Are we becoming unhappy in the pursuit of happiness?

      

Over the past 50 years, we’ve made tremendous economic progress. But our overall happiness levels haven’t progressed at the same rate, even though there have been recent improvements.

(Of course, we could have a long debate about how accurate these happiness studies are, given that happiness is difficult to both define and measure.)

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to and working with close to 15,000 people on topics related to happiness and success. Through these interactions, it’s become clear to me that people pursue happiness with a passion, but that the majority haven’t found the fulfillment they’re looking for. This is despite the fact that they’ve achieved many of their goals and have made progress in different areas of their lives.

Based on my own life experiences, I can say for certain that realising your goals, on its own, doesn't lead to enduring happiness.

Goals are useful, but we need to be clear about why we’re setting them in the first place.
I’m sure you have all sorts of goals, as do I.

What job title you want to have.
How much money you want to make.
What car you want to drive.
What kind of vacations you want to go on.
Maybe even what you want your family life to be like.
But have you ever paused to think about why we like setting goals so much?

“If you’re not happy now, you won’t be happy because of money”

Goals give us hope, something to look forward to. And when we achieve our goals we feel good about ourselves, which increases our self-esteem.

In addition, if we know where we want to go in the long term, then goals serve as markers to guide us to that final destination.

At the heart of it, we believe that by realising our goals, we’ll be happy.

But this article, written by someone who made $15 million before he was 30 years old, highlights the fact that this belief is flawed, especially when our goals are focused on material wealth.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Most people hold the illusion that if only they had more money, their life would be better and they would be happier. Then they get rich, and that doesn’t happen, and it can throw them into a serious life crisis.

If you’re part of the middle class, you have just as many opportunities to do with your life what you want of it. If you’re not happy now, you won’t be happy because of money.

Whether you’re rich or not, make your life what you want it to be, and don’t use money as an excuse. Go out there, get involved, be active, pursue your passion, and make a difference.” (emphasis mine)

How to achieve meaningful goals, not just more goals

Your attitude and choices determine your happiness much more than your wealth—or number of goals accomplished—does.

Goals are a means of attempting bigger things, so that you can become a bigger person who’s able to serve others more effectively.

We need to focus on achieving meaningful goals, not just on achieving more goals.  This is a challenging task, because we live in a culture of “more”:

• More money
• More time
• More benefits
• More food
• More holidays
• More houses
• More education
• More Facebook friends
• More Twitter followers
• More projects
• More profit

But we need to realise that more isn’t always better; sometimes less is better.

It’s better to have one good pair of shoes than it is to have 20 pairs of poorly made shoes that give you blisters every time you wear them.

In the same way, it’s better to lead a simple life with less “stuff” than it is to become overwhelmed by trying to do more, achieve more and accumulate more.

Are you reacting to the urgent or investing in the important?

If we’re obsessed with “more”, we’ll end up reacting to the urgent, instead of investing in the important.

For example, what if your boss asks you to work late to finish writing a report, but that would mean that you’d miss your monthly family dinner?

Most of us, myself included, would find it hard to say no to the boss.

Her request seems so urgent, and—if you were to say no—you might get a less satisfactory year-end appraisal.

At the same time, you know that your family will forgive you for missing the dinner. You could convince yourself that it’s not a big deal. After all, you’ll be there at next month’s family dinner.

You don’t “have” to do anything

In these kinds of situations, it can often feel as if we have no choice but to give in to the boss’ demands.

But we need to remind ourselves that we do have a choice, even if it doesn’t seem like it. There are no perfect solutions. There are only choices and trade-offs.

No matter what dilemma we’re faced with, we have the power to choose.

We don’t have to go along with the crowd.
We don’t have to choose the urgent over the important.
We don’t have to choose the easy option, if it isn’t the better one.
We don’t have to get sucked into the culture of “more”.

It might not feel this way, especially if your friends are working around the clock in an attempt to “get ahead”. And they’re constantly talking about buying a bigger home. And they’re obsessed about enrolling their children in the most exclusive schools and tuition centres.
But you can make simple choices like…

• Stop hanging out with people who are a negative influence on you
• Reading books that inspire and empower you
• Thinking positive thoughts and speaking positive words
• Deciding what values and principles you want to live by
• Defining success for yourself, instead of allowing others to define it for you

Think different, act different, be different

At the end of the day, it’s about choosing to lead a great life, not just a mediocre or good one.
I’m not referring to greatness in terms of material wealth, although it could include that. I’m talking about leading a life of great service, great contribution, great attitude, great commitment, great kindness, and great depth of relationships.

I know I still have a long way to go in building a great life, but it’s a journey we’re on together.
The meaningful pursuit of happiness isn’t about chasing after a positive feeling or a temporary high. It’s about making the daily choice to think different, act different and be different from the crowd.

Let’s choose carefully, so that we won’t become unhappy in the pursuit of happiness.

Happiness makes people more productive

Happiness makes people more productive at work, according to the latest research from the University of Warwick.

Economists carried out a number of experiments to test the idea that happy employees work harder. In the laboratory, they found happiness made people around 12% more productive. Professor Andrew Oswald, Dr Eugenio Proto and Dr Daniel Sgroi from the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick led the research.

This is the first causal evidence using randomized trials and piece-rate working. The study, to be published in the Journal of Labor Economics, included four different experiments with more than 700 participants.

During the experiments a number of the participants were either shown a comedy movie clip or treated to free chocolate, drinks and fruit. Others were questioned about recent family tragedies, such as bereavements, to assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity.

Professor Oswald said: "Companies like Google have invested more in employee support and employee satisfaction has risen as a result. For Google, it rose by 37%, they know what they are talking about. Under scientifically controlled conditions, making workers happier really pays off."
Dr Sgroi added: "The driving force seems to be that happier workers use the time they have more effectively, increasing the pace at which they can work without sacrificing quality."

Dr Proto said the research had implications for employers and promotion policies. He said: "We have shown that happier subjects are more productive, the same pattern appears in four different experiments. This research will provide some guidance for management in all kinds of organizations, they should strive to make their workplaces emotionally healthy for their workforce."

Think yourself happy! Is becoming happier as easy as trying to become happier? The latest research by two US academics suggests it might be.

In the first study, two sets of participants listened to 'happy' music. Those who actively tried to feel happier reported the highest level of positive mood afterwards. In the second study, participants listened to a range of 'positive' music over a two-week period; those who were instructed to focus on improving their happiness experienced a greater increase in happiness than those who were told just to focus on the music.

What seems to have made one group so much happier than the other in their respective studies was a combination of actively trying to become happier and using the right methods – in this case, listening to happy music.

Ferguson and Sheldon's important findings challenge earlier studies suggesting that actually trying to become happier was, in fact, counterproductive. "The results suggest that without trying, individuals may not experience higher positive changes in their well-being," stated the report. "Thus, practitioners and individuals interested in happiness interventions might consider the motivational mindset as an important facet of improving well-being." And that's definitely something worth thinking about.

The importance of Customer Experience Management

Today’s customers are more demanding and less forgiving than ever before.

96% of unhappy customers don’t complain and 91% of those will simply leave and never come back.

For businesses to create deeper, meaningful and empathetic customer connect,  it is indispensable to experience their brands as their consumers do to determine every possible way to make the product or service experience better, more pleasant, more human, and more productive.  This is possible only when every brand carefully analyzes every touch point throughout the customer journey - before, during, and after purchase.

Getting the Touch-Point Analysis Right. First Time. Every Time.

Any organization that performs touch-point analysis with utmost care, can uncover powerful customer insights as well as opportunities to improve how well customer-segment needs and wants can be met.

Establishing a Cause and Effect Relationship between Each of the Customer Actions

Human experience is complex, and mostly intangible. Several companies that do touch-point mapping exceptionally well, establish a cause and effect relationship between all the customer actions to arrive at a deep and meaningful understanding of each engagement.

Piecing together the bigger picture of why and how customers are interacting at various touch-points can help in delivering a predictive and proactive experience. The questions listed below can drive meaningful insights about customer behavior at each touch point.

Context and Device

What are the devices used for engaging with the brand and how best can you leverage all the contextual data gathered by the device, such as time and location?

Engagement channel 

Which is the actual site or media through which the customer first engaged? (Email/Social/Website/Paid Ad/SMS).

Touch-point sequence

How did the customer progress through the buying journey? What and where did the customer stop before and after engaging at each touch point?

Content consumed / action taken

What are the various content viewed/clicked/downloaded by the customer?

Time elapsed between each engagement

What is the time frame of each engagement, and the time elapsed between each activity and between activity and inactivity?

Finally, spot the touch-point that can trigger emotional connect.

Touch points with high volumes of customer interaction and those that can evoke strong emotions in customers turn into loyal advocates and will be ever willing to spend with the brand even if meaningful and available alternatives are presented.

Here are a few examples of the brands that have capitalized on this very fact to create a steadfast advantage over the competition.

Case In Point

PayPal’s Customer Effort Score

In the E-commerce industry, reducing customer friction is extremely important. Every extra second the website takes to load, costs you a customer. Reports suggests that even just a 1 second delay in page load time could reduce conversions by 7%. If that increases to 2 seconds, you’re looking at an abandonment rate of 40%.

PayPal was one of the early players to realize and act on optimizing this particular customer touch point.  And the result? Well, a $2 billion increase in transactions. Now that’s quite a big win!

 

Starbucks

So, how is Starbucks keeping pace with competition even now? Simple, personalization at every touch point and their ability to cater to each individual customer as a segment on its own. The “My Starbucks Rewards” and the loyalty mobile apps was a great step towards customer delight.

By optimizing the mobile touch point with a killer mobile app, Starbucks saw a whopping 4 million dollar mobile payments every week.

Tesco’s Social media strategy to show they care

Tesco like any other retail giant, has a myriad of touch points. Tesco has always been right by their customer’s side to assist them at every step.

The most remarkable is Tesco’s efficient use of Twitter as a customer service channel. Tesco uses Twitter really well for social customer service. Tesco is able to build a stronger relationship with customers by connecting at a personal level by adding a bit of humor to every interaction.

Building strong, healthy friendships from young

How do we help our kids build strong, healthy friendships? It begins by teaching and helping them to understand what constitutes a good friend. Here are 3 essential traits:

 1. Trustworthiness

Talk about words that define 'trustworthy', and actions that influence whether we trust a person or not (e.g. lying).
...

To help your child understand the importance of being someone trustworthy, you can play-act different scenarios; this will allow them to experience the impact of their actions. You can then ask follow-up questions to reinforce how important it is to be trustworthy.

 2. Forgiveness

It can be difficult for children to understand this; it's far too easy for them say "I don't want to be friends with (name) anymore because he/she did (insert action here)." On the flip side, children are either unaware that they may have hurt their friend, or be afraid to admit a mistake.
Disagreements do happen; it's vital that we teach them to work out the conflicts on their own and to forgive each other.

Note: instead of instructing your child to solve the problem and to forgive/ask for forgiveness, help your child determine if the relationship is worth the effort. This will help to motivate the child in resolving the conflict and retaining the relationship.

 3. Graciousness

Children may be unsure of how they should interact with others who are not like them. Encourage your child to be open to potential friendships with various personalities; being gracious to everyone regardless of their popularity and personality is an important life lesson.

As the famous saying goes, "Don't draw lines (between people). Draw circles and be inclusive." You can brainstorm with your child ways to help others feel included in different social situations.

Relaxation is Good For Your Mind

                    

Find yourself flooded by to-do lists that never end? Too busy to even indulge in your hobbies? Maybe it is time to take a step back and have a look at your life. Is it all work and no play?

Life is not all about work and not having time to relax. In fact, overworking can cause undue stress, which can result in physical and health problems such as heart disease and depression.

Relaxation rejuvenates your mind and body, so set aside time to do something that you like and enjoy. Making time to relax energises your mind and body.

Furthermore, after a fun and rejuvenating break, you will feel refreshed and be ready to take on any challenges at work. So it does pay to have fun!

Relaxing is not a treat, but something that you need to set aside time to do regularly!

TAKE THAT HOLIDAY ESCAPADE

It is time to put words into action, and take that vacation that you have been wanting to take, but never gotten around to doing so.

• One day or one month, it is still a vacation

  You can take a week and set off to explore a new city, or go on a weekend getaway to a nearby island resort. Even a short Sunday picnic at the beach with friends and family will help you tremendously to unwind and relax.

• Make sure your vacation is work-free

  Before you take off for your escapade, be sure to plan well in advance. Finish up whatever work that you can, delegate your responsibilities and arrange for colleagues to cover your duties at work. With that, you can enjoy your break in peace.

• Force yourself to stop thinking about work while on vacation

  As long as your plans are in place, you have nothing to worry about and should be able to enjoy your vacation to the fullest!

MANAGE YOUR TIME

A common complaint is that we just simply cannot find time outside of work to relax and have fun. More often than not, it is just a case of poor time management.

• Do not procrastinate

  It is important to prioritise your tasks, and finish the most important things first. Do not put off doing something because more work will soon pile up.

• Keep track of how you spend your time

  Create an activity log over several days and identify where you waste the most time. It could be time spent going through your spam e-mails or aimlessly browsing online. Rectify that, and soon you will find that you have a little more time each day for yourself.

• Plan out your activities

  Always block out time for personal relaxation first before jotting down all other obligations and appointments in your calendar.

THE LITTLE THINGS IN LIFE

Sometimes relaxation is not just about taking that long-awaited vacation. All you need is just a few minutes a day to enjoy the little things that will brighten up your day.

You will be amazed at how much difference something as small as listening to your favourite music will help uplift your spirits and enrich your life.

Or you can start now by taking a few minutes off, sit back, let your mind wander, and relax. All you need is just that little extra rest to inject the freshness back into your life.

e-learning initiatives for Lifelong Learning

  

In its first foray into e-learning, The Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA) will be piloting 40 continuing education courses for adult educators, Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin announced.

Minister for Manpower Tan Chuan-Jin began his opening address at the Adult Learning Symposium (ALS) this morning with a synopsis of the sci-fi movie ‘Edge of To...morrow’ to depict the need to learn, to stay ahead of the game. On continuing education and learning, Minister reiterated that as individuals, we grow as people only because we are always learning, and society offers vast opportunities to those who adjust, learn and embrace changes.

One of the key highlights in this year’s ALS is strengthening the CET infrastructure with technology and ensuring that our adult educators are technologically attuned. As Minister noted in his speech - in the highly connected world we live in today, e-learning will become a staple that underpin our future CET framework.

Speaking at the fifth Adult Learning Symposium on Thursday (July 10), Mr Tan said these online courses could last as short as three hours or as long as a couple of days. Participating trainers can choose from topics such as workplace literacy and instructional methods, all targeted at adult trainers to encourage them to go for continual learning.

The Manpower Ministry (MOM) announced the review of the continual education and training master plan last year and the outcomes are due in the later part of this year. E-learning will be a key feature in the future continual education system here.

The Institute for Adult Learning under the WDA is setting up an online portal, LearningSpace.SG, for learners to search for and take e-courses developed by Singapore-based training providers. Another initiative in the pipeline is the setting up of an Innovation Lab (iN.LAB) at the Lifelong Learning Institute, for partners and trainers to collaborate and experiment on learning solutions.

Prior to this, the Singapore Workforce Development Agency, WDA, has set up a "Learning Cafe" to promote lifelong learning among Singaporeans.

The "pop-up" cafe, first started in Raffles Place in April 2014, will not only be providing free coffee to walk-in guests, but also offer 17 bite-sized modules for those who're interested in picking up new skills such as coffee brewing, digital art and customer service.

Passion is all it takes for one to start the initiative. Just a simple thing like drinking coffee which many of us does in our everyone life can be used as a start-up for something one is passionate about. That applies to many things that we do. Like, the learning cafe, it provides a first step for people to be curious, take a look, and realised that actually there are a lot of different things that we can do. This is something that we need to continue doing, whether in the form of learning cafe and other formats."

Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE)

Motivate Students to Teach One Another

What if we asked our students questions (straight from our curriculum), and then we let them, in groups and with the internet, find the answers themselves?  That’s what Dr. Sugata Mitra suggests might motivate and inspire students to learn and teach one another on their own, without adult interference.

Winner of the 2013 TED Prize, educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra has shown with his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments that, “in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest” (http://bit.ly/N0esFy).

The Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) proposed by Dr. Mitra lets students organize themselves in groups and learn using an internet-connected computer with little teacher support. What would that look like in your classroom?

To create a SOLE environment in the classroom, the teacher can build a website of resources and let the students choose what they wanted to learn.  Movie making, 3D architectural design, animation, coding, blogging, infographic design, computer game design: a wealth of online tutorials allowed the students to pursue their own passions and teach themselves (and each other) whatever they wanted to learn.

But what would a SOLE look like in an academic course, like in the English classes? Could we motivate our students to read critically and write effectively on their own?

In November each year, Ms Matt's students are tasked to write their own novels (thanks to the support of the Young Writers Program of NaNoWriMo). In the past she used to spend September and October giving her students assignments to help them prepare for this writing project: plot outlines, character descriptions, setting details, etc. This year, she decided to ask them to research how to write a novel on their own?  The students are encouraged to search for answers to questions such as: how do I write a novel? How do I create complex characters? How do I plot my story?

Ms Matt thinks the answers her students find on their own will be more powerful than the ones she spoon-feeds to them.  What do you think?  What questions could you ask your students to find on their own? How could your students self-organize, with whatever tools they need, to learn the curriculum?

How to Make Learning Irresistible

Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said. Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs know this as adults. But in schools, the notion of failure is complicated.

Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play and founder of Quest to Learn, the first public school based on the principles of game design in the U.S., explained how failure can be a motivating agent for learning in her presentation at SXSW.

Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right. We need to “keep the challenge constant so players are able to fail and try again,” she said. “It’s hard and it leads to something rewarding.”

Game designer Jane McGonigal makes a similar point. She dedicates an entire chapter in her book Reality Is Broken to “fun failure” and why it makes us happy. When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way; excited, interested, and most of all optimistic, Salen said. “Fun failure” even makes us more resilient, which keeps us emotionally safe.

But the opposite is true in school, Salen said. School usually gives students one chance to get something right; failing grades work against practice, mastery, and creativity. To keep kids motivated, learning needs to be irresistible, Salen said.

Over the past year, Salen went on a “listening tour,” interviewing game designers at Media Molecule, Valve, and Blizzard Entertainment. Here’s what she learned in terms of gaming principles that can be applied to education:

• Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. Too much drama, too nerve-wracking or scary an environment makes it hard for participants to learn. Students need space to think, look around, process, and reflect.
• Learning is social. Problem-solving is increasingly collaborative. Salen heard a Media Molecule designer explain how much players’ own interactions, often more than the design, adds to the experience. Players, like students, can bring ideas to the process that designers don’t even think of. Will Wright, designer of The Sims and Spore, says he designs communities, not games. “We need to design a classroom as a community in which the participants’ knowledge is valued and the exchange of their own expertise is valued,” Salen said. “Most challenges in school today only deal with individual problem-solving. Tests don’t reward collaborative problem-solving. Sharing is often seen as cheating,” while collaborating in cross-functional teams is what’s needed more and more in a complex world.
• A strong sense of community creates safety. Open up space for students (players) to interact with one another, a space for which you’ve created 1) a need to know, 2) a need to share what they know, and 3) the infrastructure for that sharing. “Sharing should feel like a gift,” Salen said. Let players/students participate in the designing too. In participatory learning, like open-source code writing, the design keeps getting better.
• Learning that empowers the learner helps make it irresistible. Mark Healey at Little Big Planets told Salen that empowering a player to do something feels like a “force flows through your veins like you can change the world around you.” When we can design learning experiences that feel like that, we make learning irresistible.

Self-Assessment Inspires Learning

Self-reflection is self-assessment, and one of the most significant learning tools we can model for our students. Ultimately, we want our children and adolescents to be the self-assessors of their work, dispositions, and goals. Research repeatedly reports that the difference between good teachers and superior teachers is that superior teachers self-reflect.

The brain is wired for this strategy, and it has been a part of our evolution. When we teach to a child's or adolescent's brain, we empower that student with the "inner resources" that directly affect his or her ability to pay attention, engage, and create meaningful learning experiences. School culture is simply about relationships, and the brain is relational organ designed to survive, think, and feel.

People change people; programs do not create sustainable meaningful changes. Through the integration of resiliency research coupled with a deep understanding of how our neuroanatomy affects the stress response system, and our attention and ability to remember, we no longer need to manage behavior. Instead, we begin to engage one another.

Simply stated, when the brain feels any type of a threat (emotional, social, or cognitive stress) the thinking part shuts down. Unless a school culture feels or is perceived as "safe," learning does not occur. We are unable to process, integrate, and remember topics, concepts, and standards. Educational neuroscience is about creating states of mind for learning that initiate curiosity, anticipation, autonomy, self-reflection and awareness.

Personalised Education is BEST for learning

There is a difference between differentiation and personalized learning. In the last year, I've been shifting toward the personalized learning aspect of curriculum design. How do I engage my learners and make their classwork more authentic?

Last year, my school rolled out iPads for every student, and with the transition to Common Core, it was the perfect time for a massive curriculum shakeup. I'm lucky that my department gave me ample time to start working on this process. Simultaneously, I started experimenting with Genius Hour for my 8th grade students. Genius Hour equated to one hour a week, or one class day, where I let the students become experts in anything they wanted. This allowed them to explore their passions, and I saw engagement like never before. All of these things coalesced into a different mindset for me as a teacher. I'm nowhere near a full personalized education model, but I'm keeping the student-centered approach in the forefront as I continue this process.

So what are the essentials of personalized education, and how does something like Genius Hour play a role? Keefe and Jenkins found six basic tenets of personalized instruction.

1. Dual Teacher Role

To use Genius Hour effectively, get all your pieces together and ready to go so that you can use your valuable face-to-face time with the students. Your job is to coach and advise them through the process. While some students won't need much interference from you, others will need more intense coaching, so it's good to touch base with all students at least once during this hour. Because this should be a self-paced activity, with a bit of structure introduced by the teacher, you'll be able to offer regular 1:1 help.

2. Learn About Your Students

You'll learn more than you ever thought possible by watching your students go through this process. They are picking what they're passionate about, so the topics will be quite varied. Through this process, you'll also learn who is intrinsically motivated by their topic and skills, and who will need help. If you can learn a little about your students before jumping in (their developmental levels, what type of workers/learners they are, their prior knowledge on the topic), the better off you'll be in your dual role as coach and adviser. Last year when I went through this process, it was a second-semester activity. I have since reflected that the students needed more time. This year, I'll start in November so that I have time for getting to know my students before we begin.

3. Create a Culture of Collaboration

Because you're working so closely with your students, Genius Hour naturally develops a culture of collaboration. Some students chose to work as a group -- I allow up to four per group -- but many preferred to work on an individual basis. I required them to create a video pitch for their project, and then critique each other’s ideas and provide feedback. We also teamed up with other classrooms across the country to do the same. So we established the positive skill of learning from others how to make our project better.

I also had the students find a mentor and conduct an interview on their topic. Some were people in our own school or community. We're lucky to have a small university just blocks from our school, and many of the staff were willing to open their doors to provide help and support. Some students went further, contacting authors and other professionals for help. I even had one student that Skyped with an author who was then in Hawaii doing research but happy to talk with an eighth grader. I found this part of the process to be the most rewarding for students.

4. Create an Interactive Learning Environment

I often had the students brainstorming with each other or having online discussions via Schoology on different pieces of the process. At the end of the project, students were asked to give a TED-style talk on their topic. After watching and analyzing several TED talks, they did a discussion thread about what makes a successful TED talk.

The students also worked together on various topics and projects. They practiced their TED talks with each other prior to giving them, and provided critiques and feedback on their video pitches and websites. I asked them to use their own websites to reflect on their process, and then review each other's Genius Hour posts at least once through this process.

I would also challenge teachers to rethink their classroom workspace. This Edutopia video series inspired me to turn a previously unusable space at the back of my classroom into a Genius Bar and Recharging Station.

ISTE's Learning & Leading Magazine featured Australian schools working with modular furniture to cultivate digital-age learning environments. While I couldn’t afford a ton of new furniture, I noticed that a lot of the pieces in this article were small stools that the students could manipulate for different styles of learning. My admin let my buy some inexpensive stools from Ikea, and my kids moved them all over the room to use as they saw fit.

5. Build Flexible Pacing, But With Structure

I utilized my learning management system to build folders for each of the benchmarks that I wanted my students to achieve on the project. I also created a Google presentation with all the materials I would need for each Genius Hour day. By having all of this ready to go ahead of time, I could "let go" as a teacher so that the students could move at their own pace, while freeing up that valuable face-to-face time for me to work with the kids one-on-one.

6. Create Authentic Assessments

The students' year-end TED-style talks on their chosen topics created a performance assessment requiring them to show their passion to their peers. They were extremely excited about sharing out what they learned. I've found that the more you can relate their classwork to their passions, and the more likely that classwork will be seen and critiqued by someone other than their teacher, the better outcome you'll get from the students. The work now has meaning for them.

They also were reflecting throughout the project, which allowed me to assess their progress regularly. And through our face-to-face time, I could naturally assess their progress. I found that my students covered at least 15 different Common Core standards during this project.

Well there you have it -- Genius Hour lends itself nicely to the basic structures of personalized learning. I guarantee that once you see the level of engagement that choice and passion can bring to your students and the curriculum, the personalized education mindset will start leaking into all of your lesson planning decisions.

Kids' learning ability is in their DNA

You may think you're better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you're probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person's ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person's overall ability.

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture.

"Twins are like a natural experiment," said Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Kings College London who worked on the study. Identical twins share 100 percent of their DNA and fraternal twins share 50 percent (on average), but all siblings presumably experience similar degrees of parental attentiveness, economic opportunity and so on. Different pairs of twins, in contrast, grow up in unique environments.

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins' scores - no matter if they were high or low - were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half the children's math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup. A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion - strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities.

What's more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called "generalist genes" act in concert to determine a child's aptitude across multiple disciplines.
"If you found genes for reading," Plomin said, "you have over a 50 percent chance that those same genes would influence math."  That's not to say specialized brain circuits don't exist for different tasks, said Timothy Bates, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in Tuesday's study.

"If those 'squiggles on a page' the young child encounters are math or prose, different brain systems, with different genes, are involved in learning to decode them," he said. The new study just illustrates that these genes build on a more general foundation of learning ability, he said.

The finding that one's propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn't. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other, Plomin said. But it's all relative.  "You might think you're a little less good at math, but compared to everybody in the world, you're pretty good at math," he said.

That's great news for those who came out on top of the genetic lottery, but what about everyone else?
"We don't want to pit nature vs. nurture," Plomin said. "But for parents who still think kids are a blob of clay that you mold to be what you want them to be, I hope this data - and there's tons of other data like this - will convince people to recognize and respect individual differences that are genetically driven."

He sees parallels to obesity: People can no more control a genetic predisposition that causes them to struggle with arithmetic than they can control an inherited tendency to put on pounds. That doesn't mean nothing can be done to bring those students up to par - it just might take more effort. Plomin suggests individually tailored educational approaches could help, in which students could learn at different rates using different techniques, potentially assisted by the growing role of technology in the classroom. Finland consistently dominates international education rankings, and Plomin points to its strategy as a good example.

Finland has decided to do "whatever it takes" to bring every child up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy needed to survive in the modern world. In practice, this has meant reducing class sizes, trying alternative learning approaches, and spending hours outside of class with any student who needs it.

Plomin also points out that genes don't predetermine performance. Appetite is just as important as aptitude, he said. "The brilliant mathematician - that's all they do for decades, they just think math and work on math," Plomin said. "It's not like it comes to them with a flash of inspiration. It's really a long, long process of thinking about these things."

The study results show that attitudes about learning are out of date and need to change, Bates said.
"Just as we no longer blame mothers for schizophrenia, we should be humble when blaming schools and parents for not every child learning as quickly as we'd desire," he said. "The implications, I think, are that children really do differ at very deep levels in how easily they learn."