Learning and the Brain Conference - Reaching for Greatness - Friday

Pre-Conference Visit to the MIT Brain Imaging Lab
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."

Then, redefining intelligence didn't sit well.  He wanted to think more about what really matters.  He connected with the work of Maslow and the other humanistic psychologists (Personal disclaimer of bias:  I do not connect with Maslow's work and find humanistic psychology dehumanizing.)  Quoted a 1966 unpublished essay by Maslow in which he said "self-actualization is not enough" and discussed why it was important to seek the good of others and not just oneself and that they must be motivated by values that transcend oneself.   Not long before his death, he began to call for transhumanistic psychology.  (Showed pictures of unfinished manuscripts and handwritten notes Maslow wrote just before he died, showing very different ideas than those you learn in elementary psychology with the pyramid.)  Side Note: Maslow never talked about or showed a pyramid.  He discussed, instead, the balance of needs and growth.  Maslow asked, "Why do we leave mystery and awe in the churches?"

"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.

Thanksgiving Post 2 - Mr. Freeman

This November, I am writing about teachers I am thankful to have had in my life and the impact they continue to have on my teaching.  This week, let me tell you about my 8th grade Earth Science and PE teacher, Mr. Jim Freeman.

The first day of 8th-grade is mostly listening to the policies of classes.  There might be the occasional getting-to-know-you game, but in a school where you have had the same classmates all day for years, there isn't much of that.  About halfway through the day, we had gotten to our science classroom, when a very tall, dark-haired teacher walked in, closed the door, and said, "Why should Christians study science?".  He then proceeded to talk for 30 minutes about the history of scientists who honored God with their work, the value of studying creation, and the impact Christians who study science can have on society. 

I sat, enraptured by this lecture.  Let me say that again.  I, a middle school student, hung on every word of a lecture, my eyes tracking every move of this man as he walked around the room, for thirty minutes.  I left the room that day, thinking that we were going to something important that year and that I was all in.  Throughout that year, I remained enthralled any time he broke into a lecture, which he enjoyed doing on a fairly regular basis.

There is an assumption, among people who don't know better, that a teacher or youth minister must be entertaining to engage students and hold their attention.  If that is true, educators and ministers are in real trouble.  We are simply not capable of being as entertaining as the media that floods their lives.  We can never be as engaging as their phones.  What I learned from Mr. Freeman that I carry into my classroom is that engagement comes first from instilling a belief that what we do in this room matters. 

I wish I could find my notes for that Earth Science class because they were a virtual transcript of the lectures that followed.  I couldn't get enough of this teacher and this class.  Was it because he was fun?  No (although he was a fun person).  Was it because he was entertaining?  No (even though he had that in him, often breaking into song).  Was it because he had some technique that made his lessons engaging to middle school students? No (although I am sure he learned things like that in his teacher training).  It was because he communicated the value of his class from minute one and passionately stuck to it all year.  For that, and all the books he inspired me to read, I am thankful.


Extra:  As a side note, Mr. Freeman was also my PE teacher.  It's hard to communicate how much I loathed PE.  I was tall, awkward, and afraid of the ball.  There were two positive moments that year.  The first came when we were playing softball.  I stepped up to the plate, and he said, "Just keep your eye on the ball," an instruction that is pretty terrifying if you are afraid the ball will hit you in the head.  I did it, though, and for the only time in my life, I actually hit the ball.  We'll ignore the fact that I was so surprised that I had hit it that I forgot to run to the base.  The second was the only time I was good at something in PE.  This was an all girls' class, and he decided that we needed to learn some self-defense.  We learned a few punches and kicks and how to use our keys to stab an attacker in the eyes.  One day, he lined us up, held his hand out at the level of his head, and told us to kick his hand.  I was the only one who could reach his hand.  I had been dead last at everything in PE for my entire life because of my height and awkwardness.  Now, for the first time, my height was an actual advantage. 

Thanksgiving Post 1 - Mr. Danny O. Watkins

This week at our faculty meeting, our professional development coach was doing a presentation about Growth Mindset.  She made a very sad statement that she could not think of one teacher who made a real impact on her.  I have always known I was blessed to have some great teachers, but as I was mentally making a list and coming to five without even giving it much thought, I was struck by just how many great teachers God put in my life.  Since November has started and Thanksgiving is on its way, I am going to write about one of these teachers each week.  I'll handle them in chronological order.  I would start with my sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Tom Dorrin, the person who turned my personality from fragile to one that can teach middle schoolers, but I just wrote in detail about him in January. This week's post will be about Mr. Danny O. Watkins, my history and homeroom teacher in the 7th and 8th grades.

History was not "my thing."  I didn't hate it, but if I had to list my classes in order of preference, history would always be at the bottom of that list.  Most of the history teachers I had were named Coach Something (Before you turn away, I've known many fabulous teachers who also coached athletic teams.  If, however, you introduce yourself to anyone except for you players as Coach So-and-so, you have a problem.  Your players should call you "Coach."  To everyone else, you are communicating that you teach a class because you have to in order to keep your sports job.  Okay, rant over.) Back to the gist of the story.  I was not inclined to love a history class.

In 7th grade, I was enrolled in Mr. Watkins' North Carolina history class and homeroom.  I don't quite know how to describe what made him so special, but I'll start with this: He's the most positive individual I've ever known.  He could find something good in anyone.  We loved him so much that my two friends and I weren't even bothered when he asked us to sing "How Firm a Foundation" with three-part harmony in homeroom EVERY day.  We just stepped up and did it for no other reason than he wanted us to. 

During that year, I learned a lot.  I learned about Winston Churchill, Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, George Washington Carver, W.E.B. DuBois, and Czar Nicholas and Alexandra.  What's that?  That doesn't sound like North Carolina history to you?  Yeah, we didn't care.  He taught what he loved.  You could study from the book for your tests, but he taught the parts of history that he was passionate about.  By the way, I learned about all those same things in American history the next year.  I get that this would not fit with the curriculum driven world in which we teach today, but in 1989, he made me fall in love with parts of history I might not have if he had stuck to the book. 

In particular, I became interested in the story of Czar Nicholas and the family and Rasputin.  In the 8th-grade, I read the book Nicholas and Alexandra for no other reason than the joy Mr. Watkins took in talking about this story.  To this day, if I am flipping through channels and see Rasputin, I stop and watch.  Ten years after this, I was in a Tulsa art museum that had an exhibit of imperial art.  They had Alexandra's crown a desk used by Nicholas.  I stood in that museum with tears running down my face.  I would not have had an emotional response to a crown and a desk if Mr. Watkins had not made me care so much about that family.

While I believe in my curriculum, what I learned from Mr. Watkins is the power of a teacher communicating the passion they have for what they are teaching.  For that and his relentless positivity, I am thankful.

Risk vs. Recklessness

We live in a safety-obsessed culture.  Playgrounds no longer have most of the features that were my childhood favorites.  I spent many happy hours spinning in circles on tire swings and roundabouts that can no longer be found on today's playgrounds.  Seesaws are a thing of the past.  Most schools have removed their swingsets, so we will see if my mom was right when she told us you can't grow right if you don't swing on swingsets.  Every time I find out a beloved piece of playground equipment is now banned, I wonder how long it will be before we wrap the kids in bubble wrap and roll them around the playground.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not against safety.  But, the point of playgrounds is to teach children how to take risks.  Why, you may ask, should kids learn to take risks?  I'm so glad you asked.  Risk is how we grow as a culture.  Risk is how the human race has progressed.  We made fire, explored the west, crossed Antarctica, invented electricity, and flew in space - all risky activities.  All of those things have been possible because human beings were willing find something more valuable than safety.

I'm concerned that the generation in front of us has been raised with such safety-conscious decisions that they have not learned the difference between risk-taking and recklessness.  Because they aren't learning it in other ways, I have this conversation with my 8th-graders when we learn about space travel and with my physics students when discussing the Manhattan Project.  When I ask my 8th-graders to evaluate the wisdom of a manned mission to Mars, about one-third of my students object to it on the basis of safety.  They say things like, "We should not go unless it can be guaranteed to be completely safe" and, "No one should risk their lives" and "We should only go when it can be 100% risk-free."  This is an unreasonable level of expectation for anything.  I remind them that sports are not 100% safe (There's a running ambulance at every game for a reason).  Driving a car isn't completely without risk, but we drive anyway.  Some of my physics students say that the scientists of the Manhattan project were not reckless because they were just doing what they had been told to do.  It seems my students have some conflicting thoughts about safety, risk, and recklessness; so I think these are important discussions to have with them.

Reckless, according to the Miriam Webster Dictionary, is "a lack of proper caution, careless of consequences, and irresponsible."  It defines risk as "a chance of loss and the possibility of loss or injury."  In short, it seems the recklessness is just risk without care or preparation for consequences.

Sports, as I mentioned before, involves risk.  That does not make those who play it reckless because they have conditioning, training, and procedures for the possible consequences.  Driving is the daily use of a 3000-pound piece of metal with combustible fluids firing up through the entire trip.  Is it reckless?  No.  You have been trained in safety techniques, and the car has been equipped with seat belts and airbags.  We, as a society, have decided that these mitigate the risk enough to make quick transportation worth handling a moving machine.  These are things we do every day that involve risk but are not necessarily reckless.

We should not be reckless, but we cannot move forward without risk.  It's important that we teach students the difference so that progress doesn't stop in the name of safety.

Defining Impact as Building a Legacy

I had planned to write about something different this week, but I saw this video a few days ago, and it will not let me go.  I'm in my car, on the way to church, and a line from this pops into my head.  I'm reading a book or watching tv, and the kind way this man is addressing the issue with millennials comes to mind.  It's 15 minutes long, but watch it, even if it means not reading the rest of this post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hER0Qp6QJNU

I could write a ten-part series based on this video, from the neurological consequences of telling a child they are perfect and special to the fallout of giving kids what they want as soon as they want it.  I could write about the influence of technology and the trap of instant gratification or how your mom can't get you a promotion.  I could write about the trauma of being unfriended or the fact that we have age restrictions on other addictive and potentially damaging things.  I may write about those someday, but there is a small part of this video that just keeps rolling around in my mind enough that I wanted to process my thoughts about it here.

The part that keeps coming back to me is about nine minutes in, where he talks about people who want to quit their job after only a few months because they aren't "making an impact."  I teach students who use this word a lot (and in a school that has the word in our mission statement).  I truly believe they are sincere when they say they want to make an impact.  However, much like the people who want to be famous or parents who just want their kids to be happy, lack of definition makes this difficult to achieve.

In the video, Simon Sinek describes it this way, "It's as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain, and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world, which is the summit.  What they don't see is the mountain.  I don't care if you go up the mountain quickly or slowly, but there's still a mountain."  This is such a perfect description of the issue.  Those who climb Everest certainly do it for the view at the top, but they certainly wouldn't find it as meaningful if a helicopter dropped them onto the summit.  The messy and difficult journey matters. 

In addition, what if there were no way to tell when you had reached the summit of a mountain.  You could succeed and not know or be frustrated by constantly climbing without knowing what you are climbing toward.   A word like "impact" is not a goal because there's no way to know when you have achieved it.  I was listening to a great TED talk about how unhappy kids are whose parents' goal is their happiness.  When the goal of parents was that their kids become good citizens, there was a way to know if you had been successful.  Did your child have a job, contribute to the economy, serve a neighbor, vote, and pay their taxes?  You had raised a good citizen.  The happiness goal is just too elusive to know if you have achieved it.  What is happy?  Are they happy enough?  Are they happy about the right things? (I mean, there are probably identity thieves who are happy with their work.) . This idea that a person's job should be one in which they have an impact is similar.  What kind of impact? (Because again, an identity thief is making an impact.)  In what way do you want the impact to happen?  How far do you want your impact to reach?  It's all just too mushy to be a goal.

One more problem.  "Impact" is a word that sounds like it's something that happens fast.  Earthquakes have impact.  Wars have impact.  A punch to the face has impact.  It's a sudden result.  What Simon Sinek is trying to communicate is that you cannot reach the summit without climbing the mountain.  That process may difficult, non-linear, and long.  Most people who are out there, sincerely hoping to make "an impact" are frustrated that it doesn't happen after each action.  They don't see making an impact as a lifelong activity; they see it as something they can accomplish after a week of trying.

Let me humbly suggest that we change our language a bit.  What we really mean when we say we want to have an impact is that we want to do something that matters.  We want to make a change in the world.  We want to build a legacy.  Perhaps we should change the way we speak to high school and college students to this language, the language of building.  Doesn't the image of building something communicate so much more about the process than the word impact?  A person who enters their career with building something in mind will find fare more fulfillment in the process of learning and doing their job than the person who goes in expecting to make a quick and sudden difference. 

Let's focus on building something and enjoy the messy, difficult, interesting, and growing process that is.

Teaching Students Empathy

Lack of empathy may be the world's biggest problem right now.  You might not think this if you read a lot of Twitter arguments.  Someone always says, "How would you feel if . . ." and while that sounds empathetic, the motivation is to win the argument.  That's not empathy.  It the same old selfishness disguised as compassion.  A wolf in sheep's clothing is not a sheep, and the person who pretends compassion is not compassionate.   

We are so polarized that the very idea of what someone else thinks or feels is offensive to us, so we carefully cultivate our world (friending and unfriend, following and unfollowing) to hear as little as possible from those with whom we disagree.  Whether the issue is immigration, racial injustice, the waitress serving our table more slowly than we would like, or a rival athletic team, we don't want to imagine "the other side" as human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.

Anyone who has been in education longer than a day knows that we aren't just responsible for teaching content.  We also teach life skills, study skills, thinking abilities, and engage in character development.  If we are going to fulfill our mission with students, we must find ways to teach empathy.  Here are a few ways that I've seen in my own school.  Please share what you do in yours.

Project Construction:
When GRACE teachers construct projects, we often think of ways to broaden student thinking to take others into account.  One of our English teachers partnered her class with a class from another school.  They engaged in a Twitter chat about "the American dream."  Our students heard stories and viewpoints they otherwise would not have.  Fifth-grade students learning about the Holocaust were assigned roles as Jews and wore stars of David, had restrictions on which doors and water fountains they were allowed to use in order to experience what it feels like to be isolated and limited for no reason.  Physics students are assigned a region of the world to research and asked to propose the solution to a problem that engineering could help solve.  They are required to use the available resources of the area, not swoop in with a western solution.  Our AP Statistic students collect and analyze data for local non-profits.  These are only a few examples.  If you walk through the halls of either campus, you will see projects that encourage empathy development.

Modeling Empathy in Our Interactions
For all the planned activities teachers and students engage in, the vast majority of our day involves unplanned conversation.  When a student asks a question, it means they are open to a change in thinking.  The way we answer them matters.  Do we treat the question like an interruption to our plan, or do we remember what it was like to not understand?  When a student complains about another teacher, do we let it go or do we ask them to think about why that teacher might have done that?  What might that teacher have been thinking?  When a student says something mean or insensitive, do we simply punish or does our discipline involve asking that student to put themselves in the other students' position?  All of these unplanned interactions reveal how we think, which students notice.

Community Service
My school requires students to complete a certain number of community service hours for graduation, but we want them to view service more deeply than that.  The hope is that the requirement will expose them to a variety of service organizations and opportunities ranging from local thrift stores to Habitat for Humanity to food service organizations.  In a time of slacktivism, when many believe they have made a difference by using a hashtag or putting a banner on their Instagram profile, we want our students to really engage in service by investing their time.   Many of our students find that one of those opportunities ignites a passion for service and become active because of the intrinsic motivation to help others. 

Writing Opportunities
I've often said that English teachers know their students better than anyone else because they read so much of their writing.  I know I said things in essays that I didn't talk about in other places.  It's just hard to write without putting something of yourself into it.  But English teachers don't need to be the only people who provide students with these opportunities.  It will look different in the different areas of discipline, but you can craft questions and writing prompts that both lead to mastery of content, use of Bloom's evaluation level thinking skill (yes, I know it's not on the new Bloom's but it still matters), and empathy.  History teachers can ask their students to write as a suffragette or a soldier in the Civil War.  Science teachers can ask their students to evaluate the application of scientific discoveries (nuclear power v. nuclear weapons) from the perspective of Neils Bohr and/or a citizen of Japan.  Foreign language teachers probably have more opportunities than anyone to introduce their students to the thinking of people different from themselves.  If you don't want it to be in the form of writing, that's fine.  They can accomplish the same in a skit, video, song, debate, or any other creative way you can think of.

The Arts 
Every study about arts education shows that whether it is theater, dance, visual art, or music, students who participate in the arts have an increased level of empathy.  While it is risky to assume reasons from statistical data, they do prompt us to ask why the numbers are what they are.  I'm not an arts educator (just an enthusiastic supporter), but as I've read about these studies, it seems most arts educators agree that the increase in empathy results from trying to portray the creative work of others (band music students are usually performing the work of another) and also trying to get others to understand their own message (visual arts and dance are often putting out original work).  Some curriculum includes both.  You can see how the development of empathy would happen even if it weren't a specific goal of the curriculum.  When it is a specific goal, the result is practically magical, as I got to see yesterday.

Yesterday, I attended our school's fall play.  While I have enjoyed and been entertained by every play we have done, I've never been more impressed by my students as much as I was with this one.  The play is called Women and War.  My students stepped into the shoes of Vietnam nurses, gold star mothers, war protestors, wives waiting for their husbands to return from Korea, WWII soldiers writing to their girl at home, and those who served in other capacities (like phone operators and USO girls).  They portrayed worry, sadness, anger, joy, and PTSD.   Their preparation involved more than memorizing lines and learning stage blocking.  They read dozens of articles, visiting the WWI immersive exhibit at our local museum, interviewed an air force reservist, and attempted to truly interpret the intent of the playwright.  The result was a theatre experience unlike any I've seen in a high school.  In the audience, you could have heard a pin drop.  There was none of the shifting around, moving to restrooms, and talking between scenes that have become relatively normal at plays (even though they shouldn't).  The only sounds were those of sniffles from people who had been moved to tears.  When the lights went it out, there was a beat before the applause began, and even then, it was quieter applause than normal.  The audience needed that moment as they moved from experiencing the characters and their stories to remembering that they were an audience.  There was empathy in the audience, but it was because there was empathy on that stage.  For the two dozen cast and crew of this play, Veteran's Day will not be the same.  Neither will their studies of history class or trips to DC.  Once empathy has been achieved, it marks their hearts.

Like anything else, there is no "one size fits all" method.  Writing will not successfully build empathy in all students; neither will community service.  Both methods will reach some.  Projects are not going to open all of their eyes, but participation in the arts might.  If each method reaches some, the cumulative effect will be powerful.  Do as many as you can wherever it fits in the context of your school.

Twitter as a PD Tool

The first time I got on Twitter, I didn't get what the fuss was about.  It seemed like Facebook for people with ADHD (This was back when it was still only 140 characters).  I also felt pressured to post every time I changed activities.  "I am teaching a class.  I am teaching another class.  I am eating lunch."  This was too much pressure for me, and I deleted my account.  I just wasn't getting anything out of it that I was already getting from Facebook, and I felt silly posting twice.

Then, I attended a teacher's conference at which an art teacher made the case for Twitter as a professional development tool.  I wasn't sure if I agreed, but I thought I should give it a fair shake.  I created another account and cultivated who I followed more carefully than I had the first time.  Instead of the same friends and family that I already had on Facebook, I chose to follow educators and scientific sources.  It still took me a while to develop an appreciation for Twitter, but it was a much different user experience than the scattershot method I was using the first time.

That was five years ago.  While I haven't been perfectly disciplined about keeping my follows purely about education and science (I follow a few things for no other reason than the joy they bring, like @dog_feelings and @nocontextpawnee), I have developed a great deal of momentum making Twitter a tool of professional learning.  Here are a few accounts I recommend to you.  The first list is for all teachers.  The second focuses on science.

Education List
@Wikipedia ‏- I've only been following them a few weeks, and I'm already glad I do
@davestuartjr ‏- He's a teacher with much wisdom to share.
@SteeleThoughts ‏- An Alabama MS principal.  If you aren't following him, you aren't as encouraged as you could be.
@TalksWTeachers ‏- Links to their podcast.
@TEDTalks ‏- If you don't know why, you don't know TED.
@pbsteachers - Some digital resources 

Science List
@NatlParkService ‏- Beautiful pictures, historical facts about America's best idea 
@SlowMotionGuys ‏- I teach a lot of science through slow motion video
@TheCrashCourse ‏ - Actually, this is for more than just science.  They have many grade channels.
@NASA_Astronauts ‏- They post photos from the space station.  Well worth following.
@scifri ‏- The twitter account of NPR's Science Friday with Ira Flatow
@NASA ‏- Always great, but especially awesome as we approach the 50th anniversary of the moon landings.
@ScienceNews ‏and @sciam ‏- Good articles on current science topics
@Fermilab ‏and @CERN ‏- While they are good for the occasional article, it's their photos that make them fun to follow.

Try some of these out, and if there are any that aren't giving you beneficial information, be vigilant about unfollowing them.  It's only a helpful tool if you are reducing the noise from the unhelpful ones.