There is no magic. 

There is only context. 

One more paper to complete before Winter Break. I've learned a lot this past semester, but it is time for a break.  

I have been going full speed with the doctoral program since May. I am tempted to say that I am burned out...but I am reminded of my high school soccer coach whose favorite reply to that was, "You were never on fire."

Maybe I prefer a slow burn. Back to that last paper, a dispositional reflection. Due Wednesday by midnight. 3-4 pages.

• Connects (a) the core literature from Leading Organizational Change and (b) your experiences within and outside of the course during the last eight weeks, with at least three specific dispositions listed in the Mindset of a Scholar-Researcher (Concordia University–Portland Office of Doctoral Studies, 2018) material.

• The essay should address the following questions:

How has your understanding or practice of the three dispositions changed with the new ethics knowledge and experiences you have developed in the course?
How do you envision these three dispositions applying to your future work as an ethical social scientist?

Continuing on my thoughts regarding efficiencies and organizational development...

Is this really the way education works? 

Who is doing the work? Who decides how the work is to be done?

I’d like to think education is much more efficient than this. Yet, my experience and the shared experiences of other educators tells me we have a long way to go before any meaningful change is achieved. 

Professional development, in-service, assessments, testing, social-emotional learning...

All these things hold value. Only, the seem to come from the top down. Meetings and trainings should be focused on craft and culture. All the mechanics can be shared in a slide deck or posted on the staff intranet.

• Leadership is a team sport.  
  

• Most of us (men more so) tend to be overconfident.

• Memory is more often reconstruction rather than reproduction.

• Our conscious short term memory is confined to 5–7 things at once.

• Multitasking is subject to error.

• We sincerely believe things from the past that are simply not true; we provide explanations of the past or the present that put ourselves in a good light, and others less so.

• After a point, more information makes people less accurate than having less information (the overload problem).

• We don’t like to make mistakes but we dislike even more admitting them.

• Our best lies are ones that we firmly believe to be true.

• Confidence may be negatively related to accuracy and in any case is no predictor that you have something right.
  

• And worst of all, a lot of this occurs in our subconscious brain, so that ‘‘introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs’’ (Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 44). 
  

Gather. Build. Protect.

✪ see the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Dunbar's Number

I've spent a lot of time organizing things lately. Organizing my to-do list. Organizing my research. Organizing my time. Organizing my workbench in the printshop (see below).

And, I've read quite a bit about organization strategies these last few weeks, as required for my doctoral program. Some of these books and scholarly articles are written by experts in the field. Organization Development in Schools and Colleges, for example, details strategies and approaches for organizing (or reorganizing) systems for change.  

For all the organization I have done in my personal life, I now have a deeper appreciation for it. There is satisfaction in building something, or restructuring something, and making it better. It becomes efficient, and efficiency is beautiful...efficiency is art.