The Mindset of Failing

Failing at tennis - ading to a growth mindset

Learning about sport when I was young mainly involved cricket and football, I never really experienced tennis. My son has been playing since he was about 4 and this season has been enjoying playing as part of a local team in a Junior Competition every Saturday. I think he is experiencing what failing feels like through his time playing tennis.

I have been getting to know what it is like being a tennis Dad this season and watching a lot of tennis, naturally. One thing you notice with this sport compared to football is the number of small victories and failures there are. It is much more about the cumulative effort, gradually building up points, overcoming the failures you experience.

If you play tennis you will know that failure and winning/losing points is an integral part of this sport. This is different to the experience of football I had growing up, where the end result was the only thing that mattered, there were not many measures of progress. Sure you could tell which team was dominating play, but it was not as clear as you win a point or you lose a point.

I have always found it fascinating that in tennis you could be one point from defeat and yet still come back to win a match. My son starting his match today losing 3 early games and before long he was losing 4-2, but he suddenly woke up and won the remaining 4 on the bounce to win 6-4.

Do multiple small setbacks during tennis create a more resilient approach? I wonder if the mindset of a tennis player sees failing and losing differently to a football player?

What All Flourishing Creative Environments Need

 

One of the strongest outcomes of our work with schools, in developing their use of Design Thinking led enquiry across the curriculum, is the empowerment of the learner. Providing purposeful opportunities for students to bring their passions to school.

After all, when do we truly give complete choice over what takes place in schools? When do learners have total autonomy about what they want to learn and how to do it?

Being able to follow your own heart and your own questions should be something we feel, and an everyday opportunity in schools. But there is an important aspect which must be central to providing a gesture of twenty percent time or Genius Hour in schools, and that is helping our children develop a strong understanding of what they are capable of.

In their employee handbook the Valve Corporation, an American video game development and digital distribution company, outline a vision for their new hires, not of twenty percent time but of one hundred percent time. New employees have complete autonomy over the projects they choose to get involved in and those they might instigate.

…when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish.

But a flourishing creative environment only comes about when the following three elements are evident in equal measure:

CHOICE, RESPONSIBILITY and RESPECT

Valve speak about the importance of hiring, they claim it is at the centre of their universe. They rely on recruiting high calibre people who can take this type of opportunity to grow the business.

In schools we need to support children to take full advantage of learning that offers the same type of opportunity. Autonomy to bring their passions to school, to know how to share and follow their own enquiry and questions, to understand how their learning can have an impact on the world around them.

We are not “hiring” children, we do not recruit them with a set of appropriate skills already in place for this type of responsibility. I would argue that understanding what you are capable of is an ever changing state. It is a developmental and we need to consider how we help our students learn about learning and be reflective of their own impact, practice and personal growth.

This takes time, but is vital in our endeavour to offer greater responsibility for learning to young students. Valve have a nice metaphor to describe the concept of one hundred percent time or what is more commonly named “open allocation”.

Why does your desk have wheels? Think of those wheels as a symbolic reminder that you should always be considering where you could move yourself to be more valuable. But also think of those wheels as literal wheels, because that’s what they are, and you’ll be able to actually move your desk with them.

Creating an environment where the opportunity to flourish is evident is one part of this. The other that is more appropriate for your work in schools and other learning organisations, is developing the capacity needed to take advantage of those opportunities.

Sign up for March #28daysofwriting

Blogging and commenting are like Luke and Leia Skywalker. Blogging comes first (like Luke did – they are twins y’know) but commenting and discussion makes everything better (much like Leia’s influence) – they are lonely when they are apart. If you are keen to get into a writing habit during March sign up for #28daysofwriting.

#28daysofwriting continues in MARCH

I am delighted to keep this momentum rolling with a new round of March sign ups for#28daysofwriting. It is open for those of you keen to get into a writing habit and itching to join the 115 or so writers and educators who are taking part in #28daysofwriting. Add your details below to the signup form for MARCH, we’ll kick things off on 1st of March.

Remember the rules are simple – write about whatever you like, as much as you like, but you have to stop after 28 minutes and you have to stick at it every day for 28 days. #28daysofwriting.

Signup for #28daysofcommenting

We have over a week to go for the first cohort to get through February and this inaugural round of writing. But the more I have been thinking about blogging this month the more I have been considering the Skywalker Effect (yes I am calling it that!) – the lack of commenting. So for those of you keen to stay in the blogging habit consider signing up and committing to #28daysofcommenting.

Same rules apply: every day for the first 28 days of March, read and leave comments on blog posts you come across. Do as much as you can in 28 minutes. No need to hit up new posts everyday you might continue a discussion taking place somewhere as well. One key thing would be to share to your networks, through Twitter and G+ etc, the comment you just left.

“I just commented on … for #28daysofcommenting” sort of thing, you get the idea.

Just a quick signup form to get a sense of numbers really nothing more for now – and we always feel more committed when we have filled out a form.

It works as a nice parallel to the writing challenge – we will have a crew writing everyday and we will have a bunch of supportive people chipping into the discussion too.

Discussion is such an important part of our edublogging community so I hope you will consider taking part and supporting the new bunch of people taking the writing challenge. Really l0oking forward to kicking on with this challenge for month – we have 10 days to get signed up using the forms above. Don’t forget to share this with those people who didn’t quite commit for February – it’s be great to continue to grow the community.

So the hashtag lives on and we now welcome the twin to the edublogging galaxy!

#28daysofwriting

#28daysofcommenting

Purposeful Napping – How Sleep Can Make You More Creative

Zzzz Zzzz Zzzz … Zzzz Zzzz … Zzzz … mmm wah, mmm – aha! {Scribble}

When do you generate some of your most interesting ideas? Sometimes our ideas occur during the night and then we wake up to discover the thought had slipped away. The role of sleep in the creative process has been something I have always been fascinated about.

Thomas Edison Loved To Nap

It was the story of Thomas Edison that first piqued my interest in the role of napping and the effect on creativity. Even though he did once say that sleep was a “heritage from our caveman days” apparently he could sleep anywhere and was once discovered taking a nap inside a cupboard.

This great series of posts about Thomas Edison outlined how he was not just sleeping to catch up on rest, but as part of his creative process, purposefully napping as he cogitated a thorny challenge:

During his day, Edison would take time out by himself and relax in a chair or on a sofa. Invariably he would be working on a new invention and seeking creative solutions to the problem he was dealing with. He knew that if her could get into that “twilight state” between being awake and being asleep, he could access the pure creative genius of his subconscious mind.

To prevent himself from crossing all the way over the “genius gap” into deep sleep, he would nap with his hand propped up on his elbow while he clutched a handful of ball-bearings. Then he would just drift off to sleep, knowing that his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As soon as he went into too deep a sleep, his hand would drop and the ball-bearings would spill noisily on the floor, waking him up again. He’d then write down whatever was in his mind.

What was Edison looking for and why was he putting his brain into that state?

As I have outlined previously creative learning is a relational process, creativity is no different as Bruce Nussbaum states:

Creativity is relational. Its practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine your knowledge. You have to know your dots. – Bruce Nussbaum

When we sleep and nap our dream state consumes us with a strange amalgam of what we have been processing or thinking about.

Yet these bizarre monologues do highlight an interesting aspect of the dream world: the creation of connections between things that didn’t seem connected before. When you think about it, this isn’t too unlike a description of what creative people do in their work – connecting ideas and concepts that nobody thought to connect before in a way that appears to make sense.

This last paragraph is taken from this article from BBC Future. It refers to that moment when we have just woken up as sleep inertia or a hypnopompic state. (Brilliant. I just love learning new words – I think hypnopompic has become an immediate favourite.) It is this state that Edison was deliberately putting himself into and the BBC article outlines that according to some research it helps with inferential thinking and our ability for remote associations.

Making the links between pieces of information that our daytime rational minds see as separate seems to be easiest when we’re offline, drifting through the dreamworld.

So when you are next facing a tricky problem at school or a big challenge that just seems too much, or even hitting a blank for your next blog post, trust in the power of your subconscious brain to figure it out. Remember to keep something nearby, as Edison did, to jot down your ideas, but perhaps find somewhere better than a cupboard for your kip!

#purposefulnapping

Photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile from Pexels

Replying to Comments for Day 17

convo

The more I think about what is next for #28daysofwriting the more I think it will be about commenting on blogs. Tonight I enjoyed the rare pleasure of replying to some on my own blog post from yesterday, “Micro Engagement is Killing our Edublogging Community“. Here are the few I managed in my 28 minutes tonight, take a look at the comment thread on the post for the full discussion:

I would take 20 comments instead of 100 RTs anyday. I know which one I gain most value from in terms of adding to the conversation and building on ideas.

I do hope we see the return of the long form – we need to invest in it and tend to it, we need this part of our edu culture to grow back. Whether commenting will do the same, who knows. The more I think about it the more I want to run a 28 days of writing alongside one supporting commenting. I want to see people doing that old thing of “I just commented on…” type social share.

John you pinged me on Twitter with that tool – Known http://known.johnj.info/2015/t…

Looks really interesting and I hope I can discover better ways to draw the conversations together from across the web. Any other ideas would be welcomed.

I have similar posts @disqus_2IzmJDVjOB around this blog over the years. The content is just consumed. I suppose for me I am not surprised when it is posts that are not needing discussion – when you genuinely invite ideas and see nothing you realise it is fading from our digital space.

I hope we can do that Stephanie, I think it would be a good follow up too – commenting for a month. Whilst a new bunch go through the writing month too – what do you think of that? So you have a crew doing the March writing days and a crew signed up to a month of commenting everyday.

Thanks Monika I think a focus on discussion and commenting is a good next step – in many ways it is much harder than just writing your own content. Engaging in meaningful ways though comments takes a different skill, we have to assimilate the original content and share our challenges and questions.

In reply to 

I think there is lots of room for better commenting tools to be developed. Just had a search through some blog plugins for WordPress and there is not that much. Disqus is in fact a pretty solid tool compared to what else is there. Sorry you lost a comment, always painful, I have made it a habit now whenever I am commenting to copy anything I have written before hitting submit. Saved me many times.

In reply to 

Thanks Andrew – yeah that thing about RSS readers has been something I have long been dissatisfied about. The experience of reading is nice, say in Feedly, but having to move out of that to comment always feels clunky. I would love to see that solved in some way.

I appreciate that conversations about the things we publish may occur elsewhere, but unless that dialogue or the ideas developed is fed back to the blog author in some way it goes unnoticed. For example if a long discussion occurs on Twitter or in a Fb group without the author they cannot learn as well. Always good to loop people back into discussion so that they can continue to learn too.

(Thanks to Dave for commenting just as I was posting – I will get to your comment too!)