Building Performance Character: Part II

 

(originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/05/13/building-student-character-in-the-classroom-part-2/)

Last month I talked about six performance-related character values  that can help students become independent and successful adults. They are:

·         Persisting towards solutions

·         Working with precision

·         Asking questions

·         Working with others

·         Making connections

·         Monitoring progress and embracing learning

I think it’s worth taking some time to look a little more closely at the first trait on the list.

Persisting Towards Solutions

It is easy to see persistence as a moral value rather than an academic one—a sign of integrity or strength that people embody as some kind of spiritual or genetic gift.  But the willingness and ability to persist towards a goal can be taught and nourished—and it can just as easily be undermined.

Researcher Carol Dweck has written extensively about what she calls a “growth mindset” towards intelligence—a belief that a person’s intellectual ability is neither fixed nor destined, but is, instead, the result of hard work. Her studies have demonstrated that students who believe that intelligence is malleable and open to improvement do better in school than those who believe their intelligence is fixed and innate...even when those “fixed mindset” students have high IQs and have done well in school. This becomes very clear around the middle school years, when the level of challenge tends to be raised across the board. Students who had previously thought of themselves as the “smart kids” find themselves facing challenges and expectations that can be daunting, and if they can’t handle the work, they often retreat, surrender, and then turn on themselves, feeling betrayed by their native intelligence. Students with a growth mindset, however, understand that a greater challenge simply requires greater work on their part...and that “failure,” rightly understood, is just a step along the pathway to success. What is even more interesting is that students with a fixed mindset can change—and that a change in their mindset can have profound effects on their academic outcomes (research study abstract here).

This willingness to dig in and work hard in spite of obstacles or frustration is what people used to call “grit,” and it’s a quality that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth believes may contribute much more to academic achievement than intelligence. Dr. Duckworth has even developed a “grit quiz” to help people assess how much of the quality they possess.

Author Daniel Coyle, in The Talent Code, gives us some dramatic examples of grit and persistence in what he calls “deep practice,” which others call “deliberate practice.” He describes tennis players in Russia, soccer players in Brazil, and student musicians here in the United States who approach practice in an intensely focused way, aiming straight for their areas of weakness and using their practice sessions to work and work and work each area until it improves. It is radically different from the way, say, my 9-year-old practices the saxophone, which involves playing a song one time, straight through, and then putting the instrument away. When student athletes or student musicians engage in deep practice, they make enormous improvements in a very short time. And as Malcolm Gladwell has shown us, about ten thousand hours of this kind of practice is what separates true masters from the rest of us.

Take a look at the graph here and note the difference between the violinists who, after ten years of practice, are good enough to become teachers, and those who are good enough to be professional musicians. The difference isn’t just that the professionals have put in more hours over the same period. It’s that their trend line starts to curve. The more time they put in, the more time they want to put in. Getting better makes them practice more, which makes them get even better, and so on.

That wonderful feedback loop doesn’t happen on day one, though. So why are those soccer players in Brazil willing to practice one particular move over and over again, day upon day, when my son can’t manage to get through a simple scale? Part of it has to do with focused coaching and timely, specific feedback. That’s our job, as educators. It’s human nature to avoid and ignore errors and mistakes. No one likes to focus on what they’re doing wrong—but that’s exactly what deep practice requires, and it’s exactly what a good coach pushes athletes and performers to do. The question is: are we being good coaches?

There’s another piece of the puzzle, and that’s desire. If kids don’t care—if they don’t really want to be successful at [fill in the blank], they won’t put in the hard time needed to get there. Persistence requires desire, or, as Daniel Coyle calls it, “ignition.” Something’s got to light your fire. Desire isn’t everything, of course, but you can’t get very far without it. So engaging and motivating students—getting them hooked, interested, and passionately involved in what we’re teaching—is clearly important. Simply getting them to sit still, behave, and take notes is not enough. We’ve talked for years about classroom management, but the subtext of our terminology suggests that the classroom is a problem requiring control and compliance. Perhaps if we called it and thought of as “classroom engagement,” or even “classroom ignition,” we’d all be happier and more productive.

A final aspect of persistence that’s important to note is resilience—the ability to roll with the punches, change course, and adjust to the unexpected. It doesn’t mean that students should never get frustrated. That’s a little unreasonable. But students (just like the rest of us) need to learn how to manage frustration—how to step back, take a deep breath, and try something different. Blogger and author Seth Godin writes of the importance of resilience for adults facing uncertain economic times, and it is just as important for students. If we only teach students one way to do something, and spend all of our practice time drilling that one method, are we really preparing them for the unpredictable and ambiguous world beyond the classroom? What happens when the One Way doesn’t work for a particular problem or in a particular situation? Some students will get angry at the material. Some will get angry at school in general. And some will blame themselves. How helpful are any of those responses, really?

Persistence means taking a “never say die” attitude towards a problem, but it shouldn’t have to mean bashing your head against a brick wall…especially if there’s a doorway a few feet away. Sometimes, going around can be more effective than trying to going through. But you can’t go around if you don’t take a step back, calm yourself down, and reassess both the situation and your approach to it. As the old saying reminds us, the little reed persists in the wind storm while the mighty oak cracks and falls, because the mighty oak can’t bend. Do we simply expect our students to know how to bend…and how to snap back and try again?

It again raises the interesting question about what we see as our mission. Are we teachers of math or teachers of children? Are we preparing students to be poets and mathematicians…or well-rounded adults who can enjoy poetry and fill out a tax return? If we take a whole-child approach to education, we can’t help but see these performance character values as a real and vital part of our curriculum. After all, the ultimate goal of an education isn’t simply knowing stuff. The ultimate goal is a rich and rewarding life.

Of course our students need to know their fractions. Of course they need to know how to write a good paragraph. But if they don’t know how to keep going in their learning—how to Not Give Up when challenges rise up—the fractions and paragraphs won’t matter.

Building Student Character in the Classroom

Originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/04/24/the-importance-of-performance-character


The Importance of “Performance Character”

Anyone who has spent time in a classroom knows that schooling involves far more than academic lessons. Many things contribute to a student’s learning and success—and just as many things can detract from it.  One can argue to what extent teachers and school districts should hold themselves responsible for factors such as adequate sleep, balanced nutrition, and safe places to sleep at night. But other elements that affect student performance are closely tied to the academic work of the classroom and can be cultivated and developed by the teacher. In fact, studies have shown that attention to certain character traits can greatly affect a student’s ability to succeed in school and in life.

When we speak of character development in education, we often think of traditional moral values—issues of ethics and interpersonal behavior. But the high-yield character traits that researchers are beginning to focus on in school settings speak more to academic behavior than interpersonal issues. The focus is less on how a student interacts with other students, and more on how a student interacts with the work. 

Often called “habits of mind,” and defined and categorized variously by authors and researchers over the years, these academic performance character values, as author Paul Tough calls them in How Children Succeed, can be transmitted and learned implicitly and almost thoughtlessly as part of family culture or economic class; in many families and communities they are modeled and extolled by adults and expected of children from very early ages. Some students, however, grow up without these kinds of expectations, outside of communities or families that embody and demand performance-oriented values, or in homes where overstressed and overworked parents have trouble providing sufficient attention to these values.  As research is beginning to show us, teachers can make a profound difference here. Schools that serve low-income or struggling students are finding that the explicit teaching and cultivation of these habits of mind can prove to be important keys to student success.

Performance Character Values

There are many ways to define and categorize the skills and habits of mind that help students learn and succeed in school and life, and many different skills and habits that contribute to success. At my  company, Catapult Learning, we have selected six performance-related character values to focus upon and support as we develop new programs and revise our current offerings. They are:

·         Persisting towards solutions

·         Working with precision

·         Asking questions

·         Working with others

·         Making connections

·         Monitoring progress and embracing learning

Some of these values will look familiar to those of you who have been working to learn and implement the Common Core State Standards; several come straight from the Standards for Mathematical Practice. Others are values highlighted by organizations such as the Partnership for 21^st Century Learning. Values like “making connections” speak to the need to help students transfer their discrete learning into a variety of new and unpredictable contexts both in and beyond school. And others, like “monitoring progress” and “asking questions,” are things that we’ve always tried to focus on and encourage in our classrooms.

In the next few blog posts over the next few months, as we work our way towards the new school year, I'll spend some time talking about each of these performance character values and how I think teachers can use them to help students engage more successfully in their academic work.

Teaching as Storytelling

(originally published by Catapult Learning., LLC, at  http://www.catapultlearning.com/2013/03/28/teaching-as-storytelling/)

 

The T-shirt said:

Episode IV comes first; it’s just good parenting.

I shared the picture on Facebook. Within an hour, I had a ton of “likes” and comments. One friend posted a link to a blog post explaining precisely how to order the six Star Wars movies for maximum enjoyment and minimum second-trilogy annoyance. It was an exercise in hard-core geekdom, but it took the Star Wars story—and the whole idea of story—more seriously than many English teachers I have known. When you’re a fan, you care that the true identity of Darth Vader is a surprise and a shock. You care that watching the movies in George Lucas’ approved order destroys that shock and surprise. Sometimes fans understand a story better than its creator.

Stories matter. We spend millions of dollars and millions of hours on stories—stories in books, stories in movies, stories on television shows. We dissect them. We analyze them. We take sides. (Team Edward? No: Team Jacob!) We get angry when someone messes with them. Our dreams, our folk tales, our mythologies, our history—all of these things take the form of stories. Stories are how our brains make sense of life.

What is it that makes some stories work, while others leave us untouched? I think there are two very basic, essential pieces to the puzzle:

1. We don’t know what is going to happen next, but
2. We care what is going to happen next.

It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. Think about this scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark:

 

It’s very early in the movie. We don’t know who this man is. We don’t really know what he’s up to, or why he needs the thing in his hand. There have been very few words--we have to watch closely and pay attention to follow the action. But somehow, even though we don’t know the character, we’re completely connected to what he is doing, and we’re worried about what will happen to him. There is a sense of danger; the stakes are life-and-death, even though we may not understand them yet. Three minutes into the movie, we are hooked. We are engaged. We are invested.

The fact is, we are storytelling animals—story-making animals. We can’t help ourselves. Put any series of events or situations in a line and we will turn them into a story and ask what happens next. We will force a pattern, even where none exists.

If you doubt me, take a look at this series of pictures and see if you can avoid making connections that create a story:

 

 

Now, just for fun, see what happens if you rearrange the pictures:

 

 

And, of course, when you remove certain elements, it affects the story we imagine:

 

The title of this blog post is “Teaching as Storytelling,” so obviously I’m trying to make a connection. Am I saying that our classes must be as engaging and suspenseful as an Indiana Jones movie? Should our students have to dodge giant, rolling boulders in order to get a good grade? No…though it’s tempting, sometimes.

What we say in class, how we say it, the order we in which we say it, and what we leave out…all of these things are enormously important because students are not simply receiving information from us. They are engaged in a story with us, whether we intend them to be or not.

Now, obviously, not all subjects lend themselves to storytelling in a literal way. There are very few characters you can forge an emotional connection with in math classes (unless you happen to be teaching Flatland).

However, there is intellectual engagement to be had, and there is always at least one character who has something at stake in the outcome. We say that learning should be an adventure for our students, but do we really believe it? We say that learning should be a journey, but do we talk to students in the language of travel? Do we make sure they’ve packed properly, that they have a map, and that they’re ready for the challenges that lie ahead? Do we spend time to get them excited about where they’re going?

If we want our students to be personally and emotionally connected to what we’re teaching, if we want them to feel like characters engaged in an important story or journey, we should able to answer at least some of the following questions for ourselves, even if students never think to ask them:

• In what ways will this course connect me to the larger world?
• What do I need to understand about that world?
• How might that understanding change the way I think about things?
• How might that understanding change the way I think about myself?
• What’s the Big Payoff if I hang in till the end?
• What is at stake if I do not hang on till the end?

Every class has an arc to it, a shape. We start somewhere. We end somewhere else. Students don’t always know where they are going—it has to be revealed, moment by moment. That is what creates suspense.

Yes, I know, we’ve all been told to post our learning objectives and talk about our learning objectives and write syllabi and lay everything out for our students. We’ve been told to reveal everything and make everything super-clear. But there is a benefit to withholding some information and being purposeful about what you reveal and when you reveal it. There’s a benefit to having students wonder what’s going to happen next.

Think about the classic model of storytelling we all learned in school: the movement from exposition to rising action to climax and denouement. Then think about the elements of good instructional technique and curriculum writing. They’re not so very different. A great class has some of the elements of a good mystery story. A question or mystery is posed. Clues are discovered and analyzed. Pieces are put together. Conclusions are reached.

 

Thinking of curriculum as a mystery that gradually unfolds and needs to be solved should lead us to think differently about what we say in class and how we say it. If we want our students to be actively engaged in identifying and solving problems, we have to stop spoon-feeding them information. We have to stop putting all the pieces together and tying them up with a bow.

As the author of the Star Wars blog said, it matters that you gasped in shock when you first discovered that Darth Vader was Luke’s father. That shock—that emotional resonance—is a major part of people’s love for the original movies. Why would you ever want to deny new viewers that pleasure—that emotional engagement?

As teachers, we are people who love our subject matter. Something engaged us, way back when we first encountered it. Something connected with us, intrigued us, made us ask questions and want to know more.  Our job now, as teachers, is to give students what was once given to us—those moments of engagement and excitement that made us want to set off on our journey of learning. Our job is to be great storytellers—to put students in the cave with Indy, leaning forward in their chairs, pencils in hand, asking, “What happens next?”

Now, perhaps you’re snickering or rolling your eyes. Perhaps you’re thinking, “Doing long division is not exactly as suspenseful as stealing idols from a dark and dangerous cave.” And you’re right. It’s not. But the stakes are just as high for our students…and the pathway is strewn with booby-traps. 

It’s not easy, what we’re asking students to do every day. It’s not simple. Not everyone completes the journey. In some of our neighborhoods, barely half of the kids make it to the end of their schooling story. Not everyone comes out with an armload of treasure, either. That’s a fact. So don’t tell me it’s not an adventure, or that the stakes aren’t life and death. Every moment we have with our students matters. Every moment is a chance to hand them the sword and say, “Go slay the dragon.”

Maybe we should stop plastering our walls with signs that say things like, “All students will learn,” and start putting up signs that say, “Heroes required.”

So What? The Importance of Asking the Right Questions

Originally published at http://www.catapultlearning.com/category/blog/.

When the Common Core State Standards were first released, our main concern—and panic—was about alignment. We always taught time in __ grade; now we have to teach it in __ grade. We used to teach book X, but now they’re telling us the Lexile rank is too low. These were certainly valid concerns. Alignment had to be done; crosswalks had to be constructed.

But now, a few years into implementation, it’s becoming clear that the heart and soul of the Common Core lies in the questions we ask our students, not the facts or skills we teach at particular grade levels. I would argue that if we could do only one thing in our classrooms to implement the Common Core, changing our questions would be vastly more effective and important than any other thing we could choose.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. Asking good questions is an educational art that goes all the way back to Socrates, one of the first Great Teachers on record.  In fact, Socrates was famous for asking particularly annoying and provocative questions—questions that challenged the very foundation of people’s thinking. In his honor, we have a whole theory of teaching—a “method” named after the man. It’s a method praised in theory but practiced all too rarely. Many teachers, even at the college level, find it difficult, or assume that their students can’t rise to the challenge. But those who experiment with Socratic teaching come to learn that students don’t need as much lecture, as much information, as we thought. They are not empty vessels waiting to be filled. They can do more of the wrestling and grappling with ideas that define higher-level thinking than we give them credit for.

We spend a lot of time talking about question methodology—things like providing adequate wait-time before providing an answer—but we don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the kinds of questions we ask. Holding up a series of wooden blocks representing three-dimensional, geometric solids, and asking, “What’s this?  And what’s this? And this is a…..?” may be an effective way to assess student knowledge of terminology, but that’s about all it can accomplish. Is there an essential difference between asking those kinds of questions and saying something like, “Who can find an example of a cylinder in this classroom?” Do we talk enough, in teacher education classes or in our PLCs, about the value and use of these different kinds of questions—what each one tells us and when it might be useful to deploy one as opposed to another?

One of my favorite examples of Socratic teaching comes from Rick Garlikov, who wanted to see how little actual information he had to provide to third graders in order to teach the concept of binary arithmetic—the use of zeros and ones to form any number or word, which lies at the heart of computing. He found out that the answer was, “almost none.” He was able to move from, “How many fingers am I holding up?” to a very deep and sophisticated level of understanding, almost entirely through strategic and careful questioning. You can see an example of the results here.

I witnessed a fascinating example of the power of Saying Less a few months ago. In response to something I read or something I saw on a TED talk, I posed a question to my two sons, age 12 and 8. They wanted me to take them to buy a new video game, and I said they’d have to earn it by answering a question. The question was this: how much does it cost to take a shower in this house? That’s all I gave them. I didn’t tell them how to figure it out. I didn’t tell them what they would need. I did tell them that I would provide assistance or materials as needed, so they weren’t entirely on their own. But they had to figure out what the question meant, what it required, and how to get to the solution on their own.

They blinked at me a few times, confounded, and then started talking to each other and making plans. They grabbed a stopwatch, a bucket, some measuring cups, and off they went. Not everything they tried made sense, but the mistakes clarified their thinking. Occasionally they’d come back to me, asking for things like copies of water bills. After about an hour, they had an answer. They were pumped up—winded—excited. And they were incredibly proud of themselves. It had been fun. It wasn’t math, as far as they were concerned; it was just a puzzle. And kids love puzzles.

We need to think about questions at every level of our teaching—from essential questions that frame larger instructional units to daily questions that drive a particular lesson. “How do metaphors and similes compare things in different ways?” is almost certainly going to be more enticing and intriguing to students than, “Students will understand the difference between metaphors and similes.”  Students may meet a learning objective, but they have to answer a question. It makes a difference.

In a wonderful book entitled, Oh, Yeah?!: Putting Argument to Work Both in School and Out, authors Michael Smith, Jeffrey Wilhelm, and James Fredericksen discuss the importance of questions in pushing students to craft strong arguments in their writing. Some of the questions are fairly basic, things I used to ask in my own teaching. “What do you think?” helps students come up with a thesis statement or claim. “What makes you say that?” helps students identify important textual evidence. But then the authors throw in a third question that I rarely deployed: “So what?”

“So what?” It’s an amazing question. It forces students to connect the evidence back to the claim—to explain why the evidence matters and how it supports the claim. It’s where the real, hard work of argument has to happen—and it’s where student papers tend to fall apart.

“So what?” I can’t think of a better all-purpose, high-level, complex question. Think about what it takes to answer a question like that. Think about the content knowledge, the conceptual understanding, and the communication skills you need to explain—in any situation—why something matters.

I’ve said before that we can’t quickly or automatically do everything required for the transition to the Common Core. It’s going to be a process. But these are certainly some things we could do tomorrow, or start doing better: tell less; ask more; and ask why.

New Year’s Day and the Man in the Mirror: What Can We Change?

(this post was previously published in a slightly different version at http://www.catapultlearning.com/category/blog/)

On New Year’s Day, 1990, the newly elected president of a newly democratic Czechoslovakia stood in front of his people and spoke about the fall of Communism and the challenges that lay ahead. He started his speech like this:

My dear fellow citizens,

For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

This president was no ordinary politician. He was Vaclav Havel, a playwright, essayist, fan of The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, and someone who had spent years in prison as part of a resistance movement that had taken the dangerous and radical step of demanding that the government obey its own laws and live up to its principles.  You might not think that a ragtag bunch of writers, musicians, and artists could pose a serious threat to a repressive, Communist government. You might not think that simply demanding honesty and truth would be enough to make a government afraid of you. But you’d be wrong. The regime feared this group, locked them up, and banned their artworks. Apparently they were right to be worried, because, in the end, the government collapsed and Havel was made president...without anyone firing a shot.

So Havel was carried off to the castle—almost literally—and in his first New Year’s address, he chose not to be triumphal, puffing people up and filling them full of unwarranted optimism or a false of superiority. He didn’t say, “We won! We’re great! We can do anything.” He said, “Let’s get real.”

In a couple of weeks, it will be the 20^th anniversary of the day I arrived on the Slovak side of what had once been Czechoslovakia to teach English—inspired, in part, by the life and work of Vaclav Havel.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about the man, and New Year’s Day, and what it really takes to make a new beginning—a beginning that leads to something new, and real, and lasting.
We have a history of making resolutions at this time of year—promises and commitments that often deflate and blow away before January is even finished.  We shoot for the moon and hit…well, usually we hit nothing.

But what if we had a different tradition? What if, instead of making grand promises, we made little, private, Havel-esque New Year’s Addresses to ourselves instead? What if we took a little time, when the year was young, to look at ourselves in the mirror and say: Let’s face facts. I know what you want to do. I know all the things you want to accomplish. They’re good and noble things—important things. But let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with. It’s just you and me in here, so…let’s get real. 

Telling the truth can be a pretty brutal exercise. Vaclav Havel knew that. In his most famous essay, he made it clear that the most radical thing a person could do in a world built on lies is to live in truth—to say No—to refuse to play the game. It’s a brave thing to do, but one rarely gets awards or medals for doing it. The speaker of truth, they say, must show no mercy…and should expect none in return. So in the privacy of my own mirror, showing myself no mercy (and expecting none in return), what would I say in these first days of 2013, if I were brave and honest enough? What kind of New Year’s Address would I make to myself?

Well, since this began as a blog post for my company and not the Dr. Phil show, I’ll stick with educational topics. We have a lot of exciting things in the works for the coming year—some ready to roll out this month, some aimed for Back-to-School. But I think I’d have to confess to the mirror that no matter what I might be hoping for in terms of educational change, innovation, revolution, or evolution, a lot of our work will end up being resisted or ignored, even by people who agree with our goals.  It will be a lot of sound and fury signifying…well, less than we had hoped for. In the harsh light of the bathroom mirror, before we’ve even begun, I know this to be so. And I would have to say it to myself.

Doing new things is hard. Helping other people do new things is hard. It means giving up something old and comfortable, and when push comes to shove, people don’t like to do that. Nobody likes change, and most people don’t do it unless their backs are against the wall and there are no other options. I’m no different. We love the idea of change. That’s the easy part. We love the idea, and we love to make lists: I need to lose 20 pounds; my school needs to differentiate instruction; my country needs to overhaul entitlement programs. We all know what we need to do. We’re just not so good at doing it. 

So if I was going to look at myself in the mirror and say “Get real,” I’d have to say: “Listen. You know and I know that 90% of resolutions and big plans fail or never even get started. Maybe 95%. But that’s not 100%, so you can’t just roll over and give up.  You’ve got an honest chance, a real chance, at making that 5% work. So try for that, this year. Don’t try to do everything. Pick your battles.”

In the world we live in as educators—the world of 10,000 mandates—that’s a hard message to hear and live by, but I think it’s an important one. At the company where I lead a curriculum development team, we’re trying to take it to heart. We’ll be launching new programs later this month to support teachers in implementation of the Common Core State Standards in English and Mathematics for grades K-8, and in disciplinary literacy for middle and high school science and social studies teachers. The programs will provide teachers with downloadable, on-demand videos, live professional development workshops, on-site coaching support, and robust, useful teacher resources to support instruction. We are excited about these programs and look forward to seeing them go out into the world. But we know they aren’t going to solve all the problems of the world. They’re not even going to solve all the problems of the Common Core.

Throughout development, we’ve tried to hold onto the idea that Common Core implementation is a process, not an event. It’s not a “thing” you can just “do.” We can’t expect teachers to become expert at these new standards in a single day or even a single year. If we do expect that, we’re bound to fail, and so are the teachers. Because of this, we are not attempting to provide support for all things to all people. We are hoping that if we can focus on a few, key issues and challenges this year, teachers will have a real chance to grow, learn, and experience some success.

But chances are, we’re going to fall flat on our faces at least once, somewhere along the way. We all will. It’s inevitable. It’s the only way we learn how to do new things and grow. No baby goes from crawling to walking without falling down a few times. And we are all babies, every time we leave our comfort zone and set off into undiscovered country. So even if we don’t try to do everything, we’re still going to have some struggles doing anything if it’s new.

The only way to avoid failure altogether, as far as I’ve ever seen, is to resist the new, to refuse experimentation and to sneer at innovation—to stubbornly cling to what we have always done because it’s safer, and we know that at least to some degree, it “works.” But that resistance is a failure of its own, in the end. It’s the kind of failure that doesn’t teach. It’s the kind of failure that doesn’t open doors. It’s the kind of failure that lets the world pass us by while we stand unmoving, unmovable, and increasingly alone.

So let’s be willing to fail a little this year, without using that failure as an excuse to surrender or go backwards. Let’s take a shaky leap of faith, knowing that the odds are good we’ll fall flat on our faces. It might hurt a little bit. It might be embarrassing. But we’re all adults here. We’re school people. We’re tough. We can get up, dust ourselves off, and say, “All right. Let’s try that again.”

Little by little, we’ll get better. Little by little, we’ll learn. And maybe, a year from now, the face in the mirror will smile back at us and say, “Not bad.” And that smile—that baby step—that 5%— might just be enough to set a new world in motion.

After all, as our great, American poet, Michael Jackson, once said, “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change.”

A change. One baby step at a time.