“Alameda adapted a model dress code developed by the Oregon National Organization of Women in 2016, which was used in several districts in a handful of other states. It emphasizes respect and instructional continuity in enforcement.”
“My father used to say that from the time I was a toddler, all I seemed to do was ask questions. Yet a chunk of my formative years was spent among peers who thought answers were obvious and questions were in poor taste… I was probably attracted to academic life because I believed I had […]
“To make sense of the state of the profession, Education Week compiled some of the most significant findings related to teachers that were published this year. Much of this research comes from the EdWeek Research Center’s own surveys, which went out regularly to nationally representative samples of teachers, principals, and district leaders to gauge their […]
“Movies and television rarely show teachers, well, teaching. All kinds of professions, from police work to law to medicine, are routinely distorted in popular culture. But for the most part, competence rather than charisma is seen as a prerequisite for success in those fields… But in films and shows about teachers, the focus is on […]
“Additional studies have found that K-12 students’ concentration, focus, and test scores improve when they have plants in the classroom.”
“Employees with a four-day work week rate their overall lives better. Yet, shorter work weeks show a higher percentage of disengaged employees. Employers should focus on improving the work experience first.
“These disparate findings leave some questions unanswered. “How on earth can you get a more than 30 point spread between them?” Mr. Bloom asked. “It all comes down to how workers are managed. If you set up fully remote with good management and incentives, and people are meeting in person, it can work. What doesn’t […]
““Though we’ve never had an official dress code, the events over the past week have made us all feel as though formalizing one is the right path forward,” Mr. Schumer said on Thursday from the Senate floor, where he sported a navy jacket and a buffalo silhouette pattern tie, adhering to the newly official dress […]
“Dress codes are a marker of social, national, professional or philosophical commonality. They bespeak shared ideals or training, membership in a group… the Senate is more than just a “workplace.” It represents the highest level of our country’s government, whose actions are watched by and hold consequences for the entire world… Such an august body […]
“The change… involved directing the Senate’s sergeant-at-arms — whose job, aside from directing security in the chamber, also entails enforcing outfit standards for all who enter it — that the previous policy that all senators must be clad in business attire when on the floor is no longer to be enforced.”
““It feels different not having a principal,” said Ella, a fifth grader with long blond hair who’d transferred to Boston Teachers Union Pilot School three years earlier. “At the school I was at before this, ‘principal’ is a word teachers would use, not to threaten you, but to make you listen to them,” she said, […]
“I’m happy to sing the praises of what I do, but let’s have an honest conversation here: Leaving the classroom isn’t a total solution. I’m still in education and I still have to respond to its problems, albeit in a different form. So why am I writing this? My goal here is not to deter […]
“In this article we will describe how we came to understand microstress, where it comes from, and how our bodies respond to it. We have grouped the most common sources of microstress into three categories so that you can understand how they arise in your life. And finally, we’ll explain how you can push back […]
“How can managers and organizations that need or want to leverage these technologies protect multiple values in their decisions and routines to avoid the tyranny of technique? We propose that adhering to three principles can help: 1) Beware of proxies and scaling effects. 2) Strategically insert human interventions into your algorithmic decision-making. 3) Create evaluative […]
“Good teaching is about more than lesson plans. Focusing on relationships, reflection, and resilience can help new teachers thrive.”
“A survey by the communication platform Loom of more than 3,000 office workers found that 91% have had digital messages misunderstood or misinterpreted at work, and for 20%, the misinterpretation has caused them to get reprimanded, demoted, or even fired… In contrast, face-to-face conversations or video calls allow for more layers of meaning to be conveyed between […]
““It’s not a magic bullet, but it does seem to have a positive effect,” Wedenoja said. “I think it also says something larger about the fact that relationships between teachers and students are important.””
“Six months ago, when I set out to become a sub to help alleviate the acute staffing shortages at my kids’ schools, I had no idea how much I would learn along the way… The friendly banter inside school classrooms, offices, and hallways illustrated how pop culture and mass media narratives are gross distortions of […]
“In practice, restorative practices typically consist of both proactive elements (defining shared values, building character, and developing a sense of community) and reactive elements (counseling students individually for minor infractions and providing them with group counseling or community circles for more serious infractions).”
“We should strive to be good at our jobs—to work deeply, to be reliable, to lead with vision. But, if our employers need more output for each unit of input they employ, we should be more comfortable in replying that, although we understand their predicament, solving it is not really our problem.”
“Our Connected Commons research over the past decade on collaborative overload shows that more efficient collaborators — those who have the greatest impact in networks and take the least amount of time from people — are distinguished in part by how they put structure into their work to reduce the insidious cost of being “always on.””
“One of the surprises for people is that when you think about fostering resilience, many educators think that means a focus on more positive things in relationships at school. The data say, though, that we need to focus first on minimizing unkindness in the community, for students as well as adults at school.”
“Japan isn’t the only country in the region, however, to police hair color in young women. Last year, two women’s soccer teams at Chinese universities were barred from participating in a match because players had dyed hair, which was against the rules. When one player was judged not to have “black enough” hair, she was […]
“A Playbook for Sustaining an Enterprise-grade Remote Work Environment – From the World’s Largest Fully Remote Company… For over a decade, Toptal has thrived as a fully distributed global company, with over 4,000 individuals working in a fully remote environment, in over 100 countries. We have no office.”
“Digital land knows no boundaries of space, time or geography. The effect on learning has been profound this past decade, though still not consistently so on learning in schools. When we apply the principles of digital development to physical learning spaces, we can imagine a totally different means of designing and constructing new schools, where the […]
Halstead coordinates an experimental program called Eastern Flex Academy, where a handful of students attend school from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. They start off with English and math classes, break for dinner and then finish their remaining courses online.”
“The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the […]
“My question is whether increasing the quality or amount of a variable in the equation can make up for a lack of one the others.”
“Sixty-five percent of the students in the study had less than 20 minutes to eat their lunch and those students consumed significantly less of their entrees, vegetables, and milk compared to students who had at least 25 minutes to eat. They ate 13 percent less of their entrees, 12 percent less of their vegetables, and […]
“The authors find little proof of increasing busyness among the population. Yes, as expected, people were spending far more time on digital devices in 2015 than they were in 2000. But the data provides little evidence that people now spend more time multitasking or that they’re switching more often from one activity to another, which […]
“In the end, this experiment made me think a lot about what formal wear signals to others. While we might choose to dress up to show our credibility or to give ourselves a confidence boost, what might we lose in connecting with others—especially if they’re dressed more casually? Because of this, I don’t think I’ll […]
“This week, Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs announced it’s relaxing its dress code. In an attempt to shift toward a workplace that has a more casual environment, the company said its new policy would allow for more flexible attire, according to an internal note issued Tuesday.”
The system’s scheduling fails on every possible level. If the goal is productivity, the fractured nature of the tasks undermines efficient product. So much time is spent in transition that very little is accomplished before there is a demand to move on. If the goal is maximum content conveyed, then the system works marginally well, […]
“Two of the most intriguing pieces of data collected during student surveys related to class period length and homework. When we asked students about an optimal length of class, they came back with 60 to 65 minutes. When students were asked about a realistic amount of homework time that should be expected of them, we […]
“Managers who give it a try often find that employees’ morale, engagement and productivity all go up, because they are working at a time that works best for them, and able to get the most work done.”
“The first sport coats were adopted by 19th-century Europeans and Britons who enjoyed hunting or horseback riding but found such activities difficult in a typical suit jacket. Young American students borrowed the style with a few tweaks, sometimes pairing sport coats with non-matching pants to play outdoor sports like golf.”
“It’s great for teachers. They love it. And why wouldn’t they? But I see a lot of grandparents and relatives seemingly a little overwhelmed and burdened.”
“At General Motors, employees are not allowed to walk around on their phones. That’s pretty standard behavior for warehouses and manufacturing facilities, but this rule extends to the office. That means no looking at a phone on the way to a meeting. No taking calls while en route to the bathroom. No checking email while […]
“People often think that constant communication is most effective, but actually, we find that bursts of rapid communication, followed by longer periods of silence, are telltale signs of successful teams.”
“What did lead to better outcomes was having a “bursty” communication style, where ideas were communicated and responded to quickly. By contrast, in environments where communication and feedback were delayed or dispersed across multiple threads, teams suffered, and the quality of their work suffered.”
“It’s not clear whether the rise we’re seeing in advocacy around the issue of dress code is because schools are imposing them in more discriminatory ways now than they were before, or whether more students are feeling empowered to speak up and complain about discriminatory dress codes.”
Even the number of districts which have schools on a four-day week is hard to say – recently Heyward was able to identify 470 districts for certain but says she conservatively estimates that there are around 500.”
1. Do What Is Important, Not What Is Urgent… 2. Do What You Need To Do, Before You Do What You Want To Do… 3. Remove All Distractions.”
Several professors observed that when employees changed behavior between work and life, they performed worse at their jobs. When their behavior was the same between both work and life, they maintained higher levels of job performance.”
Find someone you love and trust, and share the thing with them. Then, commit to getting something tangible done in the next week. At the end of the week, reconnect and have that person ask you if you did your thing. If you did, you get a high-five. But if you didn’t…?”
“Loneliness shortens lifespans in a way similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”
“[Steve Jobs] probably knew the Churchillian adage that we shape our buildings, and then they shape us. In fact, his raw instinct for manipulating space to influence behavior was well known since the days of designing the Pixar campus in 1998.”
At the end of the twentieth century, dress underwent another great change; call it the “Tailored Renunciation” or the “Casual Revolution.” Underlying it is not the triumph of one class but rather the loss among all classes of a sense of occasion. By “occasion” I mean an event out of the ordinary, a function other […]
The No. 1 reason high performers leave organizations in which they are otherwise happy is because of the tolerance of mediocrity.
“Misinterpretation tends to comes in two forms: neutral or negative. So we dull positive notes (largely because the lack of emotional cues makes us less engaged with the message), and we assume the worst in questionable ones… Face-to-face interaction took more reported effort… but also resulted in more positive ratings of the partner’s character, and […]
“Under the deal, some [200,000] workers will be required to switch off their work phones outside office hours — 6pm to 9am.”
“After 40 years of research, they attribute happiness to three major sources: genes, events, and values.”