3 Ways to Make Meaningful Connections with Your Students | Edutopia

Educators' Lounge.

Being a teacher/educator is as exciting and fulfilling as anyone with a good head on their shoulders can imagine. Sometimes, if not always, you find out that to effectively share knowledge, to help others in their quest for learning and development, educators need to connect with their students.

3 Ways to Make Meaningful Connections with Your Students | Edutopia

Share with us the ways you best connect with your students.

Positivity and Leadership: 3 steps to getting it right.

1.    Listening and empathy.

Showing empathy to people helps them develop a stable base, so they can feel comfortable to explore and take risks. This can lead to more creativity, more effectiveness and better problem-solving skills.

Research shows that the part of our brains that focuses on goals actually inhibits the part that helps us to understand and empathize with others.

2.    A caring boss is more important than what you earn.

In a survey of employees at seven hundred companies, the majority said that a caring boss was more important to them than how much they earned. 
Making your employees feel heard and understood can actually improve their physical health as well as their mental well-being. 
"Workers who feel unfairly criticized, or whose boss will not listen to their problems, have a rate of coronary heart disease 30 percent higher than those who feel treated fairly."

Simply listening to people helps them to offload their negative feelings and release tension. Carrying around anxiety or frustration can hinder an employee’s performance, so try to tap into how they’re feeling on a regular basis.

3.    Make interpersonal chemistry a priority.

"Our sense of engagement and satisfaction at work results in large part from the hundreds and hundreds of daily interactions we have while there, whether with a supervisor, colleagues, or customers."

 Making a priority of how well your people get along is something that can not be overemphasized, Especially in bigger teams, where you may not interact with each employee as often, ensuring that there is positive chemistry among team members could make a big difference to the overall company culture.

"The accumulation and frequency of positive versus negative moments largely determines our satisfaction and ability to perform; small exchanges—a compliment on work well done, a word of support after a setback—add up to how we feel on the job." And most times, how we feel on the job, goes a long way in how we do the job.

Wikipedia according to Turnitin

Wikipedia in the classroom

Following the link above, you can find an interesting approach to how Wikipedia is addressed nowadays in the classroom and the potential benefits it may have.

This brief article has been published by Turnitin, mainly a powerful tool to detect students' plagiarism, but also a rich source of innovative teaching ideas.

The ones who understand failures.

Big dreams and big goals can only be realized as long as you are ready to fail – again and again.  And, you see, the most successful people are those who fail the most. With each failure you grow, you become bigger, you learn new things and you get one step closer to reaching your goals.

One thing is absolutely sure, if you REALLY want to succeed in life, if you want to do something special, if you want to fulfil your dreams… failure becomes inevitable.

But, failing is not so much the problem as the attitude you have towards it. With the right attitude, failure could be surmounted and even be welcome. People who have succeeded in anything know that…

•  Failure is an integral part on the way to success and self realization. Don't sulk, pout or whine about it. Expect it, accept it, and welcome it.
• Every time you fail,  you become stronger, and wiser. You are better able to identify what didn’t work.
• Failure is a great teacher and it allows you to learn some of the most valuable life lessons.
• Each failure brings you one step closer to reaching your goals.
• Whenever you step outside the comfort zone and whenever you try something new, failure becomes inevitable.
• Failure teaches you that a certain approach may not be ideal for a specific situation and that there are better approaches.
• Making mistakes is not a big deal as long as you learn from them and avoid repeating them.
• Successful people will never laugh at you or judge you when you fail, because they have already been there and they know about the valuable lessons you can learn from failure
• Each time you fail, your fear of failure becomes smaller, which allows you to take on even bigger challenges.
•  No matter how often you fail, you are not a failure as long as you don’t give up.

If you are still stuck in your old paradigm of “failing is bad and should be avoided by all means”,  if you're still being held back by your fear of failure, then you ought to read some autobiographies of highly successful people to learn how they “failed” their way to success. You might be surprised at how often they failed until they finally excelled, the lessons their failures taught them and subsequently the different and rather positive attitude they have adopted towards failure.

How do you deal with failures? Do you have a specific approaches to quickly get over your failures and to continue on the road to succeed. 

These examples should help us understand the benefits of failing as well as the power of our determination to succeed, and encourage us to go on trying until we conquer our fears and thrive in our pursuits.

Homework; The Elephant in the room

Educators' Lounge


Ask anyone on the street, no matter their age, about homework and you are bound to get an instant reaction. Vietnam acid-like flashbacks of a time gone by, or simply from the other day a school run through the mind. The drill sergeant of the classroom demanding more; more time, more effort and more commitment.

This unforgiving Mamal in the room has to be viewed from all perspectives, from Educators to Learners, Parental Guardians to Human Resources Dept and from Companies to Education Institutions. However this particular White Elephant can be boiled down to simply,
"Should we be setting and/or doing Homework?"

As Learners go back to school and we begin to negotiate balancing family time and take-home assignments, we relate and share that, Learners are stressed out and exhausted by the volume of homework they receive (so, too, are parents who say they've had to become drill sergeants in their own home to get it all done). Other parents say their kids aren't getting enough or any homework at all and they've had to create their own to keep their kids challenged. Some parents complained that their kids' homework is more busy work than helpful work to improve academic performance, while others said their kids' homework is just right -- and critical to competing in a global economy.
The concept of homework is so ingrained in our culture that people can't and won't think about what it might be like if we just stopped making our kids do homework, refuse to enforce more than 10 minutes of homework per grade level for each grade of learner, which is the guideline recommended by both the National PTA and the National Education Association, can significantly impact a Learner.

Homework: How much, how often?

On the other side of the debate is Ann Gunty, a mom of four in Flagstaff, Arizona, who doesn't understand -- or support -- the notion that children should have less homework or no homework at all.
"I just don't think it's the right thing to say, 'Oh, they don't need any homework. It's just too much. They should be out playing and adults relaxing after a hard days of work. They should only go to school,' " Gunty states. "Making it less and less and less is contributing to us being less competitive worldwide." Gunty's kids, who attend a school that runs from grade 5 through 12, get between one to two hours of homework, including 30 math problems every night, which she feels is appropriate, beneficial (her kids' school enjoys high test scores and strong college placement) and not intrusive on their ability to still be kids or enjoy family time.

Mozart Saint Cyr, a father or two in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, takes it bit further: He doesn't think kids today get enough homework and are so distracted by video games and social media that they're going downhill. He says parents should demand more from their kids: "If the school provided extra homework, some parents would force their kids to do (it)."

Author: Nicholas Blunsum

Please tell us your opinion and where you stand on this debate, find us on our website at www.jogglelounge.com, visit us on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/jogglelounge, you can also follow us on Twitter @jogglelounge for up-to-date Coaching Tips and Tricks.
*information and interviews sourced from CNN.

The Leader, the Educator and the Art of Listening

Think about it: What’s the most common gripe among unhappily married couples? “You’re not listening to me!” 

Why do talented managers jump from one corporation to another? When they feel that senior management has all but turned a deaf ear to their needs and concerns.

What one thing do students swear to being tired of hearing in and outside the classroom? "Listen to your teacher!" 

The fact is, getting people to listen–really listen–is damn hard. Listening is even harder. And given how busy leaders and educators can be, it’s easy to see why they, most of all might fall prey to “selective” listening. Unexpected thoughts or approaches vying for purchase in an already crowded cranium can come off like a bunch of hot air. 

Being a really really good listener requires that for the time it takes to listen well, you have to place your own ego behind you. Not deny it. Not suppress it. But set it aside; bracket it, so to speak, so that your intention can actually bring the unique person of the other into full view.

To really master the art of being a good listener, you must, first and foremost, understand that the other person is not you. This may sound simplistic, but it’s important to understand that the other person does not operate from the same assumptions as you do: the most important assumptions being those that are unconscious. Even if you both share the same social and economic status, the same ethnic and religious background, the same education and experience, that’s not enough to guarantee that you know or can predict what the other person is going to say nor how he is going to say it. You must understand that there will always be points of divergence, and when you’re not expecting and subsequently not prepared for these points of divergence differences, the person you are talking to can branch off in unexpected and startling ways that can lead to confusion and frustration, if not irritation and even rage.

So, the first of the essentials of really good listening: be sure to act from the premise that the other person is not you. 

And this leads to the second essential of a really good listener---curiosity. You must sincerely want to know who the other person is. What makes them tick? What assumptions govern their lives, unconscious or otherwise?  What are they going to tell me? In many instances, deep listening is not worth the time and focus it takes. But when it is, it returns a treasure of understanding that enhances and bolster the strength of your relationship. And, what’s more, you keep learning!

Thirdly: keep in mind that the other person’s point of view is as important to them as yours is to you. This perspective will prevent you from dismissing them out of hand when they express something not in alignment with what you think or believe and sometimes they may even contradict your position. If you do not grant them the right to be different from you and legitimately so, the onus falls on you for projecting your narcissism onto the other. The option is to allow your curiosity to give them the benefit of the doubt. This doesn’t mean you have to agree or even want to remain connected. But you won’t fall into the trap of characterizing them from your own point of view which means that you’re characterizing them as in some way wrong if they are not you. And you won’t be the only one in that moment that counts.

The fourth essential: listen for their non-conscious presuppositions/assumptions because they form the context or the non-conscious frame for their point of view. This may seem daunting but it’s not. People express things consciously, but at the same time we all say things from the unconscious dimension of our minds. That’s inevitable. It is in this  unconscious dimension that our presuppositions reside, and they are mostly expressed as slips of the tongue, inconsistencies, even contradictions.

To listen really well, you must be aware of and stay alert to both dimensions of the mind---conscious and unconscious. Short of that, you are certain to be listening only partially and with equal certainty, you will miss what’s right there in front of you.

To summarise: begin with the fact that the other person is not you. Follow that with your sincere curiosity. Bracket your ego and remember that the other person’s point of view is as important to them as yours is to you. And listen for their non-conscious presuppositions/assumptions. The degree to which you can integrate and practice these listening strategies will not only make you a great listener but will open up other people to you in ways you will never have imagined.

How Emotionally Intelligent Are You?

By Carolyn Gregoire

What makes some people more successful in work and life than others? IQ and work ethic are important, but they don’t tell the whole story. Our emotional intelligence — the way we manage emotions, both our own and those of others — can play a critical role in determining our happiness and success.

Plato said that all learning has some emotional basis, and he may be right. The way we interact with and regulate our emotions has repercussions in nearly every aspect of our lives. To put it in colloquial terms, emotional intelligence (EQ) is like “street smarts,” as opposed to “book smarts,” and it’s what accounts for a great deal of one’s ability to navigate life effectively.

“What having emotional intelligence looks like is that you’re confident, good at working towards your goals, adaptable and flexible. You recover quickly from stress and you’re resilient,” Daniel Goleman, psychologist and author of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, tells The Huffington Post. “Life goes much more smoothly if you have good emotional intelligence.”

Read the full article at the Huffington Post

Summer Travel for Teachers

As an educator; a teacher, trainer, facilitator or coach, you find yourself giving and sharing all the time. You may not know it, but every summer, different organizations provide a lot of  wonderful opportunities for teachers and educators to travel to different parts of the world. Teachers could choose volunteer programmes, where accommodation and food is provided. These summer travel opportunites comes in different packages, but it is such an enriching experience that it is highly recommended as one of the "50 Things every Educator must do before you retire"

Below are a few suggestions that might help you plan your next summer trip.

No-Cost Summer Travel for Teachers | Edutopia

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/summer-trips-teachers

http://www.edinformatics.com/travel/teacher_travel.htm