The Illinois Model

There's no value in collecting blocks unless you're connecting them to build something awesome! On-task students. War against expertise. Playfully drawing systems. Reductionism. EQ in the military.
The Tyranny of Being On Task. Andrew Miller is an instructional coach (and former classroom teacher). He discusses the pressure for teachers to ensure students remain on-task. This is a futile attempt to increase learning efficiency. While this article is mostly about children and adolescents, there are outside arguments that the same lessons can be translated to adults as well. How can workplace training benefit from these theories? The War on Experts. Dr Gary Klein argues there are five distinct communities fighting against expertise: decision research, heuristics & biases, sociology, evidence-based performance, and information technology. How or can experts learn from and contribute to each of these communities?Nicky Case: Seeing Whole Systems. This is an 80-minute video talk…

One needn't look far to find an online video of some copper somewhere losing his temper.

Relax, gender police. I use the masculine pronoun here because of two reasons: #1. Statistically, there's more men in policing. But more importantly...#2. Women police officers are almost never the star attractions in these cops-flipping-out videos. So back at it...

I'm about to enter my third decade of policing. In nearly twenty years on the force, I've let my emotions get the best of me more than a handful of times. I'm not talking about the tears of sadness after leaving the scene of a brutal crime, a deadly accident, a suicide, a failed family, or an abused kid.

I'm referring to the instances where I unnecessarily responded to someone by taking the low road of sarcasm, intimidation, disrespect, insult, name calling, or attitude. Of those times I can recall, I look back on them with embarrassment. Simply, those were times that I lost.

I got introduced to the concepts of…

There's no value in collecting blocks unless you're connecting them to build something awesome! Assumptions. Kids sports. Data Visualizations. Navy ship collisions. Sales adaptability training.
Assumptions can be a situational awareness barrier. Rich Gasaway comes to us from the fire and medic services. He brings up a discussion on assuming, guessing, estimating, and other time-saving tricks in the world of human decision-making. I'm a believer that we need to make assumptions in chaotic, adaptive environments...especially when the stakes are high and time is crunched. Because variables in complex situations are often unknown and unknowable, experience and intuition is what helps those assumptions be as accurate as possible. How Kids' Sports Became a $15 Billion Industry. TIME magazine's Sean Gregory takes us inside the world of youth sports teams. The journey leads from local, community-based teams to private, national, "professionalized" teams and clubs…

There's no value in collecting blocks unless you're connecting them to build something awesome! Witty replies. Sexual sins. Optimal learning environments. Renaissance Men. Better understanding of mistakes.
Great Zinger! Buster Benson humorously discusses the use of witty responses used to embarrass or expose an opponent in dialogue. I see zingers used in social media arguments all the time. In an age of digital anonymity, it seems zingers are more and more popular, with less respect and less intent to find middle ground. The points are adding up and the divide is widening. Thoughts? The Physiophobe: Modern Man Against Reality. Professor Anthony Esolen uses the word physiophobe to describe a person who fears the way things are. He uses the concept of sexual sin to explain his rationale, but his argument can be extrapolated into a wide array of applications, fields, or topics. The claim that we manipulate the way things are should challenge the way we think about truth and our i…

In the story of the doctor who attended police SWAT school, one of the skills that I identify in adaptive people is the ability to triage.  

In emergency medicine, triage is the process of a hasty evaluation:
to determine the threats to life of an injury or illness, as compared to another patient, balancing the potential for reward or success,due to an increased demand on limited resources.Imagine a fully staffed, but empty hospital emergency department. No patients. Doctors and nurses sitting around...waiting. In walks an injured person. There is no triaging going on here. It's purely an evaluation and investigation - followed up by all-hands-on-deck response. On its face, the process might look the same as triage...but it's not. There is no second or third patient splitting the attention and resources of the medical staff.

Triage is a comparative process. It plots two or more things against each other. It ranks problems and opportunities according to a set of criteria or princi…

There's no value in collecting blocks unless you're connecting them to build something awesome! Pink toy bricks. Cognitive biases. Affective learning. Jerks. The power of "yet" in learning.
Why pink LEGO might be bad for girls. Dr Christian Jarrett writes about some "experiments" run with boys and girls and with colors of their building bricks. (I used quotation marks around "experiments" because it sounds like a bunch of crap.) My kids play with LEGOs - with sets that include rocket ships, ice cream trucks, race cars, princess castles, hot dog stands, superheroes. Then when my kids are done, they go off and play with dolls and Nerf guns. What do these research projects tell us about gender and the roles associated with it? Overcoming the Biases That Come Between Us. Hunter Gehlbach talks about stereotypes, opinions, echo chambers, and more. He discusses cognitive biases...and why they exist: survival and efficiency. I liked this piece because it …