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Thorndike recommended standardizing time for classes, homework, and tests based on how long it took the average student to complete a task as a way to efficiently rank students.
Thorndike and class time
If speed and learning ability are not related,
alternative to current testing procedure
scholars and politicians in the United States debated whether schools could narrow achievement differences, or whether these were mostly due to factors outside the schools’ control, such as poverty.
knowledge gap hypothesis was part of this
The second group—the “self-paced group”—was taught the same material and given the same total amount of instruction time, but they were provided with a tutor who allowed them to move through the material at their own pace, sometimes going fast, sometimes slow, taking as much or as little time as they needed to learn each new concept.
what we did in Headstart (actuually summer remedial) math w Mr Huber
These two insights—that speed does not equal ability, and that there are no universally fast or slow learners—had actually been recognized several decades before Bloom’s pioneering study, and have been replicated many times since, using different students and different content, but always producing similar results.30 Equating learning speed with learning ability is irrefutably wrong.
quantity as quality seems long-recognized but ignored
Yet the architecture of our education system is simply not designed to accommodate such individuality, and it therefore fails to nurture the potential and talent of all its students.
education pacing error
What can be much harder to accept is the second assertion of the pathways principle: there are no universally fixed sequences in human development—no set of stages everyone must pass through to grow, learn, or achieve goals.
no normative stages
“the crisis of variability” in developmental science.
crisis of variability
helped resolve the crisis of variability,
too much credit?
“Instead, each one of us has our own web of development, where each new step we take opens up a whole range of new possibilities that unfold according to our own individuality.”
web of development
no fixed ladders of development for any other aspect of our lives, including our careers.
relativism
ERC funded a study, headed by Dr. Claartje Vinkenburg at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, to examine
why not cite the source?
success.
"Capturing gendered career paths of ERC GRANTEES AND applicants" (ERCAREER) Vinkenburg is listed as PI https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/ERCAREER_final_report.pdf
Vinkenburg & Weber Journal of Vocarional Behavior 80(3), 592-607 2012 "Managerial Career Patterns: A Review of the Imperical Evidence " metaanalysis
Or
P.Van Arensbergen & P. van den Besselaar "The Selection o Scientific Talent in the Allocation of Research Grants" SEP2012 25(3), 381-405 but listed in Vinkenburg
But what the pathways principle tells us is that we are always creating our own pathway for the first time, inventing it as we go along, since every decision we make—or every event we experience—changes the possibilities available to us. This is true whether we are learning how to crawl or learning how to design a marketing campaign.
what Bolles has told us for decades
courses I should take each semester. I took out my pad and pencil and eagerly began writing down everything he said, thinking to myself, He knows the system here and his job is to figure out what’s best for me. He looked over my high school record, thumbed his beard, and declared, “Given your history of poor academic performance,
cookie cutter advising fits averagarianism and I am guilty of it
until my senior year, because I knew I would find it boring and would probably not do too well if I took it right away. (I was right: it ended up being one of my dullest classes at Weber, but by the time I finally took it, I had built up my study skills and was able to grind through it.)
indictment of comp system
When I consider the decisions I made that contributed to my college success, every one of them was rooted in the belief that a path to excellence was available to me, but I was the only one who would be able to figure out what that path looked like. And to do that, I knew that I needed to know who I was first.
like I did at DSC
the jaggedness principle, context principle, and pathways principle ultimately all work hand in hand.
combining principles
know my own jaggedness (such as my low tolerance for boredom, as well as my ability to focus with laser intensity on those things that did manage to captivate me), and I had to know about the contexts where I would be performing (avoiding classes with kids I knew from high school, and seeking classes that focused on arguments and ideas). By knowing my jagged profile and my if-then signatures, I was able to choose a unique pathway that suited me best.
strategy
There was no incentive for deviating from the prescribed course, even if it might benefit the company. I was expected to do a certain set of tasks, defined by somebody else—nothing more, nothing less.
B Dalton v Pickwick and both v independents
Employee indifference is not unique to any one company or business sector—it is endemic to most organizations that rely on Taylorist principles of standardization and hierarchical management.
apathy factory
A century of averagarian business models stemming from Taylorism has convinced us that for the system to win, the individual must be viewed as a cell on a spreadsheet—like a disposable Average Employee.
also ed and med and all bureaucracy
mental barriers of one-dimensional thinking, essentialist thinking, and normative thinking,
dangerous systems
normative thinking compels managers and human resources departments to lock employees into a narrow career path, or where certain positions are cordoned off for employees who fulfill certain requirements, such as getting an MBA or working a specific number of years in the industry.
normative career route
If you believe that talent can be found anywhere, then one way to act upon this belief would be to cultivate the talent yourself.
why ed system is failing
Zoho pays economically disadvantaged youngsters with little schooling to attend the university, where they learn programming skills, along with math, English, and current events.
Zoho curriculum
decided not to operate the university according to the traditional standardize-and-rank mission of most schools. Almost all the instruction is self-paced and project based. There are no grades; instead, students get feedback on their projects. “We realize that students learn at their own pace, and you have to respect that,” Vembu emphasized to me. “If what you care about is how well students will do in your company over the next decade, you soon realize that fast and slow are useless distinctions to make. There just isn’t a relationship between learning fast and succeeding.”30 After twelve to
...more
Zoho system
the freedom that individual employees are given to develop and grow within the company.
so lless need for traditional external schooling
does not assume there is an optimal pathway for individuals to move through the company.
trad ed vulnerability
“About half of the people we hire want to explore and develop something new. We encourage it,” Vembu told me. “We don’t have rigid job descriptions because they promote rigid thinking and suddenly you think there is a fixed job for you. If you give people flexible pathways, people evolve into lots of roles they would have never thought they were interested
competency based
there are no performance reviews at Zoho, no scorecards, and no employee rankings. “Placing a grade or a number on a human being is nonsense.
anti-quantitative
You should have lots of differences in skills sets and talents;
heterogeneous teams for creative results
We’ve found that mixing up different talents and ages and experience actually produces better products. It runs counter to tradition, but our products speak for themselves.”
same for fabrication & production stages and tasks?
Zoho’s competitiveness is a direct result of the way Vembu identifies and nurtures talent—and how that talent responds: by being fully engaged and extremely productive.
qualitative edge
And I know that you are in big trouble if you start to think about individuals as numbers to be optimized on average,” Vembu told me. “Treat individuals with respect, as individuals, and you will get out more than what you put in.”
qual > quant
FOSTERING INNOVATION
creative activity
Even in an industry such as manufacturing, where averagarianism has been the global standard for more than a century,
manufactories ALWAYS have been places of standardization, haven't they?
generate new and superior methods for getting things done. In fact, innovation
this is R & D, not production
difficulty inspiring and harnessing creativity.
aren't creative individuals bored silly in manufactories?
individual initiative, nurtures individuality, and where innovative ideas are welcome regardless of their origin.
this raises questions
we believe the individual is the single most important entity, and we do everything we can to promote the power of the individual.”
as opposed to the product being primary. I sse the different paradigm, I think...
at every link in its organizational web—Morning Star is tacitly committed to the principles of individuality through what the company calls a “self-management” philosophy.
how does this impact Deming statistical (i.e. averaginarian?) TQI?
organically adapt to each employee’s jaggedness, match employees to the contexts where they are effective, and empower individuals to pursue their own paths.
similar to Great Teacher Movement?
Morning Star spent years trying to determine what kinds of personal qualities predicted success at the company, analyzing things like intelligence, personality, and education. They failed to find any meaningful correlations—except one: “People who have already worked a long time as managers at other companies can’t figure out what to do,” Paul Green told me. “They can’t handle the freedom and the fact that they can’t simply issue unilateral orders. But whenever people come here who don’t know what it’s like working anywhere else—or who didn’t fit in at other places—they very quickly and
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key trait: they learn OUR house rules FIRST
Abe,
BOHE!!
sense of belonging and personal purpose—that sense that you can add value to the company by sharing your ideas, and that the ideas will be listened to and, if they are good ideas, implemented—is
key
When you take individuality seriously—when you set up a business designed to embrace that individuality—innovation occurs everywhere, all the time, at every link of the network, because every employee is transformed into an independent agent tasked with figuring out the best way of doing her job and contributing to the company.
what about the slackers? they probably keep ding drone work their "carer" as long as they are true to their mission statement
the principles of individuality show us the path to a better society, one that embraces individual freedom, initiative and responsibility, without sacrificing free enterprise.
ideal
win-win capitalism,
"win-win capitalism"
These benefits—employee engagement, increased productivity, and widespread innovation—will not materialize if individuality is a fair-weather passion.
or if heads change
