Dave’s Whiteboard

From Dean Shareski’s Ideas and Thoughts blog, an energizing presentation by Chris Lehmann. He’s the principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, working under a time crunch (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide), and having a great time.

I found myself connecting what he says to the world of work; I’ll keep that to myself till after you hear Chris. (Note: You can’t see all Lehmann’s slides, so I’ve posted them below the video clip.)

I actually stopped the video a few times to scribble stuff down.

“Good data costs a lot more than we want to spend.”

That’s true for schools, and it’s also true in the world of work. There’s a lot of lip service paid to Kirkpatrick’s levels and to ROI, but in reality, we can’t afford to assess everything at Level IV, and if we’re doing a full ROI assessment on whether to devote a day and a half of our own time to learning some new technology, we’re going to end up getting to spend more time with our families.

I absolutely believe in the value of data — it’s the requirement for performance improvement — but as I listened to Chris Lehmann, I realized that ofter we are in great shape if we have good enough data. Claude Lineberry (as energetic a guy as Lehmann) hammered in the point that businesses don’t do control groups. Some data, carefully chosen, is a hell of a lot better than no data, which is what many people run with all the time.

“Tests and quizzes as dipsticks…”

When I get gas for my car, I always get a fill-up; I calculate the mileage and record it in a booklet I keep in the glove compartment. This is a kind of dipstick — it’s one stream of data that I can glance at, and if I see a variation from my car’s typical performance, then I go looking for more data and for causes.

Lehmann is pushing back from treating tests as goals. As he talked, I thought of the painful annual corporate ritual, the performance review. More than once in my career, I was asked to create a list of what I’d done so my boss could “update” my goals. In other words, I was backing from accomplishments to goals.

Which, I suppose, is better than being slammed for not doing stuff people forgot about nine months ago. The platonic ideal, where you and your manager (or, you poor schmo, your “leader”) regularly look at what you’re doing, what you’re getting done, and what needs to get done — I don’t know how often that happens, but when it does, it’s the dipstick model in action.

“You want to see what kids have learned, give them a project.”

As Lehmann points out, we adults learn when we’re trying to solve something, which means we’re trying to achieve a result. A depressing amount of corporate “learning” involves passive reception: listening to presentations, clicking through page-turners, reading documents. Nothing happens, which means there probably aren’t any new neural connections forming and few old ones getting stronger.

Working on a specific outcome probably leaves gaps in your learning. You can hear someone saying, “Okay, great, you got the web page menus to work entirely with CSS — but you don’t know how to do A, B, and C.” There are two assessments there: was the point to get the menus working, or to do A, B, and C?

I content that much of the time, getting X accomplished is the way to go. If afterward, you feel you don’t have the right result, then you go back and redefine X. I have seen perfectly harmless people subjected to a one-hour lecture on the step-by-step telephone switch, only to learn afterward that their telephone-company employer did not actually own any step-by-step switches; the last one had been replaced more than 10 years before, by computers.

But it was “good for them” to learn about the switches.

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Jonathan Drori helped launch the online face of the BBC. He’s edited and produced TV series on science, and is not a director at Changing Media Ltd.

In a TED talk in February, 2007, he discussed why we don’t understand as much as we think. Points that stood out for me:

• We look for evidence to support our mental models.
• Some people are all too ready to supply that evidence.
• Early mental models are extremely persistent.
• We collude: we design tests so people pass them.

At one point, Drori says that kids learn by messing around with everyday objects, things that are “bodged and stuffed.” “Bodge” was new to me, but “quick and dirty” seems a good American English counterpart. Urban Dictionary gives this example:

Bodge (verb)… to repair hastily and without care of durability or aesthetics or perfection. Popularized in British television show “Scrapheap Challenge,” known as “Junkyard Wars” in the US, and by producer Cathy Rodgers.
“Your task is to bodge together a hovercraft from nothing but twisted metal, scrapped cars, and other assorted bits of rubbish!”

But he can speak for himself:

(Here’s a direct link to Drori’s talk on the TED site.)

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One reason I started the Working/Learning blog carnival is that I’ve gotten so much out of other carnivals — like Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology carnival, now in its 54th edition.

Two hops from the carnival, I learned about Brains R Us: The Science of Educating, a day-long conference last March at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

The videos on the site are lengthy (over an hour each). I can’t find any hint of the content of each video other than a list of speakers (on the agenda tab, below the video window). (Maybe they should have looked at Jakobsen’s suggestions.)

That’s too bad, because I suspect there’s good stuff. For instace, about at about 5:30 into the Highlights video, you see an example of a baby learned to detect differences in tones that are 70 milliseconds apart.

So what? Well, a baby’s ability on this task at the age of six months accurately predicts a language impairment at 3 years — with 91% accuracy. Speech involves “a lot of rapid auditory transitions.” Training children on a task to distinguish different kinds of beeps and boops can bring their language ability to normal.

The other videos:

• Brains
• Schools
• Children
• Teachers
• Transformation

Starting next Monday, I’m going to be doing intense research on North Carolina tides. I burn easily, though, so I’ll have to spend some time indoors, and so I may watch a couple of these and turn my notes into a series here.

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One advantage of living near Washington DC is the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program. I’ve gotten to hear people like novelist John Mortimer, historian John Keegan, DNA co-discovered James Watson, and nanotube expert Richard Smalley.  Some weeks ago it was Jan Moynihan on “Making Connections: the Endocrine and Immune Systems and the Brain.”

I don’t have any formal background in science, so a good deal of the time I was swimming (or dog-paddling) in water over my head. (And mighty polysyllabic water at times: “a chronic increase in proinflammatory cytokines can induce a state of resistance to anti-inflammatory glucocorticoids.”)

Moynihan’s main topic was the link between the immune system and the brain. Each influences the other. This sounds straightforward — but for centuries “common sense” told people the earth was flat. Moynihan provided evidence for the connnection… and some possible implications as well.

For example, one study showed that exposure to acute stress prior to a flu vaccination enhanced the body’s ability to create antibodies — but only in women. ( “Acute stress” here means a brief, one-time experience, such has having to subtract backwards from 1,000 by 17.)

Chronic (long-term) stress produces what’s called allostatic load. “Allostatic” refers to the body’s complex balancing act. If you’re walking in the desert, you’re stressed by the head. The body could sweat, but eventually you’d dehydrate. So rather than that simple, homeostatic adjustment, the body will reduce urine output, dry out mucous membranes, decrease sweat output, constrict the circulatory system in order to maintain blood pressure with a lower volume…

An increased allostatic load can have negative consequences:

• Impaired cognitive function
• Suppressed thyroid function
• Decreased bone density
• Decreased muscle mass
• Higher blood pressure
• Decreased adaptive-immune function

That last point reference to the adaptive immunity you’ve acquired — e.g., through vaccinations.

In other words, chronic stress can reduce your body’s ability to protect itself.

This was a summary of a complex field, but at least for me, one worth tracking.

Stressful work photo by alexanderljung / Alexander Ljung.

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Thanks to Greg Laden’s Blog, I came across this TED talk by Benjamin Zander, conductor for the Boston Philharmonic. Serendipitous, especially after yesterday’s post about involving more of the senses. (Time: 20:43)

A comment from Tara at In My Copious Free Time (she was in the audience):

He told a story about a musician who was practicing a piece for an interview to be the associate (2nd chair?) cellist? (sorry, can’t remember) in a Barcelona orchestra. Zander thought the guy was holding back - he kept working with him until the guy was giving it all he had and the guy went away to Spain for the interview. He came back and said he hadn’t gotten the job because he played the first way, holding back. But then he said, “oh, fuck it” and went to Madrid, auditioned for 1st chair in their orchestra and got it. So Zander says that you have to get BTFI - Beyond the “fuck it” point.

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