KILUVU

Is it hard for you to motivate your students? Learn about the different types of gamification in education and how gamification is transforming learning.

Mary Halton

A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better.

If you want to become a better critical thinker, Daniel J. Levitin has some advice for you. Here are his 7 suggestions for better critical thinking practices.

From Atomic Learning comes an infographic featuring 12 terrific ways you can energize classroom learning and keep school thrilling for every student.

Forget slogans and posters. Forget mission statements. Forget culture decks. A survey of over 400,000 people across the U.S. found that when employees believe promotions are managed effectively, they are more than two times as likely to give extra effort at work -- and to plan for having a long-term future with their company.

But wait, there's more: When employees believe promotions are managed effectively, they are more than five times as likely to believe their leaders act with integrity.

The result? At those companies, employee turnover rates are half that of other companies in the same industry. Productivity, innovation, and growth metrics outperform the competition. For public companies, stock returns are almost three times the market average.

Team brainstorming seems like a good idea--at least, on paper. What usually happens is this: the company is experiencing a tough problem that no single person seems able to solve, so someone decides that more minds means more processing power, and before you know it you're all gathered in the conference room.

One or two people churn out bad idea after bad idea, while everyone else stares at the wall or multitasks. There are no major breakthroughs and most of you are irritated at the waste of time.

Sound familiar? Why is this such a problem?

One of the most difficult transitions for leaders to make is the shift from doing to leading. As a new manager you can get away with holding on to work. Peers and bosses may even admire your willingness to keep “rolling up your sleeves” to execute tactical assignments. But as your responsibilities become more complex, the difference between an effective leader and a super-sized individual contributor with a leader’s title is painfully evident.

In the short term you may have the stamina to get up earlier, stay later, and out-work the demands you face. But the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands will eventually catch up to you, and at that point how you involve others sets the ceiling of your leadership impact. The upper limit of what’s possible will increase only with each collaborator you empower to contribute their best work to your shared priorities. Likewise, your power decreases with every initiative you unnecessarily hold on to.

Ask the members of any team if they want to institute better processes, and be prepared for them to roll their eyes. “‘Better processes’ means ‘more bureaucracy,’” someone will mutter. But ask that same team how much they enjoy doing projects the hard way — duplicating efforts, scrambling to meet deadlines when someone drops the ball, or bearing the brunt of customer fury — and you can expect the floodgates to open.

Why do people love to hate “process” but rail against disorganization? It is because most people associate processes with checklists, forms, and rules — the overseer breathing down their necks. Not surprisingly, leaders wanting to foster innovation and creativity are reluctant to institute such rigid controls and procedures.

NexGen LMS Grid for corporate market. Presented by The Craig Weiss Group.

Learning new things is a huge part of life -- we should always be striving to learn and grow. But it takes time, and time is precious. So how can you make the most of your time by speeding up the learning process? Thanks to neuroscience, we now have a better understanding of how we learn and the most effective ways our brains process and hold on to information.

If you want to get a jump start on expanding your knowledge, here are 10 proven ways you can start learning faster today.

It's been largely assumed that to run a successful business today, good leadership is required. But it's not the end of the world for leaders who worry that they're low on charisma or can't stir employees' hearts and minds. Maybe they don't particularly want to, and that's OK too.

Sometimes, it's more effective for employees to be more loyal to the work instead of being more loyal to the leader. After all, the end goal should be to keep employees engaged and productive by charging them to solve compelling problems.

First, it's important to understand the difference between an appealing boss and challenging work. A recent Harvard Business Review article found that employees at Facebook were more likely to quit because of their work--and not because of a "horrible" boss. The authors--three HR executives and Wharton professor Adam Grant--had spent years studying Facebook. When the social media giant started tracking employee exits, "all bets were on managers," the authors wrote. Turns out, employees left "when their job wasn't enjoyable, their strengths weren't being used, and they weren't growing in their careers."

Effectively managing others is both a science and an art, just like programming or playing an instrument. Based on personality and past experiences, some people tend to naturally be stronger at leading and inspiring others. That being said, anybody can learn how to be an effective manager if given the right training.

What's nice about the world we live in today is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel to be a great leader. Countless studies have been poured into determining what makes for a good manager.

Whether you've always seen yourself as a natural leader or are scared in front of others, here are six science-backed tactics that are universally effective.

Many leaders believe a team is only as strong as its weakest link. Thus many organizations spend a lot of time working to attract the best talent, while performance-managing those that aren't operating at the standard they would like.

But building a world-class team isn't about just getting the right people on the bus. It's about making sure you have a game plan in place that makes everyone on your team operate at a higher level.

So if you want to build a team that consistently overflows with top performers, build a team philosophy and culture designed to enable everyone who is part of it to excel.

As an administrator, whenever I walk into a teacher’s classroom, one of the first things I almost always subconsciously look for is whether or not the students are engaged in inquiry. However, telling a teacher, “Your students need to engage in more inquiry,” is comparable to letting a comedian know she needs to be funnier or asking a pizzaiolo to make a better dough. And, vague directives in the absence of explicit instruction typically generate anxiety.

To avoid these anxieties, and for progress to actually take place, we need to drill down to the nitty gritty and be as explicit as possible. In other words, we need to be explicit about being explicit and leverage specific strategies to comfortably move forward for the benefit of our students.

With these thoughts in mind, I’ve been obsessing over inquiry’s common denominators – the strategies or drivers we should always consider when implementing an inquiry-based lesson.

That being said, here are the six drivers of inquiry-based learning. And, while I don’t think every lesson or activity must have all six, I do believe that once we (and our students) become comfortable with an inquiry approach, all drivers will naturally find a way into learning experiences on a regular, if not daily, basis.

One of the most difficult transitions for leaders to make is the shift from doing to leading. As a new manager you can get away with holding on to work. Peers and bosses may even admire your willingness to keep “rolling up your sleeves” to execute tactical assignments. But as your responsibilities become more complex, the difference between an effective leader and a super-sized individual contributor with a leader’s title is painfully evident.

In the short term you may have the stamina to get up earlier, stay later, and out-work the demands you face. But the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands will eventually catch up to you, and at that point how you involve others sets the ceiling of your leadership impact. The upper limit of what’s possible will increase only with each collaborator you empower to contribute their best work to your shared priorities. Likewise, your power decreases with every initiative you unnecessarily hold on to.

Teenagers use social networking apps almost exclusively, and therefore, they don’t know that they are missing out on the wider web’s breadth. There are no thickets of hyperlinks, no galaxies of websites, no freedoms to hack and customize, no opportunities to learn snippets of HTML and CSS. That is because the skills they would need to take advantage of the web—to move beyond the borders of familiar apps—remain largely absent from traditional classroom settings.