Mindwise
Think you might want to read this book?
The quality of training for education leaders varies widely. If you are in a leadership role and have a counseling background, psychology degree, or SEL training then Mindwise, by Nicholas Epley will reinforce, update, or supplement what you already know. If not… then you might want to become familiar with ideas such as lens perspective, correspondence bias, and the curse of knowledge, among others. Moving education towards implementing what research tells us is effective will depend on our engaging in books like this.
What Would Socrates Ask?
What questions could we ask those who report to us so they can be more engaged?
What if every decision at your school was analyzed through the student lens?
What if we committed to celebrating student success in as many ways possible?
What if we set up student learning experiences that required interviews from multiple generations?
Research
Social isolation is a greater risk factor for cardiac arrest and death than even cigarette smoking.
Concepts
Planning Fallacy- people habitually underestimate how long it will take to get tasks done.
Lesser Minds- Think that others have less going on between their ears than, say, you do.
Ubuntu- a person is a person through other persons. Your humanity comes from the way you treat others, the idea goes, not the way you behave in isolation.
Seemingly chronic tendency to ignore or underestimate intrinsic motivation.
In performance appraisals, asking someone to reiterate your feedback in order to increase your understanding - something often called “parroting”.
Quotes from the author
“… this overconfidence increased in proportion to how long two people had been together. The longer they had been together, the more they thought they knew about their partner. In fact, the length of a couple’s relationship was not correlated with accuracy at all in the study. More time together did not make the couples any more accurate; it just gave them the illusion that they were more accurate.”
“Treat employees like mindful human beings who care about doing a good job instead of like mindless idiots who care only about making money.”
“One consequence of being at the center of your own universe is that it’s easy to overestimate your importance in it, both for the better and worse.”
“The social spotlight does not shine on us nearly as brightly as we think. The point here is that few of us are quite the celebrity that our own experience suggests we might be; nor are we under as much careful scrutiny from others as we might expect.”
“The mistake that can arise when you fail to engage with the minds of others is that you may come to think of them as relatively mindless.”
“The problem with a lens is that you look through it rather than at it, and so your own perspective doesn’t seem unique until someone else informs you otherwise.”
“The main barrier to getting perspective is that others won’t tell you what you’d like to know. They lie, mislead, misdirect, avoid, or simply refuse to divulge the truth.”
“The egocentric biases make you believe you are communicating your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and instructions more clearly than you actually are.”
Quotes from others
“I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.” - Roland Fryer, Harvard economist
Referenced books with the potential to impact leading and learning in education
The applicability of this book to education is ….
Resources
