How do we find the time and energy to do all we are asked (and all we want) to do without burning out? Carey Nieuwhof – a lawyer turned pastor, writer and speaker – is the author of At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor. Cathy Gassenheimer shares five of his “green zone” strategies to help us maximize our time and energy at work and at home.
The compelling theme of the latest issue of Educational Leadership is “Compassionate Discipline.” This is one issue of ASCD’s monthly magazine that Cathy Gassenheimer recommends every educator read. In her post, Cathy summarizes four articles – each presenting a different dimension of what it means to approach school discipline with curiosity and compassion in traumatic times.
Imagine high schools populated by teachers and students who can’t wait to get to school every day to collaborate, discover, create, and learn. In their research-based book In Search of Deeper Learning, Jal Mehta and Susan Fine call for a transformational shift away from the emphasis on breadth over depth that characterizes most high school classrooms toward a new “grammar for learning” that better prepares students for today’s world.
If you are contemplating making a change for the better, Cathy Gassenheimer recommends adding Katy Milkman’s “How to Change” to your must-read list. We’ve all learned just how hard change can be during the many months of the pandemic. Wharton professor Milkman offers a research-based book full of engaging stories and actionable advice that we can use in our own lives and those of our students.
Active listening is a critical skill for teachers, administrators, coaches, parents – everyone! And just like developing any craft, active listening requires intentionality and the ability to turn off that inner “here’s what I know” voice that seems to be ever present in our mind. Cathy Gassenheimer shares five big take-aways from the new book “Listen Like You Mean It.”
Like many of us, author Amanda Ripley noticed the growing strife emerging in American culture and wanted to better understand why people – and sometimes even whole communities – find themselves involved in conflicts that become quite ugly. Her curiosity and wide-ranging study produced the new book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Cathy Gassenheimer shares highlights.
Whether we call it SEL or Life Skills or something else, writes Cathy Gassenheimer, schools have always had a role in preparing the next generation for success in the adult world of college, careers, the workplace and citizenship. In a functioning democracy, school systems supported by the public will always need to provide a well-balanced mix of academics and skills for living that support an open and resilient society.
We are all delusional, and sometimes delusion can be a good thing. That’s the valuable lesson found in Useful Delusions: The Power Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain, written by science journalist Shankar Vedantam. In her review, Cathy Gassenheimer draws a connection between Vedantam’s conclusions and researcher John Hattie’s top classroom influencers. Could “useful delusions” increase the impact of collective efficacy in our schools?
Now that we’ve had a summer break, Cathy Gassenheimer suggests we take a moment to look back at the past school year and identify what we’ve learned. She’s summarized a recent article by John Hattie sharing his take on the silver linings of a difficult pandemic year – and what Hattie believes we can do to solidify the positives and let go of ineffective pre-Covid practices.
“I’ve come to see that curiosity is not simply one more tool in the engagement toolkit but an innate human trait that can help all of us in a multitude of ways,” writes Cathy Gassenheimer. “Because I now believe curiosity to be a kind of superpower that we can all tap into, I’ve created a guide to some of the ways we can put it to good use.”
