Doing nothing with verve, the new reality in education.
Are your students drowning in a culture of “niceness”? Is indecision rampant in your school? Do you have classrooms of cognitive complacency? The Best Evidence Synthesis (Alton-Lee 2003) encourages us to seek cognitive conflict, to encourage students to teeter on the brink of their competence. If we do this, how can we best prepare students for those moments of teetering? Habits of Mind (Costa and Kallick 2000) are effective dispositions for confronting the unknown. Habits of Mind allow us to behave intelligently when we don't know the answers. Habits of Mind are 16 effective behaviours for surviving the teetering. Workshop participants can expect to leave this workshop with a new sense of how to avoid paralysis by indecision, and how to maintain verve.
Incoming email: I need from you a mini-blurb about your Key note and presentations (to advertise to teachers when they select Workshops). Will J be working with you as well (for name tags....)? I also need to know whether you have any equipment requirements...... and catering requirements. Looking forward to your reply.
Realised today that I quite like “looking forward people”, they are so much more fun to play with than all those “looking backward people”. Though I suppose even “looking backward people” are less demanding than those angst ridden “looking over (a shoulder) people”.
And I am in absolute denial, I refuse, refuse, refuse to acknowledge the “looking under people” in my life.
Admit that I became quite excited by the question about catering requirements. At the last place we worked, when we broke for lunch they pointed out the garage across the road, where it was possible to grab a mince and cheese pie and a can of coke.
Know, just know that some of you eschew the mince and cheese pie and are captured instead by the root vegetable, but the following extract should persuade you of the essentially egregious and cannabalistic nature of the root vegetable
Undertaker: (calling) Fred... get some parsnips.
Man: I really don't think I should.
Undertaker: Look, tell you what.... we'll eat her, if you feel a bit guilty about it after, we can dig a grave and you can throw up in it.
The Undertaker Sketch, Monty Python
A mince and cheese pie and a can of coke in contrast are “Food of the Gods, Food of the Gods”. They encourage verve and they ensure teetering will be survivable. Much like Costa and Kallick’s Habits of Mind.
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