Post 25: The Motivation Breakthrough by Richard Lavoie

Motivational School Leadership Blog with Michael Horton

Post 25: The Motivation Breakthrough by Richard Lavoie

Richard Lavoie, the author of “The Motivation Breakthrough” is a specialist in working with children who are not motivated by the traditional school.  He specializes in children with ADHD which causes motivation problems at school.  Although his book is aimed at motivating students at school, I’d argue that human motivation is the same no matter the age or the audience.

The principal behind Lavoie’s motivation strategy is that humans are motivated by six things that all happen to begin with the letter “P.”  The six things are:

1) Power
2) Prestige
3) Projects
4) People
5) Prizes
6) Praise

Most people, Lavoie argues, welcome a mixture of all of these motivational strategies, but have one that is dominant.  The student who constantly rebels against the teacher is probably motivated by power.  The student who is overly competitive is probably motivated by prestige or prizes.  None of these things are good or bad, they’re just important to know in order to motivate the individual properly.  I’d venture to guess based upon my experience that teachers are no different in what motivates them.  Teachers are likely motivated by these six things also.

But here’s the elephant in the room, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I have 120 teachers at my comprehensive high school.  How in the world am I supposed to know what motivates each and every one of them?”  I have a one-word answer for that . . . ask!  Put out a survey that asks a simple question, “When you go above and beyond the call of duty, how would you like to be rewarded?”  Keep all of the results in a spreadsheet somewhere to use when needed.  Also, use a variety of different motivational strategies with the whole group and you’ll multiply the probability that you’re using the right strategy with any individual.

Here are some examples of how you might use these 6 categories to motivate:
1) The teacher who is motivated by power is likely the teacher who is on the fast track to becoming an assistant principal.  The best thing that you can do for this group is to teach them to be great leaders.  They’ll either use that motivation for power to force people to do what they want or learning to influence and motivate people to get what’s best for the whole.  These people can be department chairs or can oversee committees such as school site council, attendance committees, etc.
2) The teacher who is motivated by prestige likes for others to know that they are doing a great job.  These are the teachers who can be motivated by teacher of the month awards, being written up in the principal’s weekly newsletter, or acknowledged by the parent group with a certificate to hang above their desk.  Certificates, trophies, banners, and other public awards are effective with this group or teachers.
3) Teachers who are motivated by projects are great for being the lead on a new technology rollout, writing the accreditation report, or overseeing a new grant.  These teachers are great at teaching courses such as leadership, newspaper, yearbook, running the students store, robotics, debate, FFA, or other courses that require organizing teams and groups to compete or perform.  These projects will help keep them motivated on the way to school each day.  Just be careful of the amount of time that they require outside of the school day and don’t overwhelm the teachers.
4) Teachers who are motivated by people appreciate getting together with others in groups socially and professionally.  These teachers love to collaborate with peers, eat lunch in the staff lunch room, and rarely complain about faculty meetings.  These are the perfect teachers to put in charge of the social club on campus that celebrates birthdays, throws retirement parties, and knows when a teacher has a grandchild born.  Just make sure that there's a purpose behind the collaboration, don't limit it to only social get togethers.
5) Teachers who are motivated by prizes are the ones who bring in the most box tops or store receipts when there’s a competition at the school.  They get the most students to sell holiday cards during the annual fund raiser.  They always have the best decorated door at Halloween and get the pizza party.  For students, digital badges are very motivational, similar to boy scout badges but collected online.  A similar program could be started for teachers.  There could be badges for 100% attendance for a month, completing report cards on time, returning greater than 80% of parent surveys, or whatever schoolwide strategies are used (objective on the board, lesson plans submitted, calling on non-volunteers, gave a performance task, etc.).
6) Teachers who are motivated by praise are the ones who are constantly asking for feedback.  They want to hear from the proverbial horse’s mouth how they did after you do a classroom walkthrough.  They don’t necessarily need to hear it in public like the prestige group, but they need to hear it.  Leaving notes of praise on their desks when you leave a walkthrough could be very motivational for this group.  Saying thank you when they do a great job goes a long way.  You may want to read the research by Carol Dweck on how praise can backfire.  Be sure to praise things that are not inherited, but things that can be perfected and improved with practice.  The former will lead to a stalemate in improvement and the latter will lead to growth through practice.

This is clearly not an exhaustive list of how to use these six factors to motivate teachers.  But if you leave this blog thinking about each of your teachers and how you might use these ideas to motivate them, then my job here is done.  I highly recommend that you read this book in its entirety to get the whole story and I think that you’ll end up getting a copy for each of your teachers as well.



What are some other ideas that you have for motivating teachers who fit into one of these six categories?  Leave your ideas in the comments section below.

Here's the first of a 9-part series of videos by Richard Lavoie on The Motivation Breakthrough.

Post 24- Doug Lemov's "Practice Perfect"

Motivational School Leadership with Michael Horton

Doug Lemov's "Practice Perfect"

After I read “Outliers,” “The Talent Code,” and “Talent is Over-rated,” I was convinced that there’s no such thing as talent.  There are those who have put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and those who haven’t.  Many examples of musicians and athletes were given who were not truly experts until they had put in at least 10,000 hours of this specialized kind of practice.

I was now ready to go out and practice!  Unfortunately, these books mostly talked about how to practice music and sports.  I wondered, how do I become a better administrator?  First of all, administrators do a million different things.  Which of them are impactful enough to spend time practicing?  Second, for those things that are important enough, how does one deliberately practice administration?

An administrator sees this situation from two perspectives: 1) How do I practice to become better? and 2) How do I encourage my teachers to practice to become better?  The book, Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov (co-author of Teach Like a Champion) gives examples of how professionals can deliberately practice and specifically how principals can help teachers practice.

The keys to deliberate practice are outlined in Practice Perfect.  First of all, simply performing the task isn’t considered deliberate practice.  Playing basketball isn’t the same as deliberately practicing basketball skills.  So, being an administrator isn’t deliberate practice for being a better administrator.  The task must be broken down into tiny, individual pieces and those pieces practiced in an environment as similar to the real thing as possible.  For example, let’s say that you read Crucial Conversations and you want to practice this communication skill.  You don’t call in your toughest teachers and practice having difficult conversations with them.  First, you go to lunch with a colleague and practice “Speaking Tentatively” (one of the skills in Crucial Conversations).  Have your colleague say 50 things to you and you respond tentatively (“Well maybe you might try . . .” or “Have you considered . . .”) until you're comfortable speaking this way.

The second key to deliberate practice is to receive expert feedback on your performance.  Let’s say that your Instructional Rounds determine that a lot of class time is wasted correcting misbehavior during lessons.  Some of your teachers use simple hand gestures to correct the behavior without breaking their stride.  So, you set up a faculty meeting where those teachers show the entire faculty how to use the gestures and typically, that’s where it ends.  Practice Perfect suggests that you set up chairs like fake classrooms and have teachers rotate through practicing the hand signals with their fake classes filled with colleagues.  The trainer teachers would each be with one group giving feedback and having teachers try again when necessary.  Of course, the administrator would need to do classroom walkthroughs, follow-ups, and retraining after the meeting.

For administrators, this feedback often comes from an expert coach.  Every leader should have both a coach who can provide one-on-one feedback as well as an advisory committee to give big picture feedback.  The coach can sit in on meetings with parents and teachers, attend faculty meetings, or tag along during classroom walkthroughs and give feedback on specific skills that the administrator is practicing.

It is possible to practice being a better teacher or a better administrator.  How has your school used practice to become even better?

Post 23: Chip and Dan Heath's "Switch"

Motivational School Leadership with Michael Horton

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

                I know that it is cliché and I hesitate to say it, but here goes . . . The only thing constant in schools is change.  OK, now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about school change.  Presently, the only things changing are the standards and the standardized assessments (tongue in cheek).  These changes are going to require changes in instruction, professional development, unit planning, lesson planning, collaboration, data analysis, grading, and more!

                Chip and Dan Heath have some ideas how to implement change.  Their idea boils down to one metaphor, the elephant and the rider.  Here’s how the story goes.  If you want to get an elephant to a destination, the rider must know what they’re doing, the elephant must be motivated to get there, and the path must be marked well enough to follow without a lot of potholes.  In this analogy, the rider is logic and reason, the elephant is motivation, and the path represents the specific steps to get from where we are to where we want to be with as few obstacles as possible.  In different situations, resistance to change can come from any of the three areas.  Understanding these factors can help an administrator overcome resistance and get to implementation.

 

Click here to purchase this book

                So, let’s say that you have a half a dozen teachers who simply aren’t updating their grades for the online parent portal.  There are three reasons why they might not be doing this: 1) They don’t know how to use the software 2) They’re not properly motivated to do it and 3) The process of importing the students into the gradebook takes many hours.  Each of these reasons requires a different response.  The difficult part is that amongst the six resistant teachers you’ll probably find each of the three reasons somewhere.  So, the response to reason 1 (the rider) is to have the district office come down and do a training.  The response to reason 2 (the elephant) might be to have some parents call in to the next faculty meeting to explain how important online grades are in supporting their child in homework and ensuring that they get assignments turned in.  The response to reason 3 (the path) might be connecting these teachers with a mentor, creating a step-by-step list, or having parent volunteers import all of the rosters for the teachers.

                A second example could be that teachers know that they should be making more parent contacts but still aren’t making nearly enough.  So, either   1) They don’t know what to say on the phone, 2) They’re not motivated to call home, or 3) They don’t know how to make the time, find the phone numbers, and create an organization system to log the calls.  The response to reason 1 might be modeling phone calls, recording expert phone calls, or practicing phone calls on each other.  Reason 2 might require reading some research, sharing some stories of beloved students and their difficult home lives, or studying teachers who do make plenty of parent calls.  Reason 3 might require setting up a phone room with a list of parent phone numbers, several phones and note-pads, and comfortable chairs to make calls.

                When analyzed through the lens of the elephant and the rider, implementation plans start to form and change begins to happen.  In the comments section below, share some changes you’re implementing and how this book might help.

Learning to Code and Coding to Learn

Learning to Code and Coding to Learn (Updated 12/21/2013)

In a TED video about kids learning to program computers, Mitch Resnick pointed out that when we’re young, we learn to read and eventually that enables us to read to learn.  The same idea applies to computer programming (coding).  First we learn to code and then we can code to learn.  I argue that it’s impossible not to do both simultaneously, and that’s a great thing!

For some time now, I’ve been disappointed with how few schools actually teach computer programming.  There are many children out there under the age of 13, some under the age of 10 who are learning to code on their own.  There are languages that use drag-and-drop blocks to teach the concepts of coding and plenty of resources to learn how to use them.  Dozens of compilers or editors can be installed for free to code on Windows, Mac, or Linux computers.

My daughter uses a device called a Raspberry Pi to code in multiple languages.  She’s 11 years old.  The Raspberry Pi is a $35 Linux computer on a credit card sized circuit board.  It can be programmed from the Linux command line in Java, C++, Python or many other languages.  Through the graphical Linux screen, users can install software in order to program in compilers like IDLE or Nano in a variety of languages.   I’ll talk about some of the things my daughter has learned as she’s been learning to code.  She blogs about her adventure at http://raspberrypikid.wordpress.com

Variables-

If you ask most kids, “What is a variable?” they’ll tell you, “X is a variable.”  They really do not understand the concept of what a variable is.  You’d be hard-pressed to find any computer program that doesn’t have dozens or even hundreds of variables in it.  When my daughter was learning about coding in Python, variables are one of the first things she learned because you truly cannot do anything in coding without variables.  I challenged her to write a couple of programs using variables and she completed them all. 

First, when she learned how to ask a user a question and store the answer in a variable, I challenged her to write a program in Python on her Raspberry Pi that asked how many pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters the user has and then report to them how much money that is.  This requires storing each of the answers in a variable, multiplying the variable by the coin’s value, adding up all of the coin values, and then getting the answer to display in dollars and cents format.  She really came to understand variables and calculations using variables from this program as well as the conversion from cents to dollars.  In addition, she learned a lot of new coding concepts too.

Next, she learned about a math function called “modulo.”  When you take the modulo (whose symbol is %) of two numbers (7 % 2), the answer is the remainder of the division problem.  This can be used to tell if a number is even or odd, to tell if two numbers are divisible by each other, or to round a number up or down.  I challenged her to write a program in which the user could type in a number and the program would tell them if it is a prime number or not.  This involved taking user input and storing it in a variable, writing a loop to divide that variable by every number between 2 and one less than its own value, and seeing if any of those division problems gave a modulo of zero (no remainder).  Not only did she learn about variables, but she also has a much better understanding of what a prime number really is and how you can test to see if a number is prime or not.  And at the same time, she learned about writing “while loops,” an extremely important coding concept.

MIT created a programming language called “Scratch.”  It is very kid friendly and cartoony, but teaches the concepts of computer coding without having to type in code.  Instead of writing a “while loop,” users just drag a “forever block” onto the screen.  My daughter’s first project was to create an animation of a fish moving around in an aquarium.  To move the fish around, she had to drag a “move to x=__, y=__” block onto the screen and type in values.  She’s learning about ordered pairs!  But it looked funny for the fish to be moving left yet facing right so I asked her how she can tell if the fish is moving left or right.  She figured out that if the x value is increasing, the fish is moving right and if the x value is decreasing, it is moving left.  Then she looked at each movement to see if the value was increasing or decreasing and dragged a block to tell the fish which direction to face.  She learned about ordered pairs, the difference between a changing x value and a changing y value, and what it means when the x value is increasing or decreasing.  These will be very valuable skills in other classes like physics when she’s learning to analyze displacement versus time graphs.   The next step will be for her to figure out how to make it tilt upwards a little when it’s swimming upwards and vice versa.  This will also improve her understanding of ordered pairs.

One major difference between variables in math and variables in coding is that in coding, variables can hold words or letters.  This allows her to learn about language arts while she’s coding also.  She was learning a lesson in coding on how to include a variable in a sentence to make it look like it belonged there.  For example, a program might ask me the question, “What is your name?”  The program could then output, “Nice to meet you, Mike” with my name inserted into the sentence.  So, I challenged her to write a MadLibs-like program.  MadLibs are books that ask students to randomly name a noun, an adverb, or an adjective and then insert them into story frames to make funny non-sensical stories out of them.  So, she wrote a story, took words out of them, figured out what part of speech the words were, wrote into the program prompts to ask the user to type in a word that was that type of speech, and then printed out the story with that part of speech in it.  This lesson was a great example of combining learning to code and coding to learn into one activity.

One afternoon, she was playing with a device that I had lying around that measures how loud a sound is.  We started talking about the decibel scale and how different levels on the decibel scale are associated with pain and permanent ear damage.  She wanted to turn her Raspberry Pi into a sound level meter that could be installed in a factory or a school bus stop to warn people if the sounds there would damage their ears and signal with a red light that they need ear protection.  The program didn’t end up working out for technical reasons that you can ignore if you’re not interested (the sensor is analog and the Raspberry Pi is digital and it was too complicated for her to figure out how to convert the analog signal into a digital signal).  But, she wrote the program anyhow before she realized the problem.  This process involved storing the value from the sound sensor in a variable, comparing that variable to a known value, and then determining what to do based upon whether that value was greater than or less than a known dangerous value.  She was basically saying that if the sound level is less than a certain number, light the green light.  If the value is greater than a certain number, light the red light.  She was learning about inequality expressions!  How many 6^th graders really understand what inequalities mean when they learn about them in school?  Fortunately, the coding of inequalities is very similar to inequalities in math.  The code would look something like this (simplified into English a little):

if variable < value:

     Light green LED

else if variable > value:

     Light red LED

She has also programmed Lego Mindstorm robots both in the drag-and-drop Mindstorm language as well as the RobotC text-based language.  For one of her projects, she followed directions online to make a Lego Segway that balances itself on only two wheels and avoids obstacles using ultrasound “eyes.”  The step-by-step instructions didn’t leave much room for learning, so I challenged her to modify the program and the robot in the end to make it do something different.  The robot was designed to turn around and roll a different direction if it gets within 20 cm of an obstacle.  I challenged her to make the robot so that it could walk on a table without falling off.  This involved pointing the ultrasonic eyes down instead of straight ahead.  She built a structure to hold the eyes, but then she had to make another structure on the back to balance it out.  She had to realize that to tell when the eyes had gone off of the table, she could measure the distance between the eyes and the table and write an inequality saying basically, “If distance is greater than the robot’s height, turn around.”   In this case, the code was already there, she just had to change it from “less than” for the obstacle-avoiding version to “greater than” for the table-walking version and type in a different number.  But in the process, she was learning about variables and inequalities again as well as measurement and the metric system.  She also learned about the physics of balance when building the robot.

In another Scratch lesson, she was learning how to make Scratchy, the orange cat character, jump up and down.  By simply moving the cat from one ordered pair to another and back, she accomplished this, but it looked terribly unrealistic.  So, we had a conversation about acceleration.  On Earth, if one were to throw an object up at a speed of 30 meters per second, after one second, it would be travelling 20 meters per second, after two seconds it would travel 10 meters per second and at 3 seconds it would have reached its peak and turned around.  After another second, it would be travelling downward at 10 m/s, after another second it would be falling at 20 m/s, and after another second it would be back to its original starting place travelling at 30 m/s in the opposite direction.  So, she built this idea into her animation.  Instead of moving from point A to point B at a constant speed, she broke the trip down into several steps, each step a little slower than the last.  After it reached its peak, she had it fall slowly, then faster and faster after that.  It was a lot of work doing this by hand and she realized that she could write a program to do it in just a couple of steps using variables and loops.  In this lesson, she learned about acceleration, ordered pairs, what a changing y-value does, and variables.

In coding, programmers can use less than, less than or equal to, greater than, greater than or equal to, or equal as the comparators just like in math.  The difference between “greater than” and “greater than or equal to” is a lesson taught in elementary school without much in the way of real world application.  This difference is very useful in coding.  If the programmer wants to run a loop 10 times, they can set a variable to zero, run the loop, and increment the variable.  They can either stop the loop when the variable is >9, =10, or >=10. 

*Update: My daughter participated in the "Hour of Code" presented by code.org as well as the extension activities.  This involved using a program called Blockly that is Google's version of MIT's Scratch.  While running through the activities, she learned a great deal of geometry.  She learned that the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees in learning to draw a triangle.  She learned about complementary and supplementary angles when determining how far to turn when drawing different shapes.  She learned how many 30, 45, 60, and 90-degree angles make up a circle and many other geometry topics.

These examples show that students can learn to code and code to learn simultaneously.  Each of these programs is simple enough that a late elementary or middle school student could understand them.  I would argue that when math is applied this way, it will certainly lead to a deeper understanding of the math with the added bonus of learning the valuable skill of coding.

My daughter blogs about her adventures in programming and her blog can be found here or she tweets about her adventures under the name @kid_pi.  Her Scratch projects can be found hereand her lego robot videos can be found here, here, and here.  Mitch Resnick’s “Let’s Teach Kids to Code” video can be found here.

Download her PowerPoint here "Top 10 Reasons Kids Should do Science"

Here’s a link to the Raspberry Pi computer

Here’s a link to the Lego Mindstorms Robots

Here’s a great book about learning Python

Here’s a link to the Scratch website

Here’s a great book about creating games in Scratch
Here's a great science toy that she loves, Snap Circuits

How to Choose an Award Winning Science Fair Topic

How to Choose an Award Winning Science Fair Topic: No lemon batteries, solar system models, or Mentos here!
with Michael Horton

This topic will be different than my usual Motivational School Leadership topic, but it's coming upon science fair time of the year so I find it appropriate.

Before I became assistant principal at a STEM school, I had been Science Coordinator at two county offices a science teacher at two schools and I've written two science books (here and here).  I have judged school, district, county, private, and state science fair projects.  My own children have both earned gold medals at the county science fair and as you'll read later, my daughter is in a national science fair competition right now.  As such, I often get asked for how to come up with a good science fair project topic.

Before I get into where to find a topic, let me say where NOT (I repeat absolutely NOT) to find a project topic.  Please, oh please, do NOT find your topic in a book about science fair projects.  These have all been done a hundred billion times.  But more importantly, most of the reason for doing a science fair project is to follow the process of science inquiry.  This involves doing research and designing an experiment to test a hypothesis based upon research or preliminary experiments.  These books have already done the research, have already identified a hypothesis, and have designed the experiment.  All that the students do is follow the recipe.  That is not science!

Secondly, please, please, please do not go to science fair project websites for exactly the same reason.  Science teachers are constantly trying to make cookbook science experiments into inquiry activities.  Most of these websites do exactly the opposite; they turn an inquiry-based science fair project into a cookbook activity.  Some of these sites claim to give opportunities at the end to turn the cookbook activity into an inquiry activity, but students rarely (read: never) make it that far and the judges end up seeing citrus batteries, baseball bat comparisons, catapult designs, mentos and diet coke, and how clean is a dog’s mouth projects again.  Some people are going to hate this advice.  This article is about award winning science fair projects.  I'd bet a great deal of money that nobody has ever won a big award (ISEF, Broadcom MASTERS, STS, Google Science Fair) with one of those topics.

So, now that I got that out, how should a student choose a science fair project?  Here are two ways:

1) Learn about science by listening to podcasts, reading age-appropriate science books, or talking to scientists.  As soon as the student says, “Hmm . . . I wonder . . ." they have a topic.  There are a myriad of free science podcasts for all ages on iTunes and online.  One of my favorites is the 60-Second Scienceseries.  They have a podcast for Earth, Space, Health, Brain, and General science.  There is also a podcast called “The Naked Scientists” (don’t worry, it’s an audio only podcast and the only thing they strip down is science) with a section called “Kitchen Science” that gives great science activities to do at home.  They have a website with an outline of the activities here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/).  There are many others too just depending on what area the student is interested in and how old they are.

2) Another way to find a science fair project is to go out in nature and observe.  When you think you’ve found a pattern, have a question about why something happens, or see a behavior that you cannot find an obvious reason for, then you’ve found your topic.  A student, for example, might notice that seagulls fly over the lunch area on weekdays, but they do not show up on weekends.  They might wonder, “How do the seagulls know what day of the week it is.”  They might notice an osprey on one highway in the morning and a different highway in the afternoon and ponder, “I wonder how far an osprey travels in a day?”  They have then found their topic.

My daughter and I were listening to 60-second Science episode about how bitter tasting substances can relax the airway of asthmatics faster and better than prescription medications.  There are taste receptors in human lungs that block the signals to constrict the airway.  After hearing this, she said aloud, “I wonder if cross-country runners would run better if they ate something bitter before a race.”  DING DING DING!  That’s a great science fair project topic!

Another time, we were listening to a podcast that talked about some students who had discovered that listening to low pitch sounds through headphones for a short time can get rid of the ringing in the ears caused by exposure to loud sounds (music devices, concerts, explosions).  She wondered, “Why low pitch sound, would high pitch sound work too?  How about if you matched the sound to the ringing?  I wonder if this would work for people who always have ringing in their ears (persistent tinnitus)?  How long would they have to listen?  How often?  What frequency works best?  How long would the ringing go away?”  There are 7 excellent, testable questions from one 60-second podcast!

Science News Magazine is a free children’s publication (pre-teen to teen).  Here’s an article about how changing pH of oceans due to climate changes affect the size of shelled plankton.  Students could test whether these differences are due to the acidification or the temperature by setting up several aquaria under different conditions of temperature and pH and observing the plankton under a microscope.  Here’s the link to the article: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349745/description/News_in_Brief_Some_like_it_acidicand to the main site: http://www.sciencenews.org/

My daughter has worked in professors’ labs several times already (did I mention that she’s 11 years old?).  She once read a story about how if we could eliminate crop fungi, we could feed 600 million more people.  So, she got on the local university’s website, found a professor who studies fungi, and started working on a project about cenococcum geophilum.  Another time, there was an article about a beetle that had killed 80,000 oak trees in a neighboring county.  She contacted one of the researchers, found out how to identify damage from the beetle, and did a project that won a gold medal at the county fair and tomorrow, she flies to Washington D.C. to compete nationally against 29 other kids for $25,000 in the Broadcom M.A.S.T.E.R.S competition.  There are many professors out there who are willing to mentor science fair students, you just have to ask.  If you don’t live near a university, many of them will answer questions via email too!

Popular Science has put an archive of more than 130 years of the magazine online.  This is another great place to look. http://www.popsci.com/archives

For older students, try Scientfic American,  Audubon Magazine, Smithsonian, The Scientist, Science Magazine, or journals such as The Chemistry Central Journal and others.

What other resources have you found to help find legitimate, original, inquiry-based, science fair project topics?

Part 2: Twelve Pillars by Jim Rohn and Chris Widener

Part 2: Twelve Pillars by Jim Rohn and Chris Widener
with Michael Horton

This is part two of the discussion of Rohn and Widener’s “12 Pillars” book.  Here’s a link to part oneof the blog.  Here’s the description of the book that I gave in that first part, “It is the story of Michael Jones whose car breaks down near the mansion of a successful businessman, Mr. Davis.  The groundskeeper, Charlie, then shares Mr. Jones’ 12 Pillars of Success with Michael and encourages him to practice each pillar between visits.  There are some twists in the plot to make this book an enjoyable, easy read with many quotable lines in it (in fact, I posted many of them to Twitter @rimsavid).”

Without any more fanfare, here are the last 6 pillars:

7) Be a Life-Long Learner

8) Life is Sales

9) Income Seldom Exceeds Personal Development

10) All Communication Brings the Common Ground of Understanding

11) The World Can Always Use One More Great Leader

12) Leave a Legacy

Albert Einstein said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.”  I wouldn’t be that dramatic about it, but I could agree that “Once you stop learning, you . . . “

Stop improving

Stop growing

Let the competition catch up

Regress to the mean

When I hear a principal say, “I don’t know how to involve parents in the school” or teachers say, “I don’t know how to motivate students,” I think to myself, “There are dozens of books written on each of those subjects.  Go read one of them!”  In my position, I realized that I didn’t have any formal knowledge of leadership, influence, or motivation.  I went on a reading rampage and this blog was born.

Everything you do throughout the day is trying to sell an idea to someone else.  When you try to convince the custodian that it’s time to high pressure wash the gum from the quad, convince the parent that this IEP is exactly what her child needs, or convert a department to using performance task assessments, you have made a sale.  I know that sounds sleazy because of our impression of sales people, but it is true.  Everything you do is about sales, sales is about influence, and influence is about relationships.  Going back to pillar 7, there are hundreds of books about sales, influence, and relationships, go read one of them!

Your income is highly correlated with your knowledge and skills.  You can lose your job, your money, your car, your home, you can be transferred to a new school . . . but your knowledge and skills are permanent and they can help you to become successful again.  Our concern shouldn’t be, “How do I make more money?” but instead, “How do I become so good that regardless of what happens to my money, I can start all over again and regain my success.”

Relationships are one of the most important factors in leadership and success.  Communication is the backbone of relationships.  Therefore, listening and speaking are two of the keys to success in any field.  A school administrator communicates with students, teachers, parents, cabinet, board, district office, county office, state officials, fire marshals, custodians, secretaries, etc.  Each one of these experiences is a chance to make or break a relationship, so proceed carefully.

Every movement in history has been guided by a great leader, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Bill Gates who have a cadre of “tribe leaders” below them.  Nothing happens without great leaders.  Be one of these great leaders and make a difference in the world.

Almost everyone wants to leave a legacy.  But how many have determined what legacy it is that they want to leave?  What’s important to you?  How do you want to be remembered?  What do you want to change in the world?  Go do it!  But first, you have to decide what “it” is.

How did you learn to communicate and build relationships?  Share your ideas in the comments section.