Recently there has been a spate of articles in journals as diverse as Dow Jones, The New York Times, and Inside Higher Education which, when boiled down, ask about the fundamental value of a college education and raise the question of how, when we see that value, we will know what we are looking at. continue reading

“Ignorance isn’t bliss. Rather, education is.”
— Catherine Rampell, NYT, 2/18/2010

As reported by the The New York Times, Richard Florida, author of the The Rise of the Creative Class and director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and his colleague Charlotta Mellander have done some analysis that shows a correlation between educational attainment (earning a bachelor’s degree) and the sense of well-being. This is only a correlation, of course, but apparently it is a stronger correlation than:

* wages
* unemployment
* output per capita

Interesting!

This article was cross-posted at the Innovations Lab Blog.

I just finished David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong.” It is a good read.

In a nutshell Shenk argues that “Talent is not a thing, it’s a process!”

Shenk joins a growing popular literature that is redefining popular conceptions of talent — books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Daniel Pink’s Drive, Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, Carol Dweck’s Mindset, among others.  Each in their own way challenging cultural, sociological and political commonplaces (subtle and not-so-subtle) that perpetuate the idea that talent, intelligence and, thereby, success and achievement are endowments we cannot change.

The Genius in All of Us covers some of the same ground that Malcolm Gladwell covers in Outliers (the 10,000 hour rule for example), but Shenk takes a decidedly more biological and genetic framework for his argument.  In some ways, he takes Carol Dweck’s foundational argument about the our mindsets and grounds it in a genetic framework.  Shenk’s work embodies Dweck growth mindset from her book Mindset — showing us the growth mindset dynamic through examples like Ted Williams.

Letting Shenk speak for himself, he says,

“Some people are training harder and smarter then before.  We’re better at stuff, because we’ve figure out how to become better. Talent is not a thing, it’s a process.  This is not at all how we’re use to thinking about talent.  With phrases like, ‘he must be gifted’, ‘good genes’, ‘innate ability’ and ‘natural born runner, shooter, talker, painter’, our culture regards talent as a scare genetic resource.  A thing that one either does or does not possess….

And,

But the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark. … In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged that overwhelmingly suggests a completely different paradigm: not talent scarity but latent talent abundance.

I am not an expert on genes, but the concept of “latent talent abundance” rings true to me as a teacher.

The question we must ask ourselves as educators is: Do our institutions reflect our understanding of human talent and growth?  Are we part of enterprises dedicated to unlocking a vast latent talent abundance, or are we as educators gatekeepers of scarce resources?  I know which side I am on!

Will also is the editor of a free, professional development blog for teachers: The Innovations Lab.

While I was driving across New York State and southern Ontario, I listened to Daniel Pink’s new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Drive while driving, I suppose.

Bottom line: I really liked this book! It purports to be a business book, but the insights seemed to easily be applied to education. Here are some of my “top-of-the-head” impressions of the book:

1. The social and behavioral sciences have interesting things to say about motivation.  Carrot-and-stick reward systems often backfire.  Pink cites work from research with monkeys, pre-schoolers, world-class artists, and of course, graduate students.

2. Pink’s main point is that the most effective motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic.  Intrinsic motivation has three main components: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

3. Drive was more than a book-reading experience.  I felt like it was a holistic learning experience.  The lead to the story set the stage.  The concepts were compact and easy to understand, but with enough depth to make them believable. The last part of the book had practical things that you could do to further the ideas in your own life.  There were other goodies too: a glossary of terms, study group questions and a nice summary of the ideas in the book at the end.

This article was cross-posted at The Innovations Lab Blog.

Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck’s work is research-based and nuanced, but can be boiled down to a simple (and profound) schema.

There are two mindsets: fixed and growth.

People who primarily have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence, talents and personality are fixed and innate. For people who have a growth mindset, intelligence, talents and personality can be worked on, improved and made better.

The implications of this schema are profound for education. For example, being mindful of these fixed/growth mindset tendencies in students should influence the way we give feedback. (Positive feedback about a student’s innate intelligence is less helpful then praise about the student’s effort and hard work.)

Click on the image below to see Dr. Dweck’s Keynote Address at the 2009 Scottish Learning Festival:

I have been reading Mindset.  It is quite good.

This article is cross-posted at Kaplan University’s Innovations Lab.

Stanley Kaplan, in his memoir Test Pilot, wrote something that has stuck with me over the years.  He wrote this about students:

I wanted them to love learning as much as I loved teaching. I used everything imaginable to stimulate the students — arguing, joking, teasing, cajoling, listening, deciphering, and probing. I dug deep into my bag of tricks and pulled out mnemonic devices… flash cards, scrawled blackboard diagrams, and flailing animated gestures.

What is interesting about this quote is the juxtaposition of “affect” and “technique.”  Towards the end of the quote, he opens up his “bag of tricks” and lists a number of techniques for getting students involved in their education. But notice how he started the quote: “I wanted [students] to love learning as much as I loved teaching.  He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to learn everything that I know.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)   He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to buckle down and become good students.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)  No, he leads with the affective dimension: love learning!

Was he just waxing poetic? I don’t think so.  Lots of contemporary writing about the scholarship of teaching and learning focuses on the affective dimension of the human being as a key to successful learning.  James Zull in The Art of Changing the Brain describes how fear and biological responses of deep structures of the brain can make the conditions for learning difficult.  Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach shows us with poignant examples, about how fear can shut down learning and teaching from both the student role and the teacher role.  Palmer shows how fear can, in fact, become more than biological responses as it is becomes embedded our culture, in behavior and in norms and values.

What Stanley Kaplan gives us, today, in that one thin sentence is a touchstone: The student-led revolution in higher education will start in the heart — in the hearts of teachers and in the hearts of students!

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Will deBock is the Associate Director and Founder of Kaplan University’s Innovations Lab. The Innovations Lab is a teaching-and-learning centered initiative focused on empowering teachers to bring sustainable innovations into their teaching and their classrooms. The Innovations Lab Blog is a publicly available resource for educators all over the globe!

I am excited and pleased today because I am holding my new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass, Jan. 2010), in my hands. It lives up to its title, I think, describing how our technology-rich environment, populated with platforms, networks, social sites, and downloads, makes possible a level of access and completion in higher education that has been unattainable up to this point. I illustrate this point with a number of examples. Primary among them is being able to self-assess your experiential learning and then, if you wish, get it reviewed formally for academic credit , all on-line. continue reading

I am sitting at the opening session of the Kaplan University Faculty Retreat in Miami, a biannual event that precedes KU’s graduation ceremonies, listening to my colleague and fellow Rethinking Higher Education blogger Peter Smith talking about his new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. I am proud to be his colleague and his friend. continue reading

A co-worker recently shared with me this YouTube video:

Maybe you’ve already seen this clip (more than 3.8 million folks have viewed it … I admit to being a bit behind the times, technologically speaking). If you haven’t, then I encourage you to check it out. continue reading

Recently I have seen three articles about the current state of higher education financing which perplexed me greatly. First, Business Week published an article which portrayed proprietary institutions as “cashing in” unduly on stimulus money. continue reading