Articles

Originally posted in our July 2021 Top of Mind Newsletter. Keeping on the thread of pushing through our own self-critique, we’ll move onto a piece from the Harvard Business Review. In it, the author suggests that happiness at work will often get you the opposite. Instead, we should seek meaning. But what does that mean, and how do we accomplish it? According to the author and research she cites, there are five factors that differentiate meaning…

Originally posted in our June 2021 Top of Mind Newsletter. Now let’s turn to some predictions for the future of education due to the pandemic. While these are just that, predictions, we found some important things to reflect on in this piece. Be it a push to all things virtual, non-degree learning, or pricing models that are severely out of date; the pandemic has brought the future of education forward in many ways. Moreover, as employment…

Originally posted in our June 2021 Top of Mind Newsletter. When we think about well-being in 2021, employment is likely high on the list for most of us. However, the pandemic has exposed various holes in our economic structures. Employers and workers feel short-changed from wage stagnation, health and safety concerns, infrastructure, and lack of talent. Some believe a significant factor to this is an education system (at least in the US) that has not kept…

Originally posted in our May 2021 Top of Mind Newsletter. Keeping the theme set by John Kay’s talk on obliquity, we turn to an article from the BBC about the beginner’s mindset. The work of Tom Vanderbilt is outlined in the article, showing ways that adults can re-commit to learning and the importance of learning many things. Learning from our mistakes, varying our practice, and sharing our new knowledge with others are ways to improve…

As we discussed with the term languishing, when we focus on a particular profession, teaching, we see a fraught and reductive phrase bandied around: burnout. Teacher burnout is a topic which many think pieces, studies, and keynotes have tried to address. ‘Teachers need to learn to relax,’ they might say, with some relaxation techniques included. But how are we ignoring what’s really going on with teachers that “describe themselves as frustrated, exhausted, and disappointed by their…