A Window Worth Looking Through
Let’s take a moment to look at the Johari Window, as created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham. The Johari Window is a cognitive psychological tool most often used in…
Enemies of Innovation
We believe that innovator is a critical role and performance area not only for faculty who are committed to personal growth and professional development, but for the most successful students…
When Life Hands You Lemons: How to MAKE the Lemonade
We all know we’re supposed to make lemonade when life hands us lemons. As nice as it might be to never get the lemons in the first place, it’s not…
Failure is Success in Progress
In order to develop the concept of the benefits of failure, Penn State University has a course for engineering students called Failure 101. The students have to take risks and…
Where They Are
A philosophy professor friend once told me about the greatest regret he had from all his years in the classroom. Early in an Intro to Philosophy course, he tasked his…
The Trap of Unconscious Competence?
My mother used to call and ask me to come over and fix her computer. While she could tell when there was something wrong with it ("It says it can't…
Personal Context & Gardening Success
We’ve done it! We're at the last 2 pieces of the Performance Model: Personal Factors and Fixed Factors. The previous blog entry was Context, which was really context of the…
The Where, When, and How of Piracy
We’ve worked our way through the identity, learning skills, and knowledge parts of the Performance Model and the pieces left are context, personal factors, and fixed factors. Context is next…
Cultivating Students
Previously, we looked at the skills that different performances require, ultimately focusing on learning skills, which are embedded in everyday behavior and operate in conjunction with specialized knowledge. That specialized…
Pirate Skills
As we noted in the previous post, if we want to understand or improve important performances, we need to appreciate that there are multiple aspects to performance itself, any one…