Group items tagged

by finally being able to see dynamic, ephemeral, local teams, we would better fight the real war for talent: not just attracting the best people, but getting from them the best that they, uniquely, have to offer.

the biggest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams: trust in the team leader.

we discovered that strong agreement with two statements from our survey, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me” and “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work,” corresponds with a high level of trust in the team leader. This suggests that despite the fluidity of today’s working world, the best team leaders can help each team member feel both understood and focused. Know me for my best, and then focus my work around that: These are the fundamental needs of every team member, and the foundation of any high-performing team.

frequent attention to the work of each team member is what we might call the anchor ritual of team leadership. These organizations have all instituted a simple weekly conversation between team leaders and each of their team members and have been able to measure increases in engagement as a function of the frequency of these check-ins.

The fundamental lesson of the research is that work happens on teams, whether they are overlapping, dynamic, spontaneous or designed, long-lived or short-lived. The real world of work is messy. We must push into the richness of real teams doing real work, and we must ask new questions: Do large successful teams have the same habits and rhythms as small successful teams? In how many ways do teams start? Do the best ways for team members to share information vary according to the type of team they’re on? Are some ways demonstrably better than others, in terms of their impact on team engagement? Do virtual teams adopt a cadence different from that of colocated teams?

frequency of conversations is critical

The research reveals that for people to be engaged, the span of control must allow each team leader to check-in, one on one, with each team member every week of the year. Any relayering, delayering, or org redesign that prevents such frequent attention will ultimately lead to disengagement, burnout, and turnover.

to engage your people, you should avoid mandating that they show up at the office every day, and also that all the time you spend helping your remote workers join, get to know the other members of, and feel supported by their teams will pay off in the form of more-engaged workers. Engagement is about who you work with, not where.

Employees should have more control over their work and a greater chance to do work they love. They should have the best of both worlds: one predictable, stable role with a “home team” (more often than not, the static team depicted on the org chart) and one “side hustle” — a series of opportunities to join dynamic teams inside the same organization. Their greatest value to any of these teams may well be the particular, wonderful, and weird set of strengths they possess.

Thus we should select, train, reward, and promote leaders not on the basis of an abstract list of generic leadership competencies but, rather, on their appetite for team leadership and their demonstrable track record as team leaders.

What are your priorities this week, and How can I help?

For team leaders, the emphasis needs to shift from the generic to the specific. We need to be clear that the job of a team leader is simply, and challengingly, this: to create, day in and day out, an experience on the team that allows each person to offer his or her unique best, and then to meld those contributions into something no individual could do alone. We need to anchor this job in rituals and measures, all designed to help magnify what the best teams do: the weekly check-in; frequent discussion with each person and with the team as a whole about where people can employ their strengths; and use of the eight items in our methodology to gauge progress, not for the purpose of accountability but, rather, for illumination and course correction.

nd here, finally, we see the core purpose of teams: They are the best method we humans have ever devised to make each person’s uniqueness useful. We know that the frequent use of strengths leads to high performance, and we know that strengths vary from person to person. High-functioning teams are essential to a high-functioning organization because they create more opportunities for each person to use his or her strengths by enabling the tasks at hand to be divided according to the strengths on offer. Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems. Ultimately, then, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies, and that only they can do it.

The eight statements (taken verbatim from the ADPRI study) capture the emotional and attitudinal precursors to engagement and the productive employee behaviors that flow as a result. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. My teammates have my back. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. I have great confidence in my company’s future. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.

Donnery notices that the gross motor skills of many of her kindergartners are underdeveloped, noting that usually means that fine motor skills are also lacking. “Developing those gross motor skills is just critical, can impact so much of later learning,” she said.

You’d be surprised at the importance of play.

lacking in the attention needed to learn, with more than 10 percent of the school population diagnosed with some kind of attention disorder.

occupational therapist Angela Hanscom opined in the Washington Post that there’s good reason our kids are so fidgety: more and more students come to class without having enough core strength and balance to hold their bodies still long enough to learn.

“In order for children to learn, they need to be able to pay attention. In order to pay attention, we need to let them move.”

A recent study by psychologists at the University of Colorado shows an even stronger reason for free play: children who experienced more undirected free play showed signs of stronger executive function, a strong predictor of success in school. “The more time that children spent in less-structured activities,” wrote researchers, “the better their self-directed executive functioning.”

Reading and recess are important enough that we need to do both.

While this kind of adult-led movement is a far cry from the nearly unstructured free play of a forest kindergarten, it does serve the school’s purpose of high academic standards for their kindergartners, in hopes this prepares them for future academic success.

And companies including Accenture, Boeing and Microsoft have created the Internet of Learning Consortium to speed up the production of job-ready workers by using the internet to teach them what they need to know.

“We talk about the days long gone when companies trained employees from the ground up and now we’re talking about companies training employees again. These organizations are saying [to the universities], ‘We need people with X, Y and Z skills and you’re not providing that.’ ”

While 96 percent of chief academic officers at higher-education institutions say they’re effectively preparing students for work, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agree

Faculty could react more nimbly to industry demands if their universities hired more of them and gave them the resources they need to update courses or offer them online

In addition to long waits for programs to be approved by faculty and accrediting agencies, for example, many schools can’t find enough people qualified to teach computer science. The increase in the number of tenure-track faculty in that and similar fields has been one-tenth as much as the increase in the number of students crowding into classes, the Computing Research Association reports.

The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, for example, is in the market for five or six new faculty hires per year in data, business analytics and other fast-growing disciplines, said Ash Soni, executive associate dean of academic programs. It usually manages to fill just two or three of those positions, Soni said.

“The pace of change and product cycles and skills demands in the economy are moving more quickly than traditional university processes and program development can keep up,” said Northeastern’s Gallagher.That needs to change, for universities’ own self-preservation, said Gordon, of Eastern Washington

“We’ve got to be at the leading edge of today and tomorrow,” he said, “rather than the day before.”

Even the youngest children are quite capable of entertaining, even educating, themselves.

encourage complex imaginative play by offering simple props and play ideas, but then withdraw so the children can plan their own scenarios and act them out.

your child is spending precious time at the activity that children need most and love best: playing independently and imaginatively

Prototype Design Camp was created by Christian Long, a visionary educator, to introduce and infuse design thinking skills into the K-12 landscape.

Pilla worked as a mechanical engineer at Lockheed Martin before switching to teaching. “I didn’t have enough experience working on and planning out a really big project,”

That’s what he tries to give his students in high school.

When students newer to making come in excited to take on a project, the old hands help them get up to speed on the skills. And a lot of those projects are about improving the school itself.

Tiarra Bell, a senior at SLA Center City. Design drew her into engineering. She experimented with architecture and industrial design, but has really become passionate about furniture design. She now makes and sells her own furniture.

Kamal and Pilla meet with an advisory group of engineering industry professionals periodically to make sure their program is truly equipping students with the skills they’ll need to go into these fields later

The experts say students need to be able to write, to find problems, to communicate, to Google, to understand constraints. They need to be creative, take thoughtful risks and have a “fearlessness to leap.

robotics, senior engineering, astronomy and space sciences, MakerSpace, electronics and programming)

To me it’s not about becoming an engineer in college or after. It’s about the critical thinking and the challenges and the creativity that comes with it,”

We think and learn about things that matter to us, that are emotionally relevant because we perceive them as important to our physical or social survival and well-being.

Motivation, engagement, perseverance, creativity, optimism, resilience—pretty much all the so-called “soft skills”—are rooted in emotion.

If students’ programs of study include significant, meaningful opportunities for them to follow their expanding and changing interests during their many years in school,  motivation and perseverance will spontaneously combust because, as some students told me, “my interest and involvement in my studies became personal. I felt like my school had meaning, like there was purpose.”

regression is essential to learning because each time the learner rebuilds the network, the more stable and automatic it becomes. Regression is not failure, although it is often treated as such.

natural process of learning—building, regression, rebuilding

So what matters to students? What are they learning in school that forces them to focus on what matters to adults?

Because emotional goals motivate and direct people’s thoughts and behavior, as Immordino-Yang suggests, understanding students’ goals can provide insight into what they are likely to learn and help educators understand how they might change their practices

Engagement in school does not always reflect engagement in the sort of deep, meaningful learning—developing intellectual skills and conceptual understanding—that educators value.

how to rethink school designs and create a new conceptual model for schools—a model that combines and finds an effective balance among the goals that adults have for students and the needs that students have for themselves, a balance between what matters to students and what matters to adults.

more effective model will offer real opportunities for students to pursue personally meaningful interests and questions

we don’t need to try to make all students masters of all disciplines.

Instead of insisting that all students collect identical promotion and graduation credits by meeting minimal standards to “pass” anywhere from five to seven courses each year in discrete, unrelated subjects, educators might be more successful ensuring that all students work each year on a body of specific essential skills—perhaps communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving, which are getting so much attention today—that can be learned while working in any subject area.

Some of the changes that make this new model possible involve significantly reducing the number of traditionally required courses, creating individualized rather than rigidly standardized courseloads, giving students more control of the subjects they study, and establishing graduation requirements based on skill development.

Many contributors agree that a competence is a complex construct, comprising knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, etc. But in the actual listing of the competences, they mix competences with their constituent elements.

Lack of evident interaction across elements of competences:

Lack of a common starting point:

Varied taxonomies:

Lack of a common language and common concepts

Unclear standards and developmental progression:

Lack of consensus on the structure of curricula:

While there is consensus on the need to transition to competence-based curricula, views on the structure of curricula remain divergent between the maintenance of traditional subjects and learning areas interwoven with competences, and the more radical view that curricula should be restructured around competences.

Feasibility of implementation:

Managing the transition:

Weak or unshared tracking of impact:

However, the world still lacks a global normative instrument that can be used as a global reference point for curricula transformation.

Competence is herein defined as the developmental capacity to interactively mobilize and ethically use information, data, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and technology to engage effectively and act across diverse 21 st century contexts to attain individual, collective, and global good.

Distinguishing Attributes of a Competence-based Curriculum

A competence-based curriculum is grounded in the understanding of the demands of the learners’ context.

In contrast to competence-based curricula, subject-based curricula are mostly grounded in an understanding of the subject matter content or the disciplines. They generally prepare learners to know the subject matters and to gain a deep understanding of advancements in the field. They don’t necessarily emphasize immediate use of acquired knowledge. The application is often deferred to real life situations that learners may confront later in life, forcing them to apply what they had learned. Because of insensitivity to context, it is often easy to have the same curriculum across different contexts, mostly borrowed from what are considered to be advanced contexts. The risk of irrelevance of the curriculum is also higher.

A key consideration is how best to facilitate curriculum specialists to gain an in-depth understanding of the learners’ current and future contexts, and how to identify competences, which should be reflected in curricula.

Learner centeredness:

Competence-based curricula emphasize the ability to use what is learned. Acquisition is important but not sufficient.

Emphasis on outcomes or impact:

A key consideration is how to support educators to reach for the deeper impact of learning, and how to assess it.

Emphasis on trans-disciplinarity:

Especially at the post-primary level, a key consideration is how to enable educators to master their specific disciplines, and at the same time, to have adequate knowledge of other disciplines enough to make transdisciplinary linkages. Another challenge is how to design curricula in a way that makes linkages across subjects and learning areas.

Competence-based curricula are structured around competences and not around subjects, and progression relates to the competence rather than subject matter difficulty.

As the last word, competence-based curricula are not against subject matter content. Effective application of content across disciplines actually requires a high level of mastery of the content.

seven macro competences that are considered relevant across contexts. These are: (i) Lifelong learning; (ii) Self-agency; (iii) Interactively using diverse tools and resources; (iv) Interacting with others; (v) Interacting with the world; (vi) Multi-literateness; and (vii) Trans-disciplinarity. Because of their universality, macro competences are quite stable. They allow for curricula stability across transformations and reforms. They are the bigger picture and the overarching "why" of a curriculum.

Knowing how to learn is the most critical future competence.

The 21 st century requires people to be self-actualized agents.

Responsible use of tools and resources is also at the heart of responsible consumption and sustainable lifestyles, which contribute to sustainable development.

It demands collaboration to resolve complex problems and create integrated solutions across contexts.

This competence enables people to be local and global.

Different contexts will demand different types and levels of literacies.

Increasing complexity requires ever more sophisticated solutions that integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines and from domains of knowledge.

This framework therefore balances the need for dynamic change in curricula with the equal need for stability.

key part of the secondary school curriculum should involve the teaching of stress-reduction methods, such as mindfulness meditation, yoga, and aerobic activity; exercise breaks during class; a strong physical education curriculum; and a broadly based extracurricular sports program for all students, not just the star athletes.

Scientists should stick to two projects—having only one can be boring; having three can overextend you.

R&D leaders need to hire people who are willing to join multiple projects and to move from one to another as needed. Call them ambidextrous; call them system thinkers. These are people who want to solve problems that matter and that take them from invention to final product

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.

How do people feel about knowledge – is it power to be hoarded, or a gift to be shared?

The two key advantages of informal learning are that it happens at the point of need and what is learned is usually applied right away.

In the cooperative model, the learning and development group can shift from being the producer of content to being the guide, initiator, facilitator, and coach.

Based on alignment with agreed upon organizational and learning goals, the learner takes responsibility for his or her own learning – with the support and guidance of the organization.

People who are not used to working in a learning organization culture, where cooperative learning within communities of practice is the norm, need the knowhow and a new mindset regarding learning to cooperatively in the workplace.

The positive is that this incidental learning doesn’t take people away from the work. The disadvantage is that when they are so caught up in doing, people often miss an important ingredient for learning: reflection.

The combination of structured and incidental learning can give us intentional learning.

The key to solidifying this learning is reflection.

David Kolb, wrote about a model of experiential learning consisting of the following cycle: action, observation, reflection, concept formation, and back to action.

Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck asked managers to stop once a week and answer just two simple questions, “What did you do last week?” and “What did you learn from it?” They found that this simple process of reflection enabled the managers learn from their experiences and to change the way they managed.

integration of formal and informal learning can create a virtuous cycle that leads not only to increased productivity but to the real innovation that is necessary for long term success in a dynamic marketplace.