Wow! That's all I can say about this visit. Is it because the machine is amazing? No. I mean, it is but it looks like one you have seen in any medical drama. Is it because the facility is amazing? No. It pretty much looked like an office with a bunch of computer screens. Why was it amazing? The people who work there. We were lead on the tour by a safety coordinator, a neuroscientist, and an engineer. They couldn't have been any kinder or more patient with all of our questions. They were also super smart but could explain things in a way that anyone could understand.
Any notes or actual information I could post here would not make sense if you weren't there.
Keynote 1 - Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD. - Finding Your Personal Greatness
Started by saying he was terrified because he felt a moral dilemma due to his hatred of the word greatness, which is the theme of the conference. In order to keep his integrity while presenting at the conference, he decided to redefine it as personal greatness and give a talk he never has before.
He was in special education. Had been told that he was learning disabled and not college material (which the adults in his life thought would relieve his anxiety). He spent a decade of his career to redefine intelligence because there was such a divide between those who were considered intelligent and those who had " special needs."
New Definition: "Intelligence is the dynamic interplay of engagement and ability in pursuit of personal goals."
"Suddenly, intelligence didn't matter to me anymore." Kauffman revised the hierarchy of needs.
Safety - He describes a cycle of needs for safety (more complex than the absence of danger), connection, and self-esteem (including competence and the healthy regulation of narcissism) as the basis for security.
Growth - He also describes a cycle of growth, that includes love, purpose, and exploration. Cognitive exploration is about both intellect (including curiosity) and openness to experience. The combination of those two results in creative thinking.
Love - Asked for audience definitions. He got committed selflessness, duty to meet the needs of others, unconditional support, and value. He then gave Maslow's description of Being-Love as admiring, enjoyable, constantly growing, having a quiet ego, healthy authenticity, and with minimal expectations ("steady, small maintenance doses").
Purpose - Choose the right goals (Strive wisely). Live your purpose (pursue wisely).
Transcendence - Integrates the rest of the needs in harmonious ways.
Don't achieve greatness without achieving personal greatness, or you will feel like a fraud. Talent development must be about advancing the whole person, not just the skill. Developing a sense of awe in students is possible, and it should be important to us. We can give them reverence for the material. (Personal note: This is so much more meaningful in my work as a Christian school teacher than it was in public school. It is easier to bring a sense of awe when we recognize God's sovereignty and plan in all of our curriculum.)
If you are interested, you can assess your personal greatness at selfactualizationtest.com
Characteristics include freshness of appreciation, acceptance, authenticity (which is more like dignity or integrity, not just being a jerk), equanimity (grit with grace), purpose, efficient perception of reality, humanitarianism, peak experiences, good moral intuition, and creative spirit.
Keynote 2 - Gail M. Saltz, MD - The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorders, Creativity, and Genius
Psychoanalysts should be talking to educators because many mental health issues show up in school.
Has a program where a historian and a psychologist examine some of the great minds (e.g. van Gogh, Einstein). Almost all have a mental health issue or a learning disability.
The typical brain has 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses (connections). There are 180 defined areas in the rain. It would be difficult for people's brains to be the same because of all those connections.
Brain differences are normal until it interferes with a person's ability to live and operate daily. Then, it becomes something diagnosable. Almost all have a genetic component, but it is not destiny. We don't treat the diagnosis; we treat the symptoms. Treatment minimizes suffering in order to keep people on their developmental path.
Brain difference issues have benefits if you have some symptoms. If you have no symptoms, you might not be able to benefit. If you have too much of a symptom, you may to ill to benefit. There is a sweet spot when it comes to brain differences. Any brain area that gets used gets strengthened, making it more likely that it will be used again. If there is no treatment, a pathway can become overwhelmingly strong. (e.g. Untreated depression will lead to more and deeper depression.) Having some symptoms but not too many allows you to take advantage of the strengths.
Strengths of dyslexia
- Ability to discern patterns
- Increased visual-spatial relations
- A wider span of attention
- Greater empathy, resilience, and perseverance
Strengths of Distractability
- Exceptional originality and creativity
- Impulsiveness helps you act on "out of the box" thoughts
- Intuition
- Doesn't inhibit thoughts, leading to new ideas
- Most CEO's of major companies have some form of ADHD.
Strengths of Anxiety
- Alertness, diligence, attention to detail, perfectionism
- Drive
- Vigilance
- Can accurately assess emotions in others
- Ability to predict outcomes
(Problem: Long-term cortisol exposure leads to brain cell death. Need treatment. Excitement anxiety is good and leads to better performance, but if everything feels like a mortal danger, you cannot function.)
Strengths of Melancholy (Depression)
- Empathy
- Insight
- Realism (Paying attention to real issues rather than glossing them over for the sake of happiness)
- Obsessiveness
- Perfectionism
Strengths of Mania
- Diversity of thought
- Rapid associations
- Heightened linguistic ability
- Confidence
- Quickened senses
- Passionate drive
- An incredibly high number of great writers live with hypomania (just beneath the manic phase)
Strengths of Divergent (Schizotypal) Thinking
- Problem-solving ability
- Persistence
- Risk-taking
- Sensitivity to environmental stimuli / more nuanced
Strengths of Autism Spectrum
- Ability to classify objects
- Increased peripheral visual acuity (perhaps the cause of decreased facial recognition)
- Increased drive to analyze or construct systems or patterns
- Attention to detail
- Perseveration / find comfort in repetition (a strength in the right job)
The average time from a child's first symptom to treatment is 5 years. Parents are resistant to believe that their child has a problem. Dandelions don't need as much nurturing and attention as orchids. Some people who think differently are orchids and need treatment for growth.
The Human Connectome Project has scan 12000 brains of people without diagnoses to lay a roadmap for the "normal" thinking brain. This should help with diagnosis, treatment, and education.
We can educate better if we know their strengths. We should spend 80% of our time developing strengths and 20% shoring up weaknesses. Expose kids to many things to see what lights their psychological fire. Recognizing the strengths of all kinds of thinking will redue stigma and allow all students to flourish.
Concurrent Sessions A
Part1: Raising the Next Great Innovator: What the Quirky Lives of Franklin, Einstein, and Marie Curie Teach Us About Creative Genius - Melissa A. Schilling, PhD, Author of Quirky
Studying a random sample of people will not result in finding innovators. She spent an entire year studying Steve Jobs and his history and family. Comparing multiple innovators results in interesting results because on the surface, it is not apparent what they have in common.
Used a protocol to make a list of the most famous inventors, scientists, and thinkers who had multiple innovations. They also had to have multiple biographies written about them and first-person source material to have a lot of data to draw from without the bias of just one biographers' interpretation.
When the protocol was run, she found 32 people, from which she chose the 8 that had the most in common. She was bothered the so many of them were white men and was highly pressured to choose a more diverse population to study. After she tried to, she decided it was not science anymore if she tried to make her data fit the social norms of the time in which she was living instead of following the protocol. Also, there is more diversity in the group than skin color. Tesla was Serbian. Einstein was Jewish. Steve Jobs was broke at the beginning. Edison had a mental illness. Curie was a Polish woman. Elon Musk grew up in South Africa and left by himself at the age of 17. These aren't stories of privilege.
There was only one woman who made the list because female access to education was so low for so long. Most of these great innovators were so driven that they focused on their work to the exclusion of everything else. Marie Curie's daughter refers to her as Madame Curie in her biography and says, "She did not love family and friends. She loved only science." This total devotion may also account for the low number of women historically because they felt they must devote themselves to work or family only and would not be able to do both.
Articles by Schilling on this topic. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3190195 and https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/stsc.2017.0044
1. Innovators are also not typically genial. They are usually socially awkward and sometimes don't care that they are. Einstein was disliked to the point that his teachers wouldn't write him recommendation letters. He also didn't fit with the protocols of proper behavior, sweeping Newton's theories away as nothing. Pierre and Marie Curie "dreamed of living in the world quite removed from human beings." It is thought that Pierre was likely autistic. Tesla said, "It is not humans that I love, but humanity." He was in love with a pigeon (who he said loved him back). If he were alive today, he would be diagnosed with OCD and mania. One of Elon Musk's employees said, "You have to understand that he loves humanity. He just doesn't like people that much." Edison had few friends and intentionally shut himself off from his employees. Dean Kamen believe that if you said something was impossible, you just meant that YOU couldn't do it, and he would tell you so. Steve Jobs was known to be against all social norms, wearing no shoes, parking in a handicapped spot every single day, refusing to put a license plate on his car, etc. Innovation comes from people who don't care what other people think.
What we can do:
Embrace weirdness.
Stop trying to achieve consensus.
Allow people to work alone in creative endeavors.
Brainstorm individually before doing group work.
Brainstorming teams produce fewer ideas and almost no innovative ideas.
Innovation comes from quiet time, alone, without external stimuli.
Stop scheduling all of kids time if you want them to think creatively.
Meanwhile, someone from a different room, hearing a different speaker tweeted this quote. "Collaboration as a key to creativity and learning." I wonder what the data shows.
2. Innovators have extreme self-efficacy. They might not come across as confident in normal situations, but they have a great degree of faith in their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve their goals. The line between hubris and self-efficacy may be blurry (the difference may be in whether or not you actually get it done). Elon Musk responded to NASA telling him that they had been working on reusable rockets for years and hadn't been able to do it with, "I think I can do it." Tesla looked a photo of Niagara falls and told his father that he would harness that power and send it hundreds of miles (when he was 14).
What we can do:
- Create opportunities for early wins in school by lowering the stakes of losing.
- Read hero stories to kids. They gain self-efficacy vicariously by hearing stories of people overcoming obstacles.
3. Innovators are extremely idealist and altruistic (except for Edison). They aren't usually in it for money or popularity. They often think they are working for God or working on behalf of humanity. Ben Franklin gave up family (his son was a British loyalist) for the cause of liberty. Dean Kamen urinated into the water purifier that he invented and drank it to show that it worked. Because the people who need clean water don't usually have money, he has poured money into it just because people need it and he wants to help clean up the mess. Elon Musk said, "If something is important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure."
4. Innovators have a need to work. They don't want to do anything else. They get a dopamine rush from working, so the work is their reward. They lose all sense of time while they are working. Edison never wanted to not be working. He was said not to "comprehend the limitations of the strength of other men."
What we can do:
- Keep them stimulated.
- Rethink the hours of work.
5. Innovators are usually in the right place at the right time with the right resources. (Personal note: They call it luck. We call it God's sovereignty. He puts the right people in the right place at the right time.)
Formal education is not necessarily correlated with innovators. Curie was the only formally educated person on the list. Elon Musk has a bachelor's degree, but he only showed up for the tests. The other six had very little formal education. They were largely self-educated. Several read all the books in their public library, and Ben Franklin started the public library system. Standardization is a cage for the innovative thinker. These innovators had high achievement in fields they weren't trained for because, as outsiders, they could see things people in the field could not. We can, however, as educators create more opportunities for more kids by the environment we create.
Part 2: Unlocking Student Talent by Brian Pete and Robin Fogarty
The person doing the talking is the person doing the learning. When you are comfortable with the person you are talking with, the learning will be better, so get to know each other.
There's a great analogy about birds on wires and a cat that won't make sense to anyone who wasn't at the conference. It can't be explained here, but you have to teach your kids to fly, not sit on higher wires.
Developing talent comes from deliberate practice. We create the structure that they think within. We must be deliberate and thoughtful about the structure we create and let them move within it.
Perfection is an illusion. If you are obsessed with perfection, they've got some pharmaceuticals for that now.
Exposure isn't enough to help a student find their passion. We can push them to try a little more and go a little further to get to the point where passion can be found. Stimulate the curiosity that is already there.
To Ignite:
- Inspire - Aspirations, hallmarks, novelty
- Invigorate - Challenge, creativity, competitiveness
- Instill - Mindset, confidence, burning desire
To Practice
- Repetition - Deliberate practice strengthens Myelin in the brain (Myelin is the insulating material on the neuron. As it gets stronger, thinking gets better and faster because it increases working memory.)
- Resistance and Results - Increase their "reachfulness." Put the goal just out of reach, so they have to stretch to get there.
- Recovery and Residual - Evolving routines develop "pattern-thinking." Mental memory is developed.
To Coach
- Engage - Coach and talent become a trusting team. What matters is that the kids believe that you believe in them.
- Elevate - Hone achievement with feedback one level so that they know how to do better on the next level. Teach them to teach themselves
- Exceed - Goal setting, imagination, metacognition
Don't sit too long. Stand up occasionally while processing learning. "The latest research shows that the brain is connected to the body."
Creating a little obstacle in practice makes them remember it better because of the greater brain attention. Do it the normal way once. Then do it again with an element missing.
Four lobes of the brain.
- Occipital - Center of Vision
- Parietal - Integration of Senses
- Frontal - Center of Thinking
- Temporal - Center of Hearing
Application is the only way you know they learned something. If you want to get them thinking, you have to get them talking. When you ask someone for directions, you always repeat them out loud. Hearing it isn't enough. You have to hear yourself say it to activate the Parietal and Frontal lobes, not just the temporal lobe.
In video games, the player is wrong 80% of the time, but if it is appropriately challenging, they will go back and play again.
AB Pyramid game.
Note: This was the best conference of the day, but the notes may not reflect that. We were doing so much stuff and it moved so fast that it was easy to learn from but hard to take notes on.
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