Mind Dump

Mind Dump

Scott McLeod  //  Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University. He also is the Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), the nation's only center dedicated to the technology needs of school administrators, and was a co-creator of the wildly popular video, Did You Know? (Shift Happens).

Mar 7 / 4:01am

Talent trumps infrastructure

success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

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Mar 3 / 7:14am

Try different, not harder

The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

But you can always try different.

If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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Mar 2 / 11:13pm

Mindset myopia

Jared Diamond's explanation for how societies collapse includes a healthy does of "mindset myopia." Societies vanish because their mindsets preclude them from seeing reality as it is.
Second, because I just got back from Detroit, where I saw mindset myopia first hand, up close and personal.
It's hard to imagine a high-ranking official of what they still call "The Big 3" in Detroit standing up in front of a crowd of intelligent, well-informed business people and telling them with a straight face that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that the worst is behind us, and that the economy--and the auto industry--will all go back to the way things were before the Great Recession. It's hard to imagine such an executive making fun of sustainable energy, mocking it really, as a false direction to pursue. It's hard to image such an executive suggesting that the U.S. auto industry is poised for a great year, a big rebound, a return to the glory days.
But that's what I heard with my own ears.
Now I didn't do a survey of the people in the audience. But if any of them were buying what he was selling, well, I would consider that prima facie evidence of mindset myopia.
You can't make people see what they assiduously want to avoid. You can't make them see what their mindsets rule out as possible.
The story is told that when the first Black Ships approached Japan, the Japanese announced that dragons were off shore. Their mindsets allowed for the existence of dragons, but not of Black Ships.

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Feb 13 / 10:42am

What makes employees enthusiastic about work? It's not what you might initially guess.

Ask leaders what they think makes employees enthusiastic about work, and they’ll tell you in no uncertain terms. In a recent survey we invited more than 600 managers from dozens of companies to rank the impact on employee motivation and emotions of five workplace factors commonly considered significant: recognition, incentives, interpersonal support, support for making progress, and clear goals. “Recognition for good work (either public or private)” came out number one.

Unfortunately, those managers are wrong.

Having just completed a multiyear study tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions, and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers in a wide variety of settings, we now know what the top motivator of performance is—and, amazingly, it’s the factor those survey participants ranked dead last. It’s progress. On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest.

And, of course, many educators in many schools feel that they are making little to no progress...

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Jan 28 / 4:45am

Who's asking the right questions?

Those who can solve the problems and find the answers are essential. There is, however, another group who is as valuable - if not more valuable. They are the ones who ask the right questions.

...

I am beginning to understand that we can never find an answer to a question which has not been asked.

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Jan 27 / 3:37pm

The federal Comprehensive School Reform program did not yield comprehensively reformed schools

The federal [Comprehensive School Reform] program did not yield comprehensively reformed schools. Although states largely succeeded in providing CSR funds to those schools most in need, schools receiving CSR awards made little progress in implementing more than just a few of the legislatively mandated components and were largely indistinguishable from non-CSR schools that were similar in baseline achievement and demographics.

Furthermore, the federal CSR program was not associated with widespread achievement gains. Although CSR schools did realize improvements in mathematics and reading achievement after three years of their initial awards, they improved at quite similar rates as those of comparable, non-CSR Title I schools. After five years, any gains that CSR schools made had evaporated so that mathematics and reading achievement were similar to baseline levels at the time they received their awards.

Via http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/other/csrd-outcomes/year5-report.pdf (page 22)

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