Post 25: Resilience to prepare for chaos

Click here for the article in WIRED

Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos

Guest blog entry by S. McCrea (developer of the Thought for the Day blog for ELSLeaders.com)\

What a slogan for a school!….  The word “resilient” is of particular interest.  I’m a high school teacher who uses Dr. Daniel Amen’s “12 Prescriptions to build a healthier brain” (which includes resilient).    The Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focuses on resilience as one of its nine key principles.  

In an interview for Wired magazine, the director of the Lab made the following list.

Ito: There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.

We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.

FROM AN ARTICLE IN WIRED               A PRESENTATION by the Director:  http://www.inktalks.com/discover/287/joichi-ito-mit-media-lab-from-a-container-to-a-network 

Go ahead, click and follow the article.

Follow the Lab:   http://media.mit.edu/about/principles  

See the Media Lab’s Blog:  http://blog.media.mit.edu/  

To find out more about what Tony Wagner talks about, see these summaries:

(1) The Three "P”s … Play, Passion and Purpose… plus Get a Poster:  http://theindependenteducator.blogspot.com/2014/03/quotes-from-tony-wagners-talk-about.html

(2) Three videos by Tony Wagner (the 5 elements of innovation)

http://theindependenteducator.blogspot.com/2014/03/tony-wagner-gives-list-of-five-ways-to.html

(3)  See Tony Wagner’s list of “Seven Survival Skills”   

Can you list the seven skills?   Use the acronym "C I A” to remember the words...

COLL_______ATION

COMM_______ATION

CRIT______ THINK______ AND PROB_____ SOLV____

IMAG________TION AND CREAT______

INTI_______VE AND ENTRE________SHIP

ACC___ AND ANA_____ INFORMATION

AGI___TY   AND ADAP_______TY

To get the answers, go to http://www.tonywagner.com/7-survival-skills

(This blog post was prepared by S. McCrea, VisualAndActive@gmail.com, who welcomes suggestions for topics for the Thought for the Day)