Tag: Brain-Based
Honeymoons and Moonshine
Landing the gig is the beginning. Often, it’s also the end. Passionate school leaders move up the career ladder eager to make a mark and help the school, the district, or the region. But that zeal soon faces the swamp of emails, meetings, phone calls, and the unanticipated deluge of problems asking for you to…
John Dewey and Thinking
“We only think when we are confronted with problems.” – John Dewey Yes and no. Yes, our thinking is pushed into strategic cognition when confronted with problems. We engage in intention-driven critical thinking. No, it’s not the only time we think. We also think when we play, but it’s not the same type of thinking.…
What is the Planning Fallacy?
The theory was first proposed in the late 1970s to explain our human tendency to overestimate our abilities in completing a task. We tend to estimate less time than is actually needed for us to complete tasks. It’s our optimistic bias toward our own effort and skill. Why is the planning fallacy counterproductive? The planning…
Why Do We Struggle With Time Management?
One psychological explanation for why we struggle with time management is the planning fallacy. The planning fallacy causes us to feel out of control with our time. The more we feel out of control, the less motivated we can be to try to gain control. It’s a vicious cycle. But what is the planning fallacy?…
Laughter and the Most Wasted of All Days
The most wasted of all days is the one without laughter. Laugh today, not merely because of comedy, but because life is meant to be experienced with emotion. You’ll be better for it. The people you lead will be better for it.
Herd Mentality
Cattle herd. Sheep herd. We herd. Herding is done for safety. Yet, it’s only those in the center of the herd who are safe. A herd drives status quo. A herd drives central tendency. A herd rejects danger or risk. Outliers are at risk in a herd. The outliers are the ones who are picked…
Availability Bias
So many biases can trip us up. We’ve previously discussed the human flaw of conformity bias and attribution error. Those two errors can cause many missteps. But this simple little error in human logic can also lead to unintended outcomes for school leaders. What is Availability Bias? Availability bias is the idea that the thoughts…
Conformity Bias
There are many pressures that resist change. Chief among them is the conformity bias. In our evolutionary history, this bias served a powerful role – conforming to the norms of a group (who have clearly survived) will help me survive along with the group. Wheras diverging from social norms might cause me to lose out…
Not A Laughing Matter
It’s not a laughing matter. Well, it really is. Outstanding leadership depends on it. What’s that, you say? Laughter. A study was published at Boston University (Laughter and Leadership by Fabio Sala). The researcher analyzed two years of longitudinal data from organizational leaders. Leaders were categorized as “outstanding” or “average”. The researcher found outstanding leaders used…
Hot Coffee, Warm Hearts
People are strange. We really are. A 2008 Yale study found that participants in a study were more fond of the researcher when they had warm coffee versus participants who had iced coffee. But it’s more than just strange. It’s human reality. The idea is called cognitive embodiment. It’s the idea that what we experience…
Attribution Error, Devilish Little Error with Big Impact
Attribution error was a major concept discussed in the podcast (Season 3, Ep 1) and is a common factor that limits performance on teams. What is attribution error? What can we do about? What is Attribution Error? Attribution error is the idea that we fundamentally give a larger benefit of the doubt to ourselves than we do…
This Is Your Brain On Delay
Your brain is powerful. But you already knew that. You might not know about this powerful brain addiction. It’s a subtle, yet paralyzing addiction: the drug of delay. Delay is your subconscious way of avoiding failure. Most often it hides under the guise of perfectionism and sometimes under the veil of procrastination. Maybe it’s a…
Amygdala, Survival Tendency
Survival is about fear, aggression, instinct, and reaction. These survival tendencies work for the short lifespans of animals in savannahs, forests, and jungles. They don’t work in the sophisticated networks and lifespans of organizational cultures. The survival tendencies are in all of us. They come from the part of our brain called the Amygdala. Study.com…
The Failure of Fidelity
In today’s podcast, Episode 4 of Season 2, I challenge the RTI concept of fidelity. Should it be in your intervention systems? Has it failed? What is the evidence? Here’s what we know: Fidelity is often perceived as micromanagement. There are 4 possible reasons that “fidelity of instruction” causes poor employee performance (see the research here at PsycNET).…
Why Reading Growth Stalls
By or about 3rd-grade, the shift in reading instruction moves from learning to read to learning to comprehend. Much of the time that means learning to comprehend the “testing genre”. This is also where deficiencies turn into massive gaps! Tests are made with multiple choices, but good reading is not about answer choices. This means…