Skip to main content

Like in comedy, timing is everything

I regularly listen to the School Leadership Series and today's episode, "Slump or Spark?", made me think about initiatives, goals, and how we often get stuck in the middle.

Danny encourages us to think about the middle, the "often overlooked time." He encourages us to think about midpoints, the lull, and how we can transform them into sparks instead of slumps. He encourages us to be aware of them, use them to "wake up," and to imagine that we are behind rather than ahead in order to motivate us out of "coast" mode.

He also mentions Dan Pink's When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing in the episode. In this book, Pink gives advice for the varied levels of commitment during the middle: "... when team commitment to achieving a goal is high, it's best to emphasize the work that remains. But when team commitment is low, it's wiser to emphasize the progress that has already been made even if it is not massive" (p. 139).

Being aware of the attitudes of the team and organization is important. Just having a relentless drive on progress, on accomplishing more, can actually hurt the team's motivation. This is why it is important for leaders to know their team, to be able to "read the room," "take the temperature," or any other way you say it, and to celebrate the small successes along the way, especially when your team may need that celebration.

Along a similar tune, Seth Godin introduces "the dip" in The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick). He defines the dip as "the long slog between starting and mastery" (p. 17). I love this definition because of the word "slog." To slog is to "work hard," and we should work hard on the things that matter, not necessarily on those that don't. But it also goes without saying that the things that matter are going to be difficult and time-consuming, and we will surely encounter setbacks and challenges. Although not specifically written for educators, this point continues to stand out to me: "The reason we're here is to solve the hard problems" (p. 27). If we think about that every day--our purpose of solving hard problems that can positively impact the lives of youth--we can muster a little more motivation and avoid a slump.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public