Outliers

Sharing highlights from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.  We are considering sharing excerpts with 9th grade students this year along with selections from Imagine (Lehrer), The Power of Pull / New Culture of Learning (Brown), Change by Design (Brown) and the Jobs biography (Isaacson).  A possible shifting paradigm on the type of books our kids read.

“It’s just like sports,” Dhuey said. “We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advanced reading groups and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability. And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.   

Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.   

Worth Reading...

Sharing some articles, resources and videos that I have recently reviewed.


1. Why Every School Needs an Innovation Day- school in the UK experiments with Google's 20% time.  Empowering learners to assume ownership over time and focus of learning.

Bebbington believes every school should allocate one day per week for students to learn freely through projects. Doing so would certainly help students see how what they're learning can be applied to problems in the real world. After all, that's the kind of thing that makes students fall in love with learning, not moment-in-time test scores. 

2. Top US Universities Put Their Reputation Online (Couglan/BBC)- Some of the biggest powerhouses in US higher education are offering online courses - testing how their expertise and scholarship can be brought to a global audience. Further evidence of how online learning is becoming part of mainstream education.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online - with the modest ambition of "revolutionizing education around the world"

3.  My Students Reflect on Norway's Connected Testing-Pilot (Michaelsen/Powerful Learning Practice)- On the last day of May, my high school International English class participated in our national English exam. They were also among a group of students in Norway were allowed access to the Internet during testing as part of a pilot program.  Interesting range of students responses shared in the post.

Isn’t the issue interesting or provocative enough? They could be cheating during the test... asking if students should be able to use the internet while taking tests.  But the “controversy” doesn’t seem to have sparked much of an interest there either! Could it be that it’s just the sensible thing to do, and nobody wants to make a fuss?

4. Amplify the Positive Outliers (Godin)- provide a platform for those outside of the center and strongly consider their thoughts and actions.

The most efficient way to get the behavior you're looking for is to find positive deviants and give them a platform, a microphone and public praise.

5.  Skiing With Dad- late father's day post

As I recall, I’d leap out of bed before dawn and into my snow gear, energized by the crisp morning air and the anticipation of a day skiing with Dad. I’d relish our two-hour drives up I-70, our 1989 Volkswagen Westfalia chugging along to the rhythms of Carlos Santana. I’d scout the hills as Dad pointed out old mines and bighorn sheep. Then we’d arrive at Winter Park or Copper Mountain and make gleeful turns together, first chair to last. Yep, that’s the way I remember it.

7. Finland: Discovery Through Technology- Questions to Consider: See how Ms. Huttunen implements "progressive learning". How is technology used to enhance learning through research and data collection? How has technology changed Ms. Huttunen's role in the classroom?

8. All Your History: Valve Ep 1: Unlikely Heroes (w/ Gabe Newell Interview)- story behind birth of video game company Valve.  Newell talks about the open solution method followed by the company.