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“While people usually gain power through traits and actions that advance the interests of others, such as empathy, collaboration, openness, fairness, and sharing, when they start to feel powerful or enjoy a position of privilege, those qualities begin to fade.”

Behaviors like these undermine leaders’ effectiveness by depressing the performance of those around them, and are ultimately self-defeating.

power puts us in something like a manic state, making us feel expansive, energized, omnipotent, hungry for rewards, and immune to risk – which opens us up to rash, rude, and unethical actions.” But it turns out that simply being aware of those feelings – “Hey, I’m feeling as if I should rule the world right now” – and monitoring impulses to behave inappropriately helps keep those behaviors in check.

check email only at set points during the day.

reserve time to read and respond to email after a long period of focused work, or at the time of day when your energy and creativity are at their lowest (this means that you can do higher value work at other times).

if the email will take less than two minutes to read and reply to, then take care of it right now, even if it's not a high priority.

Anxiety severely limits –and often blocks– all logical and rational problem-solving regions of the brain. So, don’t expect to talk someone out of anxiety or rationalize with them. When students don’t respond to verbal coaching, they aren’t being difficult or defiant. The biology of their brain simply makes it impossible for them to think with reason. To help a student break out of an anxiety spell, get them moving! Aerobic activity is the fastest, most effective way to break the virtuous cycle of anxiety. Next, get them talking about the problem. Have them describe what the problem is, why it is bothering them, and how they feel about it using a feeling wheel. To get our SOAR® Feelings Wheel, sign up for our “How Do I Feel?” Curriculum Kit in the blue box on the right of this page. This process does many things, it: draws the problem up to higher regions of the brain, minimizes the sense of “threat,” gives students a great sense of empowerment over the situation, and helps them better identify potential solutions. Finally, build their skills. Build their skills for managing the anxiety and skills for managing the situation that triggered the anxiety. To learn more about skills for overcoming stress and anxiety, check out the SOAR Social-Emotional Learning Curriculum.

#1) Use a normal, natural voice

#2) Speak only when students are quiet and ready

#3) Use hand signals and other non-verbal communication

Step 1: Name Your Year

Step 2: Name Your Goal

Step 3: Put Your Decision in Writing

The DSM-5 criteria are similar to the 2011 guidelines with two exceptions. Fewer problem behaviors are required for those 17 years or older, and there must be evidence that symptoms began before age 12 years instead of before age 7.

The guidelines also emphasize ruling out other causes of ADHD-like symptoms and identifying comorbid conditions.

The stimulant medications methylphenidate and amphetamines in their various forms generally are the initial treatments.

As time is such a valuable resource its allocation to particular aspects of teaching and learning signifies their value. If we give time to content and memorisation of facts, we signal to our students that this is what we value. Likewise, if we remind our students that time is short and work must be completed quickly we should not be surprised when our students see tasks as work to be done rather than learning to be mastered. A more effective distribution of our time will see students being given time to think deeply and truly engage with the problems they are asked to solve.

The importance of these soft-skills including important aspects of socio-emotional learning, creativity and even critical thinking are often not given the time they deserve.

Ritchhart (2015) quotes research that reveals the power of wait time and thinking time with the quality and quantity of student thinking increasing by 300% to 700% when additional time is given to thinking within class discussion. Wait time or thinking time combined with strategies such as those from ‘Making Thinking Visible’ signify to students that what is wanted is not a speedy response but a well considered one. Wait time and thinking time according to Ritchhart combat the habit many students develop of guessing what the teacher wants as a response.

Cultural competence is the ability to successfully communicate and empathize with people from diverse cultures and incomes,

To build rapport, talk directly to children outside of class, using their names. Also begin class by checking in -- asking kids how they’re doing -- even if the misbehavior of the previous class reached biblical proportions.

Monitor your discourse style. Indirect requests (“Would you like to let me finish reading the directions?”) can confuse some children who are used to receiving explicit directives from their working-class parents.

professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow… Where there is judgment, there is noise – and usually more of it than you think.”

In a school, if a principal consistently gives harsher punishments to boys than girls for the same infractions, that is bias, but if she often gives harsher punishments to students just before lunchtime, that’s noise.]

A noise audit works best when respected team members create a scenario that is realistic, the people involved buy into the process, and everyone is willing to accept unpleasant results and act on them.

For education at present we face a deluge of reports that the pace of change shall only accelerate and its scale become more absolute.

The resistor is that person or even group of people who are seen by advocates of change to be habitually irrational and averse to change.

Every superintendent, or state commissioner, must be able to say, with confidence, ‘Everyone who teaches here is good. Here’s how we know. We have a system.

school-based administrators “don’t always have the skill to differentiate great teaching from that which is merely good, or perhaps even mediocre.” Another problem is the lack of consensus on how we should define “good teaching.”

a famous meta-analysis of previous research on the subject, published in 2006 by researcher Harris Cooper and colleagues, which found that homework in elementary school does not contribute to academic achievement.

One parent pointed out that some of the content of the homework is beyond the child’s knowledge so parents are almost “required” to teach it at home.

I read a number of articles about how we have to get better at homework, the argument being  that homework is a problem for children and families because it is tedious and doesn’t ask children to think critically and creatively. 

In Age of Distraction: Why It's Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus (1), Katrina Schwartz refers to studies showing that the ability to focus on a task has been linked to future success. She quotes psychologist and author Daniel Goleman as saying, "This ability [to focus] is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health."

In a similar article, With Tech Tools, How Should Teachers Tackle Multitasking in Class? (2), author Holly Korbey explores research around student study habits and talks to veteran teachers about their experiences with students using technology in the classroom.

Instead, we should be deliberately teaching students how to manage their attention with their devices.