Group items tagged

Increasingly, working in IT is becoming less about technical skills and more about integration.

While there are still roles requiring deep technical experience, for most corporate IT workers their role will shift from implementation to architecting.

your staff are going to require new skills, modes of thinking, performance monitoring, and rewards structures. Essentially, facilitating your staffs’ transition is simply too important to leave to HR.

n his book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn From Educational Change in Finland?

Pasi Sahlberg i

"The central aim of Finnish education is the development of each child as a thinking, active, creative person, not the attainment of higher test scores, and the primary strategy of Finnish education is cooperation, not competition."

This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers.

Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

Teachers whose students make the greatest achievement gains have extensive preparation and experience relevant to their current assignment (subject, grade level, and student population taught). Opportunities to work with like-minded, similarly accomplished colleagues – and to build and share collective expertise – are also strongly associated with effective teaching. Accomplished teachers who have opportunities to share their expertise — and serve as leaders (as coaches, mentors, teacher educator, etc.) — are more likely to remain in the profession. To teach effectively, teachers must have access to the people, resources, and policies that support their work in the classroom. This includes: (1) principals who cultivate and embrace teacher leadership; (2) time and tools for teachers to learn from each other, (3) opportunities for teachers to connect and work with community organizations and agencies that support students and their families outside the school walls; (4) evaluation systems that comprehensively measure the impact of teachers on student learning, (5) performance pay systems that primarily reward the spread of teaching expertise and spur collaboration among teachers.

A Better System for Schools: Developing, Supporting and Retaining Effective  Teachers

With $297 million in the Teacher Incentive Fund, states and districts will create or expand effective performance pay and teacher advancement models to reward teachers and principals for increases in student achievement and boost the number of effective educators working with poor, minority, and disadvantaged students and teaching hard-to-staff subjects

learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation.

A lot can be said with a little — the mundane and the extraordinary. Philosophers like Confucius (“Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.”) and Nietzsche were kings of the aphorism.

I’m not suggesting that colleges eliminate long writing projects from English courses, but maybe we should save them for the second semester. Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language.

The expert performance framework distinguishes between deliberate practice and less effective practice activities. The current longitudinal study is the first to use this framework to understand how children improve in an academic skill.

Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. Rated as the most effortful and least enjoyable type of preparation activity, deliberate practice was increasingly favored over being quizzed as spellers accumulated competition experience. Deliberate practice mediated the prediction of final performance by the personality trait of grit, suggesting that perseverance and passion for long-term goals enable spellers to persist with practice activities that are less intrinsically rewarding—but more effective—than other types of preparation.

Of course, some people want a formal education. I do not think everyone should leave college, but I challenge my peers to consider the opportunity cost of going to class. If you want to be a doctor, going to medical school is a wise choice. I do not recommend keeping cadavers in your garage. On the other hand, what else could you do during your next 50-minute class? How many e-mails could you answer? How many lines of code could you write?

Whyville , What does it take to build a sustainable, green energy community? 8th Graders are showing us how using WhyPower, an interactive learning game within the largest interactive learning world, WhyVille. Here is an interactive game. http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/projects/whypower-interactive-game Energy Game:  WHYPOWER Whyville is a thriving community with its own economy, newspaper, government and much more.  It now has its own power grid!  As part of the WhyCareers program, we are “electrifying” Whyville with a power grid that uses traditional and renewable energy sources.  Students will manage the power grid to select the right mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind energy. They will build homes in Whyville!  They will observe and measure power use in Whyville, and form good energy behaviors and habits. Finally, they will explore the math, science and career topics related to energy.  Just like in real life, success in Whyville is not pre-programmed!  Students skill, initiative, creativity and teamwork determines the rewards they receive and the “virtual money” they earn in WhyPower. Whyville. Run a city using energy reources.

Where these preferences particularly become a problem is when the styles that lead to success in a particular course do not match the styles that will be needed for success either in more advanced courses in the same discipline, or, worse, in the occupation for which the course prepares students.

or example, in most occupations, one does not sit around taking short-answer or multiple-choice tests on the material one needs to succeed in the job. The risk, then, is that schools will reward students whose styles match the way they are taught but not the requirements of the work for which the teaching prepares them.

- Team Salary (Similar to marketing, each soccer club must determine "ahead of time", how much they will pay each player. The base salary is determined by calculating the expected value of future revenue generated by each individual player with 90% confidence; that is to say, only 10% risk. The remaining 10% risk is not given to the player in the form of base salary, but rather as bonus incentives. "If you score so many goals, or the total games played win % is higher than X%", then a reward is given in the form of additional money. In either case, the job of a Statistician or in this case; Accountant, is to determine the probability of each player's expected preformance; then, the expected change in revenue due to such preformance; determine the risk the soccer club is willing to bear for such preformance; and then determine a fair compensation amount to each individual player.)