Cohort 21 Shared Resources

Good self-control has also been shown to be a key component of grit — perseverance in the face of educational challenges. It’s no wonder, then, that colleges have placed great emphasis on teaching students better self-control.

But the strategies that educators are recommending to build that self-control — a reliance on willpower and executive function to suppress emotions and desires for immediate pleasures — are precisely the wrong ones. Besides having a poor long-term success rate in general, the effectiveness of willpower drops precipitously when people are feeling tired, anxious, or stressed. And, unfortunately, that is exactly how many of today’s students often find themselves.

Efforts to emphasize willpower and executive function to achieve self-control are largely ineffective in helping those students.

They unplug at family dinner and before bed. They have a family movie night on Fridays, which is an example of the principle Radesky touts in her research, of “joint media engagement,” or simply sharing screen time.

But more than just limiting time, says Radesky, “I try to help my older son be aware of the way he reacts to video games or how to interpret information we find online.” For example, she tries to explain how he is being manipulated by games that ask him to make purchases while playing.

She sums up her findings from over a decade of research: “As kids and adults watch or use screens, with light shining in their eyes and close to their face, bedtime gets delayed. It takes longer to fall asleep, sleep quality is reduced and total sleep time is decreased.”

Some days I saw all of this; most days, however, I was looking through “deficit-coloured glasses” and o

nly saw the fact that I was teaching more than ever (as we were short teachers-on-call to replace

could not get done at work nor in the evening as we had an amazing new little family member), I was en

We’ve all heard the calls for innovation ringing through the education field. This age of exponential change leaves us no choice—we must change or our students will fall behind.

about 16 percent of any group actively pursue change

So how do we encourage the rest of our colleagues toward this cycle of innovation? It comes down to one simple thing: School leaders and coaches must foster a culture that celebrates the discomfort inevitably resulting from change. And that requires three key strategies.

Distraction occurs, the authors argue, when we are pursuing a goal that really matters and something blocks our efforts to achieve it.

They argue that distraction actually arises from a conflict between two fundamental features of our brain: our ability to create and plan high-level goals versus our ability to control our minds and our environment as we take steps to complete those goals.

cognitive control abilities

You cannot simply swap out the word, “problem” with “opportunity”; your thinking has to shift that way.  For example, a subtle change in the question, “When am I going to have time to do this?”, to, “How would I work this into my day in a meaningful way?”, changes the way we frame what is in front of us.  One question is looking for ways things won’t work, and the other is trying to find a way.

A subtle change in language, can change how we move forward, and how we tackle the challenges  embrace the opportunities in front of us.