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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Daniel Coyle
What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle.
You belong to a group. Your group is together in a strange and dangerous new world. That new world is shaped like a mountain, with the paradise of college at the top.
sends clear, constant signals of belonging and identity: you
shows that character might be more like a skill—ignited by certain signals, and honed through deep practice.
It's not about recognizing talent, whatever the hell that is. I've never tried to go out and find someone who's talented. First you work on fundamentals, and pretty soon you find out where things are going. —Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach
They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student's personality. After meeting a dozen of these people,
Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity.
three-part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way, and then remodeled the right way, a sequence that appeared in Gallimore and Tharp's notes as M+, M−, M+; it happened so often they named it a “Wooden.”
“mental and emotional conditioning,” which basically amounted to everyone running harder than they did in games, all the time.
“Practices at UCLA
were nonstop, electric, supercharged, inten...
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He taught in chunks, using what he called the “whole-part method”—he would teach players an entire move, then break it down to work on its elemental actions.
explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition. “Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts,”
You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned, authored by Gallimore and former Wooden player Swen Nater. “Repetition is the key to learning.”
error-centered, well-planned, information-rich practices.
placing a new focus on lesson planning and information-oriented teaching.
merely disguised as average because their crucial skill does not show up on conventional measures of teaching ability. They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition.
They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love.
master coaching is something more evanescent: more art than science. It exists in the space between two people, in the warm, messy game of language, gesture, and expression.
by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who's reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.” The key words of this sentence are knowledge, recognize, and connect.
Matrix is Gallimore's word for the vast grid of task-specific knowledge that distinguishes the best teachers
they had once been promising talents in their respective fields but failed and tried to figure out why.
The eyes are the giveaway. They are usually sharp and warm and are deployed in long, unblinking gazes.
telltale rhythm of speech. The coach would deliver a chunk of information, then pause, hawkeyeing the listener as if watching the needle of a Geiger counter. As Septien put it, “I'm always
“You gotta shock 'em, then shock 'em some more.”
spoke in short imperatives. “Now do X”
“Good. Okay, now do_____.”
As soon as the student could accomplish the feat (play that chord, hit that volley), the coach would quickly layer in an added difficulty.
Okay, now do it faster. Now do it with the harmony. Small successes were not stopping p...
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drama and character are the tools master coaches use to reach the student with the truth about their performance.
moral honesty is at the core of the job description—character in the deeper sense of the word. “Truly great teachers connect with students because of who they are as moral standards,” he said. “There's an empathy, a selflessness, because you're not trying to tell the student something they know, but are finding, in their effort, a place to make a real connection.”
I've been on both sides of that. I know the world they live in. This isn't about math. I'm not teaching math. It's about life.
Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance.
Real estate has both .... flexibility to deal with unique situations when they arise, and some skills that are repetitive and oak-like. It would be a worthwhile exercise to catalog each type.
“If it's a choice between me telling them to do it, or them figuring it out, I'll take the second option every time,” Lansdorp said. “You've got to make the kid an independent thinker, a problem-solver. I don't need to see them every day, for chrissake. You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time. The point is, they've got to figure things out for themselves.”
four distinct ways: tactile (“ball on fire”), personification (“waiter”), image (“airplane”), and physical (“butt to arm pit”).
“Sixty percent of what you teach applies to everybody,” he continued. “The trick is how you get that sixty percent to the person. If I teach you, I'm concerned about what you think and how you think. I want to teach you how to learn in a way that's right for you.
Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.
The more an organization embraces the core principles of ignition, deep practice, and master coaching, the more myelin it will build, the more success it will have.
“When something goes wrong, ask WHY five times.”
But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”
The key is that people have to linger in that uncomfortable area, learn to tolerate the anxiety. If you practice, you can get to the level you want.”
“Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining,” he said. “The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you to feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”
“It's not events, but our opinions about them, which cause us suffering.”
There was no talk about anybody's past, no attempt to deconstruct the root causes of shyness. There was only practice and feedback,
At the program's highest level, they perform Olympian feats of outgoingness such as purposely embarrassing themselves by dropping a watermelon in the middle of a crowded supermarket. The point, Shiloff explained, is to fire the circuit and thus to linger in the discomfort a little longer each time. It is the staggering-baby process all over again, although the clinic has more suitable ways to describe the sensation.
The idea is to relive the memory and rob it of its power, a technique therapists call prolonged exposure therapy.
They can't unbuild the circuit (remember, myelin only wraps; it doesn't unwrap), so the best way to gain the new skill is to establish and deep-practice a new circuit that connects the traumatic stimulus to normal, everyday events.
The myelin model also highlights the importance of seeking new challenges.
visualize those tiny strings of Christmas lights, when you look for hair-trigger moments of ignition, when you tune into the teaching signals you send—life changes.
pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. To which I would add, tell them how the myelin mechanism works,
