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What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    New research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives. We don't have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.
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'Design Thinking' for a Better You - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    "design thinking can help everyone form the kind of lifelong habits that solve problems, achieve goals and help make our lives better." HT @AllisonToller
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How to Prepare for an Automated Future - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    Article outlining the predictions experts have made about how education can best prepare students for a world with a greater degree of automation present in the workforce. Identifies the key skills and traits that schools need to help students develop.
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Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The skill to get hot without getting mad — to have a good argument that doesn’t become personal — is critical in life.
  • Yet if kids never get exposed to disagreement, we’ll end up limiting their creativity.
  • Our legal system is based on the idea that arguments are necessary for justice. For our society to remain free and open, kids need to learn the value of open disagreement.
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  • Witnessing arguments — and participating in them — helps us grow a thicker skin.
  • If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.
  • They discover that no authority has a monopoly on truth. They become more tolerant of ambiguity. Rather than conforming to others’ opinions, they come to rely on their own independent judgment.
  • Instead of trying to prevent arguments, we should be modeling courteous conflict and teaching kids how to have healthy disagreements. We can start with four rules:• Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.• Argue as if you’re right but listen as if you’re wrong. 30 Comments • Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.• Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
  • If kids don’t learn to wobble, they never learn to walk; they end up standing still.
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How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules," Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience. less about being a single-minded genius and more about being interested in many things
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Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We all need to be needed.
  • Virtually all the world’s major religions teach that diligent work in the service of others is our highest nature and thus lies at the center of a happy life.
  • Americans who prioritize doing good for others are almost twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives.
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  • Everyone has something valuable to share. We should start each day by consciously asking ourselves, “What can I do today to appreciate the gifts that others offer me?”
  • what unites the two of us in friendship and collaboration is not shared politics or the same religion. It is something simpler: a shared belief in compassion, in human dignity, in the intrinsic usefulness of every person to contribute positively for a better and more meaningful world.
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Decrease Classroom Clutter to Increase Creativity | Edutopia - 1 views

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    I love the picture from a Montessori classroom! Such a great article and totally agree. Here's some research to go along with that idea... https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/rethinking-the-colorful-kindergarten-classroom/comment-page-1/
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Laurene Powell Jobs Commits $50 Million to Create New High Schools - The New York Times - 1 views

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    HT Education Reimagined
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The Evolution of Simplicity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Of course there’s a struggle to regain control of your own attention, to set priorities about what you will think about, to see fewer things but to see them more deeply.
  • an exercise in identity discovery, an exercise in realizing and then prioritizing your current tastes and beliefs. People who do that may instinctively be seeking higher forms of pruning: being impeccable with your words, parsimonious but strong with your commitments, disciplined about your time, selective about your friendships, moving generally from fragmentation toward unity of purpose. There’s an enviable emotional tranquillity at the end of that road.
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    HT Allison Toller
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The Art of Getting Opponents to "We" - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Significantly, participants all came to align behind a single vision statement — and now they are actively communicating and advancing that vision nationwide through their organizations and networks. They host meetings with educational networks, superintendents, principals, teachers and philanthropists, reach out to libraries, museums and after-school programs, and identify and connect pioneers in learner-centered education.
  • Convergence staff and facilitators work to create a “safe space,” maintaining a strict neutrality and ensuring that everyone feels heard, says Fersh. It’s important that participants “feel they’re not in a place that’s already cooked or leaning toward any solutions.”
  • Convergence staff members look continually for opportunities to forge connections among participants. They begin meetings with “connecting” questions — for example: “When did you know that education was of great importance to you?” — that are designed to reveal people’s values and experiences, rather than highlight their disagreements. The objective is not to sweep differences under the rug, but to build rapport that a group needs to grapple effectively with its differences.
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  • Another key is to identify a frame that energizes everybody, but is not so broad that it is meaningless. “For us the gold standard is that the dialogue has to lead to action,” said Fersh. To do that, he said, there are intermediate goals: “Can you get people to the table and sustain their presence? Can you find agreements that are worth fighting for? And can you keep people together to keep working over time to make sure something happens?”
  • In the end, she said, people converged on the notion that they had to do far more than tinker around the edges of a broken system held over from a bygone industrial age. “There was a lot of conversation that the current system is ill designed to create 21st century outcomes for students,” said Young. “But there wasn’t alignment around what a new system could look like. People really wanted to be part of that conversation.”
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How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the 1960s, Gay Talese, then a young reporter, declared that “New York is a city of things unnoticed” and delegated himself to be the one who noticed.
    • Bo Adams
       
      LOVE THIS! "delgated himself to be the one who noticed."
  • discoveries are products of the human mind.
  • As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act.
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  • What an inventor “finds” is always an expression of him- or herself.
  • Some scientists even embrace a kind of “free jazz” method, he said, improvising as they go along: “I’ve heard of people getting good results after accidentally dropping their experimental preparations on the floor, picking them up, and working on them nonetheless,” he added.
  • an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process.
  • capable of seeing “patterns that others don’t see.”
  • That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries
  • A number of pioneering scholars have already begun this work, but they seem to be doing so in their own silos and without much cross-talk.
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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

  • many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ­— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based.
  • teams are now the fundamental unit of organization.
  • influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
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  • Google’s People Operations department
  • there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
  • At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather
  • Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.
  • looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’
  • After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.
  • The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
  • Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
  • psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
  • Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’
  • ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
  • Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.
  • other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability.
  • it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related.
  • The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.
  • If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’
  • to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.
  • By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel.
  • In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
  • ‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
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