What does your brand have to do with college persistence?

In my class, we spent the last few weeks learning about the concept of a "personal brand".  Students have gone through a variety of lessons and exercises designed to help them come to a greater realization of what attributes they possess as a student and a member of this community, and how to translate that into an intention about their future.  Just to make the context clear, these are high school students at a school with a college preparatory curriculum.

One of the activities was borrowed from the business world, asking students to perform a gap analysis.  In our version of gap analysis, students were asked to come up with five words that describe themselves.  They had to also ask ten people that know them to supply them with five words that describe the student.  Finally, the student would compare their self-created "profile" to the 50 words supplied by their friends and family.  A high level of agreement between those two sources of information suggests that the student's brand is strong, and the gap is minimal.  A high level of disagreement suggests just the opposite - that the world is not picking up what he is putting down.

A student in my class reports:

 5 words that describe me: Hardworking, focused, humble, leadership, dedicated

3 words that don’t describe me: athletic, creative, and humorous

So what does all this mean?  Why does a high school student need to think of himself as having a personal brand?  Shouldn't they be thinking about Calculus and AP European History?  The SAT comes to mind as well...

It's all about developing a sense of agency.  It's time for a student to start assuming greater control of their life and, in the process, their learning.  By starting to make obvious the identity they are creating by their behaviors, thoughts, actions, and efforts, students can begin to understand the agreement or discrepancy in how the world perceives them.  If we understand something, we are better equipped to take action.

In his gap analysis, he goes on to say:

There are some discrepancies between my overall brand identity and my brand image. While doing this survey I thought one of the top 5 words that describe me was being humble, but when I asked the ten people what traits described me, no one said humble. This doesn’t mean that I am not humble, but rather it means that I am not doing enough on my part to make people feel that way about me. 

 I do think it is important to address the gap, of people not right away thinking of me as humble. I feel so because being humble is a great trait to have and I don’t like to brag about my accomplishments or my luxuries.

 Some points of differences were that all of my family members perceived me as respectful, but on the contrary two of my classmates said that a trait that doesn’t define me is in fact being respectful. This may be due to the fact that I am more laid back and playful around my peers rather than when I am around my family members. To fix this gap I could make my behavior around everyone consistent and not let it depend on a certain group of people. Some points of similarity were that both my family members and peers thought I was smart and this could be due to the fact that I get good grades and I am very organized and responsible when it comes to my academics. In addition, many people also said that I am responsible and focused. This could also connect back to the academic field because I have found that balance where I know it's time to play and where it is time to be serious and take initiative. Overall, many of the people that I ask to list my traits shared points of parity and points of differences.

Pretty good stuff, right?

You can try this at home!  Write down five words that you feel describe you, and three positive traits that don't describe you.  Then ask ten people from all different facets of your life to give you five words they feel describe you, and three positive traits that don't describe you.  You can use a program like Wordle to make the analysis more visually appealing and dynamic.  If you put the 50 traits that you heard from others into the Wordle, it will give you a clear image of your most powerful characteristics - those that are most effectively being communicated to others.

We live in an age where information can travel the globe in a matter of seconds.  A post to Instagram or Twitter is a matter of public record and comment almost the moment you hit <send>.  College admissions personnel routinely Google applicants, checking their presence on social media and gathering information that tells the story behind the application.  My students, indeed all of us, are in control of what we put out there to the world.  The first step is realizing that we are in control.  The next step is understanding the message that we're sending.  With a sense of agency, we hope to be successful at the final step - ACTION.



It's always the right day to "do yourself proud, (and) be a leader".

Thanks for listening,

CK

The Fallacy of Multitasking

How many of you believe that you are capable of multitasking?  For the sake of this post, we will define multitasking as concomitant attention to two or more tasks or actions.  Agreed?  Great.

So back to the hands?  50%?  75% of you?  Try less than 5%.  In fact, researcher David Strayer of the University of Utah believes that as few as 2% of the population are what he terms a supertasker - those people who thrive in environments that require them to attend to multiple tasks in the same time window.

So what does that mean for the rest of us, as we drive, eat a breakfast sandwich, listen to the forecast on the radio, and text Mom to say we are sorry we haven't called in a while?  Doesn't that count??

Yes, and no.  Part of the problem is in the definition.  The fact is, you are not really doing those things simultaneously.  Your brain has to stop one task, shift, then start a new task.  The other side of the problem is a fallacy of success - the better we think we are at multitasking, the worse we actually perform!

So when you go to hit the microphone button on your cell phone keypad so you can tell people you never type while driving, you just stopped driving.  For those precious microseconds, your attention stopped routing to the task of driving, and shifted to the task of finding the right button to press.

Most of the time we get away with it, and therefore we tell ourselves that we are successful.  But do we really want our metric for success to include a failure option like a car accident?  I think not.

So, rather than being good multitaskers, we are actually practicing distraction.  Each time that we ask our brain to shift from one task to another, we are distracting ourselves from the task at hand.

NPR social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, recently posted a story about the phenomenon of distraction.  The brain, as amazing as it is, can take from as little as a minute to as much as 30 minutes to recover from an interruption.  We usually think of interruptions as things that happen to us, not things that we do to ourselves.  But in the digital age in which we live, with our notification preferences set to vibrate or to the "night owl" ringtone, do we really stand a chance?
Teachers face this battle every day.  In a 40-90 minute block of time, a teacher is engaged in a heated battle for the attention of their students.  The best of us limit those distractions we can control.  We don't have email notifications turned on, our cell phones are silent or put away, the print environment is functional, not busy nor intrusive.

But there are intercoms, student phones, noise in the hallway or outside the windows.  There are bathroom breaks, drink breaks, trips to the nurse.  We manage students that fidget, squirm, call out, and otherwise create interruptions from which we (and the class) need to recover.

Yet somehow, students learn.

I would love for teachers to respond to this post with your best techniques for managing the interruptions that are out of your control, and your proactive approaches to suffocating the opportunity for them to exist in the first place.  Maybe together we can keep the social scientists from asking us to wear shock helmets to bring us back to attention.

Thanks for listening,

CK

Do yourself proud, be a leader

My father, whose name I bear, had a saying he used to put into cards and letters from him to me.  He would sign off with this maxim: "Do yourself proud... be a leader."  As a teenager, and later as a young adult, I found pressure in those words.  Pride was something that other people have in you, not you in yourself.  If my father was to be proud of me, I would need good grades, trophies, achievements... I would need to be lauded in my endeavors.  Did my father say this to me?  No.  I made these assumptions up myself, and constrained my life with them ever since.  Being a leader?  That means things like being the team captain in sports, or class president.  Maybe jumping out of a foxhole and demanding that your fellow soldiers follow you forward, bullets whizzing by your head...  Turns out that's not what he was looking for either.  Once again, my assumptions at play.

It's now many years later, and I am close to the same age my father was when he first started using those words with me. I have my own family now, and they need my guidance to navigate a world that I see as vastly trickier and more dangerous than the one through which my father helped me.  I need advice to dole out.  I need wisdom to impart.  I need to know what I am doing.  There are small people who are counting on me to have the answers! I am also a teacher.  I made a career change after a number of years of job changing, and could not be happier in my chosen profession. But that means that I have a second family, a family of students, and they also count on me to be prepared, to know the answers, to have it together.  Yikes!

How did this happen?  And what am I going to do?!?

Carol Dweck is an omnipresent name in our present thinking about parenting, teaching, coaching... really anything that speaks to the human experience.  She brought us the term "growth mindset", and distinguished it from a fixed mindset.  Dweck tells us that we are all creatures with malleable characteristics and abilities.  Intellectual capacity is not fixed, as your IQ score might lead you to believe, but rather vibrant and dynamic.  Because of that, those of us with an internal locus of control, a sense of personal agency, can make ourselves into whatever we want.  That's a powerful notion, and for some, it's all they need to propel them into action.  For others, it may be even more daunting than the trauma of living out a "fixed mindset" life where we are static and stuck.  The weight of expectations can be a powerful inhibiting force.  If only there were some sage words... nothing fancy, no two dollar SAT vocabulary... just simple, truthful, direct.

My father got it in six words.  Six!  As his son, I listened with a different mindset and a different orientation toward life.  As an adult with my own children (both biological and academic) to raise, I listen to those words and think about the simple beauty in their message.  My job is to be the best me that I can be.  No one else can do it but me.  If I push myself, then I have made an accomplishment that moves me along my own trajectory.  If I hold a door open for the person behind me at the grocery store, then I have modeled positive behavior and acted as a leader.

We each have a path to follow.  Follow yours, and you will always be leading the way.

Thanks for listening.

CK