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Follow the Leader – Angela Lee Duckworth

Angela Lee Duckworth is a psychologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.  She is also the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the science and practice of character development. Duckworth is known for her research in perseverance and grit in students and educators alike. I first became aware of Duckworth’s work through a TED Talks Education video in which she discusses the importance of teaching grit and encouraging perseverance in students. Previously, Duckworth worked as a math and science teacher in different public school systems in the United States. In 1982, she founded a summer school for low-income children in Boston. Duckworth currently continues to work on her research at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania while also giving education talks on the importance of grit and perseverance over instant gratification and natural talent.

I currently follow Duckworth on both Facebook (click here for link) and Twitter (click here for link). She is quite active on both platforms (although most of the posts are the same on both platforms) and she usually shares posts daily. Her posts are usually of articles and re-posts from others on the topics of character, gratification, and perseverance.

Angela Duckworth (2013) advocates for the importance of children being taught determination and self-control in schools and at home. She believes, and has research to prove, that grit supersedes intelligence when it comes to students being successful in difficult or trying tasks (Duckworth, 2013). The focus of Duckworth’s current research is to discover ways to grow and nurture determination and resilience in children (Duckworth, 2013).  Her research has shown that children who have a growth mindset are able to increase their grit because they believe that failure is not a permanent condition and that their efforts are making them more intelligent and more likely to succeed in the future (Duckworth, 2013). Growth mindset is the belief that the brain is malleable and has the plasticity to grow and develop new connections and talents (Dweck, 2012, p. 7).

As a leader and an educator, I believe that grit and resilience is vital to group and student success. Oftentimes, I see that it is not the brightest students in my class who have the greatest success, but the ones who have put in the most time and effort into understanding the concepts and material. Mathematics is a subject that many students struggle with and it requires practice and time to fully understand the intricacies of the different steps. I believe that more students would find success and enjoyment in Mathematics if they had continued to persevere instead of giving up when faced with adversity. Knowing that developing a growth mindset helps students and adults become more resilient pushes me to emphasize the plasticity of the brain more in my classroom. In fact, Carol Dweck (2012)  describes different ways that educators can promote a growth mindset culture in the classroom so that students are motivated to continue to press on in difficult situations.

Duckworth’s website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed are filled with posts from others on the importance of grit and resilience. However, it is difficult to locate information about her current research. Since I have followed her work for some time and I purposely researched her for this activity, I have become familiar with her work on growth mindsets and its effect on grit. I think that it would be beneficial to make information on her work and ideas more accessible on her page for others who are hearing from her for the first time. While her “About Angela” page on her website describes her achievements and career, not much is shared about her ideas and current research (Duckworth, 2017).

Some of the criticisms that Duckworth’s work has received is that her ideas and methods of encouraging grit in classrooms can be inflexible and even prison-like (Del Giudice, 2014). Duckworth’s response to this is that there is a difference between children choosing to stop doing something they do not enjoy versus children choosing to give up on something in the face of adversity (Del Giudice, 2014). It is the latter that she is trying prevent and discourage. I think that more educators would be open to Duckworth’s ideas on resilience if she made this point more clear as sometimes her stance on grit can come across as forced and strict.

Duckworth is described as an efficient and effective leader who expects only the best from her team (Del Giudice, 2014). Despite her high expectations, those who have worked with and for her regard her as a leader who truly cares about her team (Del Giudice, 2014). Duckworth practices what she preaches – she motivates others by encouraging an atmosphere of growth mindset where failures are seen as opportunities to learn and to grow (Del Giudice, 2014). In an interview with Jena McGregor from the Washington Post (2016), Angela describes an effective leader as one who is gritty because they set the pace for the rest of the group. Duckworth believes in leading by example and that showing your weaknesses is a sign of strength and grit (McGregor, 2016).

Much like Duckworth, I believe that leading by example and being supportive are characteristics of good leadership. In fact, I believe that there are large parts of Duckworth’s view on leadership that align fairly closely with Northouse’s description of servant leadership in his book Leadership: Theory and Practice. Two of the servant leadership principles described by Northouse (2016) are a commitment to the growth of people and building a community (p. 228-229). Duckworth also believes that helping others grow and creating an identity for the group is vital to fostering an environment of determination and continual progress (McGregor, 2016). As an educator, I feel that Duckworth’s model of leadership allows others to feel supported while still challenging them enough to grow. This is the type of servant leadership that I strive to emulate. I would like to become the type of leader who can be vulnerable enough to share my shortcomings with the group in order to use it as a learning experience because I believe that leadership is an interactive process between the leader and the followers. I also want to be able to give the group the support it needs to be comfortable, but also challenge each individual enough so that they can continue to grow and flourish.

References

Del Giudice, M. (2014, October 14). Grit Trumps Talent and IQ: A Story Every Parent (and Educator) Should Read. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141015-angela-duckworth-success-grit-psychology-self-control-science-nginnovators/

Duckworth, A. (2017). About Angela. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://angeladuckworth.com/about-angela/

Duckworth, A. (2013). TED Talks – Grit: The Power of Passion and Perserverance [Video file]. United States: TED Talks. Retrieved September 28, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_power_of_passion_and_perseverance.

Dweck, C. S. (2012). Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential. London: Robinson.

McGregor, J. (2016, May 12). Why Angela Duckworth thinks “gritty” leaders are people to emulate. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/05/12/why-angela-duckworth-thinks-gritty-leaders-are-people-to-emulate/?utm_term=.718d928b87f8

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Unit 1 Activity 5: Blog Post 3

Listening is an extremely important characteristic of servant leadership because leadership is a process that involves communication and interactions between the leader and the followers (Northouse, 2016, p. 227). When leaders listen, they are able to understand the needs and expectations of the group. An example of this is at the end of the school year when department heads  meet with the teachers in their departments to discuss the plans and expectations for the next school year. Teachers are given the opportunity to share what they liked or disliked about the previous school year and what potential changes they would like to see in the upcoming school year. Oftentimes, it is up to the department head to implement these changes for September.

Persuasion is a characteristic of servant leadership where leaders convince others to change through gentle yet firm and consistent communication (Northouse, 2016, p. 228). I believe that this is best achieved by the influence that a leader has on the followers and the referent power that is mentioned in chapter 1 of Northouse’s book (2016). An example of this is when a senior teacher notices that a new teacher is struggling with dealing with certain situations appropriately and gives guidance by offering advice and leading by example. The senior teacher should consistently check in with the new teacher to see if more coaching or advice is needed.

Commitment to the growth of people is another characteristic of servant leadership (Northouse, 2016, p. 228). It is important that servant leaders place priority in helping followers grow and develop both professionally and personally. In a school setting, an example of this would be when principals reach out to younger teachers to see how they can give them guidance regarding professional development. In the Coquitlam School District, there is a district mentorship program that pairs administrators with teachers to help them grow in the profession and to take their careers to the next step.

Personally, persuasion is the most difficult of the three for me to incorporate into my practice because I worry that it is unwelcomed or unwarranted. I believe that there needs to be a strong relationship between the leader and follower in order for the leader to effectively influence the follower and for the follower to willingly accept the advice and guidance of the leader.

My question is: Northouse (2016) mentions ten characteristics of servant leadership (p. 228). Are there some that are more important than others or are they all equally important? 

References:

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

 

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Unit 1 Activity 4: Blog Post 2

Assigned leaders are individuals who have been placed in a formal leadership role within a group or organization and are given power and authority because of their position (Northouse, 2016, p. 8). Emergent leaders are individuals who naturally become leaders because of the way the members of the group regard or interact with them (Northouse, 2016, p. 8).

Last May, a group of my friends and I decided to take a road trip to Kelowna for the long weekend. There were eight of us and while we decided on our trip early on, there was not much movement in terms of planning for a long time. Eventually, I started to take charge by looking up hotel availability and organizing rides. Once I started, others in the group also started to take on responsibilities such as winery bookings and planning activities. However, I had somehow emerged as the leader because my friends started coming to me to ask for what responsibilities they should take on and going over details with me before confirming with restaurants and wineries. Because of my past experience with trip planning and perhaps what my friends saw as my natural ability to organize and schedule, they turned to me as the “leader” for our weekend trip.

This leads to the next point – management versus leadership. After reading about the differences between the two in Northouse’s book, I am hesitant to say that I emerged as a leader rather than as a manager in the situation I mentioned above. Northouse (2016) comments that leadership and management are similar in many ways in terms of interactions with people, influence, and goal attainment (p. 13). However, they also differ in the sense that management has more involvement in planning, organizing, controlling, and problem solving while leadership focuses on creating a vision, connecting members, and motivating followers (Northouse, 2016, p. 14). Management targets efficiency and effectiveness while leadership centers around group interaction and motivation.

Personally, I feel that leadership is imperative for an organization to prosper long term. Management is necessary for an organization or group to function and exist, but for the organization to truly flourish, there needs to be a driving force that inspires and motivates members to grow and develop positively and continuously.

My question is: Can an individual be an assigned leader and an emergent leader? And if so, is it more effective to be an assigned leader or an emergent leader first? 

References:

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Unit 1 Activity 3: Blog Post 1

Northouse (2016) defines leadership as “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (p. 6). I really appreciate that this text refers to leadership as a process rather than as an individual’s traits or characteristics (Northouse, 2016, p. 6). My experience as being a leader in situations have generally been a natural process where I emerged as a leader because of the applicable strengths and skill set I brought to the task at hand. The power given to me in these situations would have been what is described by Northouse  (2016) as “personal power” (p. 10) and more specifically, “expert power” (p. 10). While I find that I often associate the term power with a negative connotations, I appreciate being given expert power because it shows a sense of trust and respect from my peers, or in this case, followers. In my experience, influence comes naturally when your followers have agreed that you are the best fit leader for the group.

A recent experience for me where I became the leader of a group was when we were planning my good friend’s bridal shower. I was one of the bridesmaids in a group of five and during the planning process, I naturally emerged as the leader because of my past experience with planning other bridal and baby showers. We were a small task group with the common goal of planning a shower for our good friend. The process was very interactive in the sense that while the other girls came to me for advice or instruction on how tasks should be carried out, it was also important for me to learn what their expectations were for the shower and to incorporate them into the vision that I had. Even when we faced obstacles or differences, it was easy for the group to work out the issues because we could look to the ultimate goal of planning a beautiful bridal shower and realign our priorities accordingly. From this experience, I believe that a clear common goal is vital to a group’s success and for a leader to be able to lead effectively. Goal attainment is the main motivation for members to continue to remain active in a group and to be influenced by the leader.

My question is: What are the differences between a leader’s power and influence in a group? Are they dependent on each other or can they be mutually exclusive?

References:

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Photo Safari

Realizing that I had totally forgotten about this second part of the activity until this morning, I decided to do this activity in my office at work. I share the office with two of my coworkers who are also online teachers. It is a small space with 4 desks and the decor truly leaves much to be desired as offices go. However, boring as it is, this office is a big part of my life. I spend 6-7 hours a day here, five days a week. My coworkers are what makes this space one of my favourite places to be. In between our bouts of work, I enjoy occasionally chatting and laughing with them over things that happen at home and on the weekends.

To protect my coworkers’ privacy, I tried as much as possible not to take pictures of them (even though I personally think they make the space!). I found it difficult to find interesting objects around the office to take pictures of and I realized how little I actually pay attention to my surroundings while I am at work.

My favourite picture is the one of my blood test kit next to the jar of Carnation hot chocolate powder. I brought in the hot chocolate mix last year to share with my coworkesr. As a contrast, my blood test kit (for my gestational diabetes) sits next to it. I like this picture because it kind of reminds me of the way life changes as time goes on. Last year my coworkers laughed with me when I delighted in the fact that I could have a cup of hot chocolate with 60% few calories whereas the past couple of week, we have been laughing at how I can’t even eat an apple without worry about the sugar levels in fruit.

Looking through my pictures, I realize that my favourite pictures are the ones that I connect memories with. For example, as a “creative” photo, I took a picture of the calendar on my wall. My coworker gave me the yoga cat calendar last year for Christmas when I first started working at Coquitlam Open Learning. However, just looking at the picture, it is obvious that the emotion is cannot be connected without telling the story. I would like to explore more opportunities to take photos that can communicate emotion without any dialogue.

 

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Waking Baby

For my sound effect story, I created a short clip of a baby being woken up from a nap by a telephone ringing. Being 30 weeks pregnant, I’ve got babies on my mind! I imagine this will be a situation that I will face in the near future. Or maybe not…I won’t be so careless to take my cell phone off silent mode!

I found Audacity to be quite user friendly. It only took me a few minutes to figure out how to trim, silent, and move the timing of the different audio clips around. However, I did not use any of the special fade in/fade out effects this time because I felt like my audio clips blended well enough without the effects. In total, I used 4 different audio clips.

Next time, I would like to explore “stacking” more than one audio clip at a time. Since it was my first experience with audio editing on Audacity, I stuck to a simple single audio sound at a time for this track. I would like to explore using different background and ambiance sounds next time.

I got all my audio clips from SoundBible. I was surprised at how many sound effects were available and how easy they were to download and use!

Last but not least, here is my audio track!

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Anchor.fm & Soundcloud

The hardest part of this activity for me was trying to figure out what to record! I hate the sound of my own voice recorded so I really wanted to avoid it. In the end, I went with background classroom noise for my Anchor.fm audio and a clip of my colleagues discussing new technology during our recent Professional Development session for my SoundCloud audio.

The Anchor.fm app was fairly user friendly. However, I did have to google how to make my stream an “episode” so that it would stay on my station for longer than 24 hours.

I could not figure out how to record on my iPhone using the SoundCloud app so I finally resorted to record using my laptop. However, the recording sounds a bit broken up because the microphone on my laptop is less sensitive than the one on my iPhone.

For future use, I’d like to learn how to actually export an audio file off of Anchor.fm instead of just having it stored on my station. This may be something that is only available in the paid section of the app though. I’d also like to figure out how to record using my iPhone on SoundCloud so that  I can get better quality for my audio clips and just for general ease of use.

 

Here is the link to my Anchor.fm audio: click here

And here is my SoundCloud audio below:

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Better Photography

The tips that I used from David duChemin’s free ebook TEN: Ten Way to Improve Your Crave. None of Them Involve Buying Gear are:

  1. Better Contrast Makes Better Stories: I wanted to take a photo where the contrast would be different than what I would usually quickly snap with my iphone. I liked that the background in this case has the brighter colours and the foreground was darker. I also thought it was funny that most of the subjects (my colleagues!) were looking out the window while one of them sat uninterested at the table. To me, the contrast between the interested and the disinterested subjects created a good story.
  2. Pay Attention to the Moment: We were all having lunch and my coworkers’ interests were peaked by a car that was parked illegally in the lot outside. At this moment, I thought it was funny that something as mundane as an illegally parked car had caught our interest during our even more mundane lunch hour. I really like the candidness of this photo.
  3. Look to the light: The lighting in this photo is different than what I normally like. Generally I like to take photos in bright light. However, I think that having the light in the background in this photo really adds to the photo. Also, the darkness in the foreground makes my colleagues (mostly) unrecognizable, which is good, because I’m not sure they want to be featured on my blog.
  4. Put a Great Foreground in Front of a Great Background: I actually cropped this photo a little bit because I took this photo from farther away and in the original foreground, there were distracting factors like our staff room table and chairs.

Overall, I am not sure if this photo is great and I know that there is much room for improvement in terms of my skills and technique. However, after reading David’s duChemin’s ebook, I am definitely more conscious of the way I take photos and I am more aware of the different components that go into taking a simple photo. I really do like this photo I chose though because seeing it reminds me of the moment and how I laughed with my colleagues about how easily we were amused.

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Bananas

Whenever I receive an email like this, my first reaction is to delete it because I generally mistrust emails that come from unknown sources. I do not give my personal or work email out easily so it is unusual for me to receive unsolicited emails like this.

This email seems sketchy to me because of the poor punctuation and poor referencing of sources. There are also some grammar mistakes and this detracts from it’s credibility. I suppose I could take the time to research the legitimacy of it’s claims but I generally would not spend the time to do so. There is no proof in this email that the information actually came from the Center for Disease Control so I would need to confirm this information by researching the Manheim Research Institute and if this organization is legitimate, going one step further and researching the actual claims about the bananas. A quick google search showed me that there really is not a record of a Manheim Research Institute in Atlanta, Georgia and so, my search stops there and this email is ignored and delete.d

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Great Googly Moogly

Activity 1

Here are some snapshots of my results when I googled the terms without any advance search strategies:

I found that for most the searches, the people that came up were Caucasians with the exception of the “leader” and “teacher” searches. This makes sense though because my location is in Canada, which is predominantly Caucasian population.

One thing I noticed was that the search for doctor only brought up images of men while the google for nurses only brought up images of women. These are stereotypes that I am surprised to see in 2017 while doing a search on Google in Canada.

 

Here are some of my new results after adding some advance search strategies:

Google search: site:CA teacher

I searched for teacher and added Canada as the location tag since in the original simple search, I had gotten a more multicultural result compared to the other searches. Once I added the Canada tag, I only got images of Caucasian teachers.

 

Google search: Site: CN Doctor

Next, I searched for doctor and added China as the location tag. Immediately, there was a big difference because I received images of Asian doctors instead.

Activity 2

Google search (filetype:pdf teacher)
Google Scholar (leadership)
Google Search (loc: Port Coquitlam podcast)

 

 

 

 

I had a little trouble using the academic google search shown in Alan November’s article so I used Google Scholar instead, which is what I usually use when I am looking for an academic article. Other than that, I found the other searches pretty straight-forward.

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