Learning Chaos

The generational divide. It keeps cropping up, as it should. Maybe we of the advance guard, the baby boomers, can stop carping about what’s wrong with the groups coming up behind us. After all, it’s their turn, or soon will be. Why don’t we model acceptance and be interested in, rather than frightened by, their wonder? Become amazing grays.

Maybe being tense is an addiction. Like alcoholism. What if we could learn to replace what I call present tense with present relaxed? Listen for a few minutes, just listen without trying to do anything else. Inducing tension is a habit; we can learn that the feeling of excitement from being tense is not strength but noise.

Renee Sandell has found a life in art. An accomplished artist herself, she is passionate about art’s central power in life and in living. She brings that passion to a focus on art education. We can all understand art’s form, theme and context and bring that understanding into everything we do, developing our capacity for living. You’ll hear her passion as we have a conversation about visual fitness.

What if the more power we share, the more power there is? The answer to Why Share Leadership? is “because it works.” Schools, businesses and agencies can establish a more powerful, transparent and productive community when they see leadership not as a commodity but as nourishment. Here’s how to make it happen.

Charles Sosnik is the Editor in Chief at edCircuit, a popular online magazine dedicated to education and learning. He and I share a devotion to improving the classroom, each of us hoping to make a difference in the opportunities for teachers, students and all of us to find and exercise the joy of lifelong discovery.

When I started teaching, I thought that my job was to know everything. After all, that’s how I thought of my teachers. We teachers can’t compete with the Internet. We must re-define our necessity by helping our learners to become managers of information so they learn to be focus on understanding, insight, and meaning—beyond knowledge.

The world is increasingly rife with ambiguity, has been for decades, and will continue. Rapid cultural, social, and organizational change can be intimidating and lead to nostalgia for what seemed like a simpler time. As Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” Ambiguity provides unease and also great opportunity (and necessity) for a new kind of leadership built on mutualism and creative tension.

We’re all faced with what may seem like unbridgeable differences. Between the generations, between employees and supervisors, conservatives and liberals, teachers and administrators. Lateral Listening is a practice that bridges these divides, if we have the tenacity to learn it and the courage to practice it. The payoff is astonishing.

Cadence is a powerful tool to help us improve our leadership. Cadence can serve as a frame to make us more effective in how we lead, teach, and even speak to one another. The podcast serves up some simple tips that can transform our interactions, from the class room to the board room.

Fingerspitzengefühl is a spectacular word, both to say and practice. The best translation I can find is "finger-tip feeling." Equal doses of instinct, intuition, and a gestalt approach to information can produce powerful thinking and decision-making.