In response to the upheaval of the pandemic, researchers and the leaders of over 100 schools focused on three fundamental areas of education, whether it’s in person or virtual.
The pandemic precipitated a historic education disruption. In response, my colleagues at Baylor University and I gathered educators from around the world in virtual learning communities to determine how best to respond. Leaders from 112 schools met in virtual communities in May, June, and July to identify what is most important in education, regardless of delivery method.
In general, we decided that the three most fundamental emphases should be on well-being, engagement, and feedback. We imagined a pyramid in which well-being is the largest section, at the pyramid’s base; engagement is the middle layer; and feedback is at the pyramid’s peak.
WELL-BEING
Well-being is the base of the pyramid because Maslow’s hierarchy takes priority over Bloom’s taxonomy. Maslow’s hierarchy categorizes basic human needs, and Bloom’s taxonomy identifies different levels of learning. If students’ and teachers’ physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual well-being are not intact, then nothing else really matters.
Before they began addressing academics, the most successful schools ensured that they cared for teachers and students’ well-being. To that end, administrators set up multiple connection points each week to check in with teachers at their convenience. They asked teachers two simple questions: “How are you doing?” and “What do you need?”
Teachers and administrators also made weekly well-being phone calls to every student’s home. Some homes received three calls a week, particularly if there were concerns about family well-being. Several schools used mentor groups of students and faculty to generate ideas for service learning projects for their families and communities. These projects helped students think beyond themselves and reduced isolation. At one school, for instance, a team of five students created a tech support hotline for students or families struggling with technology issues that arose through distance learning.
ENGAGEMENT
The second level in the pyramid is engagement. Students don’t learn if they’re not engaged. Whether learning occurs virtually or in person, we came up with what we called the 4 Cs of Engagement: content, competition, collaboration, and creation.
Content: Through the spring, teachers discovered innovative ways to deliver content. Schools already using robust learning management systems like Schoology and Canvas made the transition to online content delivery relatively smoothly. For teachers of pre-K through second grade, Seesaw proved an invaluable tool because of its ease of use and the ability it provides to give and receive feedback. Tools like Edpuzzle and Pear Deck allow teachers to incorporate questions and interaction into videos and Google Slide presentations.
Competition: Friendly competition, particularly for reviewing surface-level knowledge, has always been an excellent way to engage students. Quizlet has long been an excellent review tool for almost any subject area because of its large number of quizzes that have already been created by teachers and students. Also, its format enables students to receive immediate feedback on what they do and don’t know. Kahoot! has been a favorite for a number of years now and allows students to interact with each other in a game format, whether in person or over distance. Gimkit, developed by a high school student who liked Kahoot! but thought he could improve on it, is a great tool for review: It’s fast-paced but allows students to repeatedly review questions and also records how many questions each student answers correctly.
Collaboration: With the move to distance learning, teachers shifted the tools they were using to facilitate virtual student collaboration. Three tools I was not aware of at the beginning of the school year that have proved to be invaluable are Parlay, Mentimeter, and Mural. Parlay allows teachers to track discussions virtually as students discuss meaningful texts. Mentimeter allows students and teachers to collect real-time data on students’ questions in the form of word clouds, rankings, and multiple-choice quizzes. Mural is a digital workspace for virtual collaboration that allows teachers and students to post, group, and reorganize ideas in real time.
Creation: Student content creation allows for autonomy and significantly boosts engagement. Tools like , Piktochart, and Padlet allow students to create digital images and content. Screencastify, GoFormative, and Loom allow students to annotate and explain complex problems. Flipgrid enables students to submit pictures and videos for feedback from teachers and students. Apple Clips and iMovie give students the opportunity to tell their own stories.
FEEDBACK
We get better through forms of deliberate practice that also provide opportunities to receive feedback. All of the tools we used for engagement offer opportunities for both deep and immediate feedback.
Whatever tool they use, great teachers know that they need to establish the criteria for success with students. Effective success criteria include answers to the following questions: (1) What does a good example look like?, and (2) What’s in it for the student? Students need examples and a reason to improve. With clear success criteria, students can self- and peer-review work. Instead of thinking in terms of the content they will cover next year, great teachers think about the skills and knowledge that students will be able to demonstrate and how they can provide feedback to help them get there.
With the uncertainty ahead for 2020–21, clarity in these three areas is more important than ever. The good news is that well-being, engagement, and feedback are not new—they have always been the key to a good education. We just need to leverage resources to implement them well in 2020–21.
You are, probably, worrying about coronavirus. For most of us, the anxious questions are: Am I going to get the coronavirus? Is someone I love going to get it? If we do, is it going to kill us?
For starters, let’s be clear that no one ever gets a health guarantee. You might still have a heart attack even if you do everything advisable to avoid one. If you eat optimally, exercise, don’t smoke, and so on- you make heart disease or cancer vastly less probable, but you don’t get a guarantee. Human health simply does not come with those. And, of course, you can do everything right to be fit and healthy and keep your coronaries pristine, reliably avoid heart disease, and still get hit by a bus, or a falling tree, or lightning. Or get a brain tumor, for reasons we don’t know.
One thing you learn in medicine is that we control ship and sail, but never wind and wave. We don’t control everything, ever. Bad things happen to good people doing everything right all the time. But they do happen much less often to those doing everything right than to everyone else, so what we do matters enormously. It shifts probability.
So, the questions about coronavirus revert to questions about probability. And those we can answer, or at least establish the basis for answers.
The ultimate questions — will I get this disease, and will it kill me if I do? — can be broken into component parts.
What is my risk of exposure?
Right now, unless you are in one of the rarefied populations around the world where the disease is concentrated, the answer is: probably very, very, very low. There are, as I write this (2/28/20) just under 84,000 global cases out of a population of nearly 8 billion humans. That is one case per 100,000. For comparison, the lifetime risk of being struck by lightning in the United States is roughly one in 3,000. The coronavirus numbers could change, of course, and likely will, but for now- total cases are of a “one in many, many thousands” magnitude, making exposure for any one of us highly improbable.
Being exposed is necessary, but not sufficient, to get infected.
If I am exposed, how probable is it I get the disease?
This is the infection rate. If we use the most concentrated outbreak in Wuhan, China, as our model, with the assumption (obviously not entirely true) that everyone there was “exposed,” then the answer at the moment is just under 79,000 cases in a population of 11 million. That is an infection rate of roughly 7 per thousand, or 0.7 percent.
If I get infected, how probable is it the disease will kill me?
UPDATE 3/09: Only South Korea is doing testing extensively enough to give us a realistic view of the fatality rate of COVID-19. It is much LOWER in South Korea than anywhere else, 0.6% — due to more extensive testing.
This is the fatality rate. Once again, the most dire numbers come from Wuhan, where there have been just under 2,800 deaths among the just under 79,000 infected. That ratio yields a fatality rate of less than 4 per hundred, or just under 4 percent.
I hasten to apologize for any semblance here that these numbers are adequate messengers. Every number in this mix is a real person just like you and me, with a family just like yours or mine. One of the great liabilities of public health is the capacity to lose the human reality of it in a sea of anonymizing statistics. As I use numbers to make my point, I point to the people behind the veil of those numbers, those families, and invite us both to direct the full measure of our condolence, our compassion, and the solidarity of our human kinship there. Among the messages of this, and any, pandemic is that however good we may be at accentuating our superficial differences, we are one, great, global human family- the same kind of animal, with just the same vulnerabilities. COVID-19 does not care at all who issued our passport.
OK, back to numbers. Here’s an important reality check: We are much, much more likely to overlook the mildest cases of any disease than death from that disease. Death is hard to miss.
What would it mean if this common scenario pertains to COVID-19? It means many more people than we know are getting the infection, but with mild symptoms passing for a cold, or maybe even no symptoms at all. The “bad news” here is that the infection rate might be much higher than we think. But does that increase your risk of getting the disease (yes!), and dying from it (no!)? I’ll illustrate.
Let’s say you are a member of a hypothetical population of 2,000 people. We believe this population was exposed to coronavirus, that 200 people got infected, and that 8 died.
The infection rate here is (200/2000) or 10 percent (much higher than the reality in Wuhan), and the fatality rate is (8/200), or 4 percent (about what has been seen to date in Wuhan). If you are a typical member of this population, your risk of both getting the infection and dying from it is {(200/2000) X (8/200)}, or 0.4 percent. We can see this directly from the total population numbers: 8 deaths out of 2000 is, just as our calculations showed, 4 deaths per thousand, or 0.4 percent. And to flip this around, it means your chances of dodging the coronavirus bullet are 99.6 percent. Those are good odds!
But what if we were wrong — not a little, but a lot — about the number of infections, because we had overlooked many that were too mild to attract anyone’s attention? Well, then, maybe 4 times as many actually got infected- 800, rather than 200. This does mean you are much more likely to get the virus yourself, but does that make it more likely you will die from it? Not at all. The simple math shows why.
We now have an infection rate of (800/2000), or a very alarming 40 percent. But we now also have a fatality rate of only (8/800), or 1 percent. If we repeat the prior calculation for your personal risk of getting the virus and dying from it, we have: {(800/2000) X (8/800)}, or…the exact same 0.4 percent as before.
This is true of coronavirus in the real world. If we are finding every case, then your risk of getting infected is, for now at least, very low, and your risk of dying if you do is also very low. If we are missing a lot of cases, your risk of infection may be much higher, but your risk of dying if infected is commensurately lower. It’s a zero-sum game, and each sum, for now, means a very low probability indeed that you or someone you love will die from this disease.
Before we wrap up, let’s examine our propensity for risk distortion whenever confronting the new, the seemingly exotic, and the uncertain — and let’s consider how epidemiologic familiarity clearly does breed contemptuous disregard.
Worries over the exotic coronavirus are roiling the world now in every way imaginable. Those not anxious about life, limb, and loved ones are fretting over their stock portfolios.
To date, there are a total of 60 cases in the United States — and zero deaths. In contrast, humble influenza thus far this year has infected as many as 40 million of us (about 1 in 9) and caused as many as 40,000 deaths (a fatality rate of 1 per thousand). We breathlessly await the rushed development of a vaccine for COVID-19, even as we balk ever more routinely at a flu vaccine which is in fact very safe, effective at reducing infection and transmission, and directed at a disease so far many orders of magnitude more dire than the coronavirus.
Nor is our penchant for risk distortion limited to infectious diseases. As I write this, I am mere days away from the release of my new book, co-authored with Mark Bittman, “How to Eat.” We wrote the book together not because we weren’t already busy enough, but because infusing the conversation about diet and health in America with science filtered through a generally missing lens of sense is that important.
Poor overall diet quality is the single leading cause of premature death in the United States today, causing an estimated 500,000 or so deaths each year. That is more than ten times worse than a fairly bad strain of influenza, monumentally worse than coronavirus thus far, and happens every year.
Diet — what should be a source of nourishment, sustenance, and vitality — is the reason for one death in six here. And that is just the tip of the epidemiologic iceberg, since diet causes much more morbidity than premature death. To borrow directly from Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman in The New York Times:
More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy.
The exposure risk for diet is 100 percent; everyone eats. So for coronavirus to rival diet, every last one of us would need to be exposed.
Poor overall diet quality is the single leading cause of premature death in the United States today, causing an estimated 500,000 or so deaths each year. That is more than ten times worse than a fairly bad strain of influenza, monumentally worse than coronavirus thus far, and happens every year.
Let’s say that the ‘infection rate’ for diet is the probability of it harming you. Since less than 10 percent of Americans meet recommendations for fruits and vegetables, and since overall diet quality is poor on average, we can say that diet is harming — to one degree or another — at least 90 percent of us. So, for coronavirus to rival that, 90 out of 100 people exposed — almost everyone — would need to get infected.
What about mortality? The deaths attributed directly to diet don’t really tell the whole tale. Diet is the major contributor to diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and an important contributor to cancer, liver disease, dementia and more. At least 50 percent of all premature death can be traced to effects of diet in whole or part, so let’s call the fatality rate 50 percent. For coronavirus to match that, the virus would need to kill one out of every two of us infected.
Admittedly, coronavirus kills quickly when it kills, and diet tends to kill more slowly. This matters, but less than first meets the eye. Dying prematurely and abruptly is bad, but dying prematurely after a long chronic disease — losing life from years before losing years from life — is no bargain either. We have a native blind spot for any risk that plays out slowly rather than immediately — but climate change shows how calamitously costly that can prove to be. So, OK, coronavirus “wins” for speed, but really deserves far less preferential respect than it gets. Flu warrants far more. Diet, willfully engineered to put profit ahead of public health while evoking no apparent outrage, warrants far more still.
Back to COVID-19, sure it is scary, mostly because of the attendant uncertainties. The relatively unknown threat is always the scariest. But for the coronavirus to rival mundane but massively greater risks that hide in plain sight and go routinely neglected, it would need to be literal orders of magnitude worse than it has thus far shown itself to be. That might happen — but we might also be struck by a large asteroid while worrying about it.
I am not saying “don’t worry, be happy.” I am saying, if your worries relate to you or those you love getting sick and dying, that they could be far more productively directed than at COVID-19. I am saying get some perspective, get a grip, get a flu shot, drive a hybrid, go for a walk, and…eat a salad.
Being a leader requires confidence, decisiveness, and quick thinking–none of which are served by overthinking every decision or scenario or worrying about every move you make. There’s a time to think, a time to act, a time to reflect, and a time to move forward.
Overthinking causes us to spend too much time thinking, getting stuck in a loop of inaction, and turns positive reflection into debilitating worry. Not only does it not move us forward, it moves us backward and downward.
For three decades I’ve been coaching employees and entrepreneurs with tendencies to overthink things, and I can share 11 mental tricks to dash the dissecting and stop the overscrutinizing.
1. Reopen the door only when new information knocks.
Overthinking goes into overdrive when we keep revisiting decisions we make, refusing to close the door on a call that was made. Believe that you’ve done your due diligence, and only revisit something you’ve decided when you’re presented with new information.
2. Know that overthinking and problem solving aren’t the same thing.
Constantly ruminating and going over scenarios and possibilities often disguises itself as problem solving. It feels like you’re doing something good and useful. But you’re not, you’re just spinning in a circle. Recognize when you’re overthinking something, don’t act like it’s problem solving, and press fast-forward.
3. Remember the 90-10 rule.
This is a formula, a ratio, for how you should calculate how you value yourself. Which is to say it should be based on 90 percent self-worth, 10 percent assigned worth. 90 percent should come from your self-acceptance and self-appreciation, just 10 percent from that occasional sliver of external validation we all need.
Overthinkers distort the formula, even reversing it by acting like 90 percent of their worth comes from what others think or say. So they worry, which takes the form of–you guessed it–overthinking.
4. Assume good intent.
Overthinkers read too much into things. Why? They’re assuming something bad lies underneath, something like a bad perception, someone wishing them ill, or an unfavorable outcome. When you catch yourself doing this, switch your assumption to what you’re reading into was well-intended, or at least neutral. The vast majority of the time, it really is, so why not act like it?
5. Embrace informed ignorance.
News flash: You can’t read the future, you can’t read minds, and you can’t know everything. So don’t try. Thinking harder doesn’t activate the crystal ball.
6. Embrace uncertainty.
When we don’t know something, we tend to fill in the blanks, often with garbage assumptions. Why? Many of us would rather be unhappy than uncertain. Garbage assumptions can take many forms, all infusing themselves into the inner monologue of the overthinker.
A Buddhist chaplain once taught me how to handle uncertainty. I remember his teachings as an acronym: OAR. Observe uncertainty, don’t overreact to it. Acknowledge the presence of uncertainty and accept that impermanence is inevitable. Realize that uncertainty brings benefits, like unleashing creativity and resilience.
7. Replace “what if” with “we’ll see.”
Overthinkers keep asking themselves “what if,” which is an impossible question to answer. If you catch yourself asking “what if,” quickly switch it to “we’ll see,” which is a way of moving past analysis paralysis to acceptance.
8. Get outside and play.
By this I mean stop spending so much time in your head. Get outside it and switch gears to connect with what’s going on around you so you can take joy in it. It can be dark and foreboding inside that head of yours, no?
9. Do the math.
Overthinking also comes from overworrying about the worse-case scenario, which of course no one wants to experience. But ask yourself, “What is the probability the undesirable outcome will actually occur?” Odds are, not very high.
10. Stop framing the unremarkable as catastrophic.
Related to the above, this means stop taking small details and turning them into questionable conclusions. Stop making a mountain out of a molehill. Unlike at the mall, this kind of escalator lifts nobody up.
11. Evaluate the true impact of being wrong.
We often feel the need to overthink because we simply fear being wrong. It might make sense to overthink things if you’re planning to jump your motorbike over the Grand Canyon or to go swimming with a great white shark. As for overthinking the decision you made in that meeting yesterday? Not so much.
Ask yourself in such moments what the realistic cost of being wrong is. When you can lower the stakes, you raise your ability to get mentally unstuck.
So don’t overthink it. Take the inspiration here and run with it. Without looking back.
It’s the day after Christmas. Generally, this day is a flood of emotions that can vary from one person to the next, however, I think there is one word that most likely describes all of us: exhausted! Maybe your home is like mine – with all the extra food, all the packaging from the gifts, the used wrapping paper, and more. And then there may even be a pile of returns. Ugh. But, the day after Christmas doesn’t have to bring you stress – it actually can be a peaceful day if you allow it.
Sound like a dream?
It’s not. Just keep reading.
Breath is the finest gift of nature. Be grateful for this wonderful gift.
Before you go any further, one of the things you’ll need is help with clutter. Be sure to grab our download with questions to ask yourself about whether to keep things or get rid of them. Just enter your email below to have it sent right to your inbox!
You may still be in the midst of exhaustion if your Christmas festivities are still continuing. Whether today marks the end of your holiday festivities or that day has yet to come for you, we all must resume our regular lives in the midst of the exhaustion that the holidays leave in their wake.
How then, are we to do this? How do we dig ourselves out from the torn packaging, mountain of wrapping paper and the kitchen that have most likely fallen victim to holiday cooking of some kind. Then there is the endless amounts of toys that need to be assembled or brought to life with countless batteries?
Let’s not forget about the sugared up, sleep deprived, most likely “regular rule” breaking kids since there is rarely room for “regular rules” in the midst of the holiday cheer.
Feel like your head is spinning yet?
HERE ARE SOME SIMPLE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS THINGS YOU CAN DO SO YOU CAN CATCH YOUR BREATH TODAY AND BEYOND.
Enter “Life is as simple as these three questions: What do I want? Why do I want it? And, how will I achieve it?”a caption
1. TAKE A DEEP BREATH
We must start here. If there is one thing I know as an exhausted, sleep deprived, overloaded, overfull, and stressed out post holiday mom it is the need to start with a deep breath. Most likely, you probably have not had a deep breath since last week sometime.
2. PRIORITIZE WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE
The list of things that need to be done all seem urgent, but the entire list of what needs to be done can’t be urgent. We only have so many hours in the day. As a mom, we are in the midst of trying to get our kids to return to “normal” as well.
Take a quick inventory of what needs to be done in the near future. Then, put this inventory list in order from most important to least important.
3. MAKE A PLAN
Plan the times that you will be devoting to working your way through your prioritized list of tasks. We all still have our “regular” lives, so fitting in all the extras that the holiday rush thrusts in our lap will have to be planned into our daily schedules, most likely little by little.
4. START WITH GOOD ENOUGH RATHER THAN PERFECTION
Start with making things good enough to get by.
Do you have a bunch of things that need to be returned?
Start by gathering them in one place. Then, get the necessary receipts and put them in a bag or box in your car, ready to be returned.
Do you have a bunch of clothes that your kids need to try on? Try putting them in a neat pile somewhere in their room. This way they are out of the way, but not causing a bunch of clutter around your home. You can get to them when you can get to them.
I am sure you have a bunch of new things that all need places to go in your house. With a family of 11, the new things that now need to find homes is astounding.
My favorite way of handling this is to break the things down, room by room, and then put each room’s things in a box or bag in the room that it will need to be put in. Again, this way I can get to it when I can get to it.
5. ACCEPT WHAT IS
Accept that your house, your kids, and your life will be in a state of disarray for the next little while. Just accept it now – you can’t change it anyway. Know that things will go back to normal in a few days, at least ideally.
6. LOOK PAST WHAT ISN’T GREAT
Look past the things you can’t get to right now. Look past the box of stuff waiting for your attention in each room. Know that it is already partially tended to since you have started organizing things to be put away. But, look past the fact that everything isn’t done to completion at this point in the game. You’ll get there eventually.
7. START WITH THE VISIBLE AREAS FIRST
Start with putting things away in the most visible areas. Attack the main living areas first since this is where you spend most of your time. The list of things you need to take care of is most likely seemingly endless at this point.
However, if you are anything like me, the sooner you can get the areas you look at most under control, the better.
8. WORK IN ORDER
Get one area or room completely done before moving on to another area. I find it to be so much better if I can get one room completely under control. Then, when I feel overwhelmed by another area, I can breathe in the solace of the one completed room I have.
It also motivates me to keep going on the rest as I can check rooms off my list.
9. REST
I put this last on the list not because it is least important. In fact, I think it may be the most important thing, and it is something that you need to start working in to your digging out process right from the start.
Recognize that in most cases, you have had several long days, all in a row. This means that you need some time to rest and recuperatere. Resist the urge to pass over this rest part in an effort to have more time to devote to the things on your list that are screaming at you.
Plan some time of rest into each day.
More importantly, get to bed on time tonight and in the nights that follow. You are no good to anyone when you continue to run on fumes.
Although we all love the holidays, the after part is not nearly as much fun. However, with every Christmas holiday season comes the time of transition and let down when Christmas is finally over.
Being intentional in breathing deeply, prioritizing and planning, creating ways that things can be good enough to get by while looking past everything else and getting adequate rest will help get you back on the path to sanity in your life once again.
Those who spent two hours a week outside reported improved mental and physical health.
In case you needed even more of a reason to get into the Great Outdoors, a study published in Scientific Reports says that spending two hours in nature every week could provide a boost to your health. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this; in July 2018, Science Daily shared another report boasting the same idea. If you read no further, at least take away the moral of this story: Spending time in nature is always a good idea.
This new study took two groups — one that did not spend any time in nature and another that took advantage of residential green spaces (parks, beaches, and the woods) — and monitored them for seven days. Each participant reported back on the state of their mental and physical wellness at the end of the study. According to CNN, the researchers included feedback from more than 20,000 people in the UK. Of those who spent time outside, one in three polled reported that they felt dissatisfied and one in seven shared that they had poor health. Of the group who did not spend time outdoors, nearly half reported “low levels of life satisfaction,” and 25 percent reported they experienced poor health.
The demographics of the two groups spanned all walks of life. Mathew White, leader of the study at University of Exeter Medical School, shared some insight with CNN on the people studied: “We were worried our effect was just that healthier people visited nature but this finding suggested even people with known illnesses who did manage to get two hours a week in nature fared better.”
This isn’t knowledge that’s supposed to surprise you: It makes sense. Pull yourself out of your everyday environment and stresses and experience something bigger than yourself. In a world where forest bathing is a popular and respected activity, it’s never been easier to get out into nature.
Indian cities are today bustling with opportunities, buildings and new multiplexes. But then look in a bit closer, there are problems. An important issue is uninterrupted power! Bangalore city is today not just famous for its IT and Start-up prowess, but also erratic power supply and the familiar noise of Diesel gensets. They experience at least 3-4 hours of power cuts every day. Unfortunate, yet true.
So is there a solution?
A few citizens today are now setting up ‘rooftop’ solar panels and generating power. Apartment associations are also debating the long term return on investment of solar panels , inverters, power storage systems in long term. Although the initial cost of setting up a rooftop solar plant might seem higher, the average daily running cost is relatively cheaper. A diesel genset for example consumes 3-4 litres of fuel to generate 1000 watts of AC output. Simple math would tell you the cost is only going to go up for daily upkeep. While a rooftop solar project will cost less over a period of 5 years or much more.
The middle class today buys apartments, villas and duplexes in the range of Rs.50 lakh to Rs.1 crore or even more. Would it not be efficient to set up a self sustaining electrical system as well?
