examination of it (Godin, 2010, 178). Being able to take the outcome not as an indication of your power, but being truly curious may yield unexpected results. A few years ago a co-worker had long standing issues with her department chairperson. She asked for a meeting and when the department chair blasted her for all of her perceived indiscretions, she asked, "Isn't that interesting. Why do you think that?" It cut to the heart of the matter and then they could start the discussion. She caused the department to truly think about why he felt what he did, and they were able to come to a better understanding of why events and beliefs were constructed the way they were.

For years, I have wanted to create an environment like they have in art or tech ed when kids come in the room and immediately begin working. For the last week or so our students have done that. For our final exam we have allowed students to split themselves into groups of 3-5. For the spirit award, they created a team name, logo, handshake, costumes, and promotional posters. They are participating in an academic decathlon where they will merge content from different classes as they construct products for a pitch, trailer, throwdown, physical representation, jeopardy, impromptu speech, website, art gallery, story/skit, and reflection. Maybe the key is that we have gamefied it. Almost everything involves earning points, but in a lighthearted way.

gamification, Arete Academy, interesting, decathlon, Growth mindset

Gratitude

 In a culture of gratitude, it is no longer good enough to give lukewarm applause. Give wholehearted applause or appreciation and reach out to that person on a one to one level. Speak to them individually as close to the completion of the delightful event as possible. That may be in person, letter, by telling the person you will spread the word about them. If there was something delightful, it was a gift. The repayment is for you to go out of your way to personally connect and tell others about the experience, not as an “Instagram” way of bragging, but as a way to celebrate someone else and offer them a gift in return: respect (Godin 2010, 172).

In the classroom, there are ample opportunities to give thanks to others. Especially if students are given the opportunity to choose their own way of showing what they have learned. That will offer the possibility of people using their talents to create something that is delightful. It wouldn't happen if they got a 100% on their multiple choice vocabulary test. When giving people the scary freedom of making their own map, the opportunity to dazzle exists.

Godin, Seth. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Portfolio, 2010.

Reinvigorating Education

In thinking about a structure to hang a new focus to the rebranded Arete Academy, efficiency engineer Harrington Emerson stated, "As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble." When considering moving the thinking of both teachers and students to a new level, holding to the principles of students advocating for themselves and their learning provides many methods for them to show it, which would make the learning the important thing, along with students taking an active role in how it will be assessed and quantified.

In a sense, common assessments hold students hostage on the teacher focused side of the continuum of who is driving new learning and keep some students and teachers from being fully engaged. It may take awhile, but student engagement will go up if they are given leeway to use their strengths to show their learning. There will have to be a huge amount of support given to students at first, including lists or menus of product types. Eventually they will get to the point where they can choose an appropriate product for the targeted skill they need to master.

There are many people who feel like changing jobs or even careers every five years or so is how they stay fresh and always in a perpetual mode of growth, but it is stressful going to a new workplace, working with new people on a new idea using our current skill set. Teachers often have the ability to avoid the reinvigorating feeling of thinking about their area of expertise in a new way. They have the lesson plans, and the history of having students find success in terms of GPA. Embracing the principle that students should be in charge of showing their learning may be daunting in terms of letting go of control, but could re-energize teachers in the sense that they are still the content experts, still working with the same people, in the same place, but now seeing it, in the opposite way of it being about what the students take away from the class rather than what the teacher teaches.

Ferriss, Timothy. Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018.

Not Only a Hammer

Cognitive flexibility is what is generally referred  to as “out of the  box thinking.” It is the ability to find multiple solutions to problems, analyze them and find what truly is the best one. Cognitive flexibility allows people to apply what they already know to new situations (Tough 114). In his book Think Again, Adam Grant refers to this as “scientific thinking” (Grant 2021, 20). Whatever the term, it is a way of approaching the world in that the first idea is not the best idea. Steven Johnson says one’s best idea doesn’t come until the 26th idea. Taking the time to conceive of that many ideas  takes some cognitive self control, where one doesn’t jump to the first solution that they may always rely on, the time worn “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” sort of thinking. Sometimes the best solution is hidden by that hammer. In one activity created by the Stanford d.school, they  recommend including a dinosaur or an alien into one of the solutions, to expand the possibilities. 

Recently, I have begun to take it to a different place and think about, in the future, What will I hate, or at least be frustrated by with the solution in the future. Especially when I am building something. Unfortunately, I have created many things that frustrate me everytime I use them or think about them--sometimes to the point where I wish an actual dinosaur were available to make the changes I need.

Grant, Adam. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking, 2021.

Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

This Might Not Work

 As reported by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions, developed by NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, is the best way to move from a current state to a desired state. When using mental contrasting, one concentrates both on a positive outcome, while also predicting the pitfalls they will encounter along the way (Tough 93). Without knowing it had a name, this is a strategy that we have used for years when planning for long term projects like Genius Hour. The whole thing is predicated on a student being able to see into the future and anticipate what will happen and how they will respond. Possibly, some extra guidelines may make it a more useful activity.  Some categories that we could use to examine obstacles may be self (what problems may I cause myself), other people (not returning messages, scheduling,  not doing their share, etc) , non-human outside factors (technology, travel, etc). Otherwise, often it comes down to “I might procrastinate and not get it done on time.” This method seems like a gentle version of Red Teams where one envisions that things went horribly wrong and the project ended up with the worst possible outcome. Rather than imagining a catastrophe, MCII is more of a “these are some things that may go wrong,” 

Having students create their own schedule based on known future events made a difference in AP Seminar this year. Some kids knew they were going away for spring break and scheduled everything to be completed before then and they appreciated the guidance.

Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 

Whose Idea Is It?

 In discussing how to create an effective TED Talk, Chris Anderson notes how it is important to make the presentation simple, but not too simple. Feed them enough information and lay out enough bread crumbs to “snap it in place for themselves” (Anderson 82). Everyone wants to feel smart and following Anderson’s strategy will make them feel smart. 

Years ago, I wrote an email to all of the administrators explaining that the sign boards outside of each school should not say “Early Out” because it sends a message that teachers have the afternoon off rather than it being used to make them better at what they do, or to make their kids smarter or more ready for their futures. Obviously, it didn’t work since, eight years after leaving the district, the boards have not changed. After describing this situation to my dad, he said,  “Haven’t I taught you anything? You have to  make them think it’s their idea.”  Simple, but not too simple.