April is here. What? Seriously? April already. Man . . . times flies, especially this year or maybe it's the lightheadedness from the loss of hair. Not sure. Anyhow, like so many other times in my career, a needed break is just what the doctor ordered, in a sense.
I'm a voracious reader. I could read more, I suppose, but would risk alienating my family, which already happens from time to time, but this Spring Break I had the opportunity to read. There are times when I come across a book that absolutely changes me from the core. It doesn't happen often, but there are a few books out there that have made significant impacts in my life, to which I can't even count the returned blessings because of them.
Often when I'm reading non-fiction and it's about leadership or human psychology, I can't help but think at those times: There's some secrets here. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the subsequent book, The 8th Habit, both by leadership guru Stephen Covey top my list of most profound works that inspire me.
During Spring Break, I read two books that stretched me in totally new ways. The first one was called Mindset by world-renown psychologist, Carol Dweck. Oh, does it have implications for what we do here in education. This post is already too long for me to go into great detail, so I'll save it for another post. The other gem I read was Drive by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, which our art teacher, Judith, got me jazzed about. This book has just as many implications in education as Mindset does.
These two books make three keys reads for me during the 2009-10 year. Brain Rules by John Medina was the first one. With so much literature out there about how the brain works, what motivates kids, and how to change our thinking, you'd assume we'd be doing more in education about those topics.
We're not.
We need to.
This week I'll begin a series of experiments (sounds cryptic, doesn’t it?) around student mindsets. Using the exact rationale and procedure Dweck describes in her book, I'll do the experiments on the 5th grade and see what the results show. I'm very curious.
I'll try and report out from the experiments on a later post.
-Mr. Bowman
PS:(random) Saw a great movie in HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON this weekend. Kids loved it. I loved it. Great story.
1 comment:
Great blog! I am a high school principal who also read Dweck's book and conducted an experiment with twenty freshmen students. My objective is to track the gain in the academic achievement between those with a fixed mindset and those who have receive intervention through brainology. Also, thank for the review on Pink's book. Have read a lot about it and now need to read it!
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