To encourage dialogue and reflection about what is helpful for ourselves and others, our question for the week is: Share a piece of advice you have received that has been helpful. Why was it helpful? Being Helpful (Week of 2/11/24) (This is an anonymous Google Form)
Blake's Guiding Lights
Our Students
Blake's Core Values: Respect, Responsibility, Resourcefulness, Reflection
Our Essential Question: How can we cultivate and curate the progression of student learning and growth?
Our Mission: Blake Middle School believes in a living mission statement, based on the concept that our community seeks and respects knowledge, integrity, character, wisdom, and the willingness to adapt to a continually evolving world.
The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning. - John Dewey
You cannot teach today the same way you did yesterday to prepare students for tomorrow. - John Dewey
Walking back from yoga last Saturday morning, it truly felt like the beginning of Spring - birds chirping away, sunlight shining, and fresh air! It was wonderful to get outside for a nice walk with the dogs on Saturday, in between basketball games for the boys. A highlight of the weekend was seeing Pure Imagination Sunday afternoon before watching the Super Bowl. Special thanks and kudos to Tracy for her leadership throughout the production, and thanks as well to Tracy, Tom, Deb M., Sarah L., Diane H., Kathleen, Maureen Doctoroff, Kim Price, Nancy M., Alice O’Connor, Erin McDermott, Cassidy Kolovos, the Consilvio family, Meghan Johnson, Cathie Mak, Jen Plonski, Design Light, and all the family volunteers!
- What’s currently working?
- What’s not currently working?
- What’s helpful?
- What’s the point of feedback?
- Does our intent match the impact?
- How do we know?
These are just a few and the list goes on and on. Just like the layers of the onion - once you start to look into these systems, ask questions, and dive in, the layers unfold. They are important questions for us to continue asking (regardless of the ‘topic at hand’), and the shares below provide insight into ways to systemically think about how we can frame our responses and directions to students. If the goal is learning and improvement, our systems should be grounded in structures that keep the compass pointing forward - not ignoring or negating the past, but taking that information in a forward-thinking path.
How To Ask For Feedback That Actually Helps You Get Better
by Gio Lodi
Feedback is a vital step in every learning journey. Whether you are picking up a new skill or want to improve an existing one, you need information to gauge your progress and course-correct. Unfortunately, not all feedback is created equal. People often give feedback that is focused on the past and sugarcoated.
(Adam Grant) Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time.
To nudge people to share future-looking, improvement-focus input, don’t ask, “How did it go?” or, “What did you think of it?” but: What’s one thing I can do better next time?
By putting the spotlight on what could be better next time, you will elicit what executive coach Marshall Goldsmith calls feedforward. You’ll frame the conversation to be about the future, not past performance.
As the late Andres Ericsson showed through his research on deliberate practice, quality feedback is a crucial component of any system for learning and growing. To accelerate your growth, improve your feedback—and act upon it.
Get rid of the 'feedback sandwich'—use this 1 sentence instead, says Wharton psychologist Adam Grant
by Ece Yildirim in cnbc.com
“The feedback sandwich doesn’t work,” Grant tells CNBC Make It. That echoes his comments last week at The Collaborative, a conference he hosted in New York alongside performance coaching company BetterUp, where he suggested ditching the method entirely: “It does not taste as good as it looks.”
There are two main problems with the approach, Grant says. First: If the recipient focuses on the criticism, they’ll forget all about the praise…Second, and inversely: If your praise comes across as genuine, it can drown out the criticism.
If you have some criticism to deliver, don’t try to hide or mask it, says Grant. Preface it with a single sentence: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
“The most important communication of information in your feedback happens before you give the content of the feedback,” Grant explained. You don’t have to use those exact words, he added — as long as you can show the other person that your intent is to help them improve, not to attack them.
Or, as he says now: “It’s surprisingly easy to hear a hard truth when it comes from someone who believes in your potential and cares about your success.”
Bob Sutton: Greasing The Skids For Organizational Success
(55 min) from Lead From the Heart
Every organization is plagued by what Stanford University Business School professor, Bob Sutton, calls “destructive friction:” forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done. In Sutton’s language, “the convoluted, time-consuming & soul-crushing gyrations that drive people crazy and undermine organizational performance.”
Along with his co-author, SBS professor, Huggy Rao, Sutton spent seven years studying the ways in which companies unintentionally create maddening friction – from mazes of red tape, to clueless leaders who pile on needless complexity, to hours spent in meetings to more wasted time spent reading poorly constructed and indirect communications (e-mail especially). And they’ve just published the new bestseller, “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make The Right Things Easier And The Wrong Things Harder” in which they provide clear and proven solutions: tactics, tools, & practices to help us avert these traps & move forward.
While most friction in organizations proves to undermine and slow-down progress, the authors stress there are times when leaders are actually wise to inject good friction into the mix – for the explicit purpose of enabling teams to be more creative, develop deeper connections and trust, be kinder & more ethical, make better decisions, and prevent bad friction from building up in the first place.
On the book, Wharton’s Adam Grant says “If every leader took the ideas in this book seriously, the world would be a less miserable, more productive place.”
Adam Grant Thinks Again
(34 min) from A Slight Change of Plans
Psychologist and author Adam Grant talks with Maya about the science of changing peoples’ minds, including our own. Adam also takes some of his own advice and rethinks some of his ideas.
Sampling of Responses from Last Week’s ‘Question of the Week’: What is something that you wish more people knew about you?
- I feel like some people conflate enthusiasm with a lack of criticality.
- Hardworking
- I wish people knew that I care.
- That I am funny
- I do dance
- I love Taylor Swift and I'm not ashamed of it.
- That I have feelings too.
- I am cool
- That I like to run.
Throughout the month I am continuing to share words to honor #BlackHistoryMonth…
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Take care.
Nat