Mind - Body - Heart - Spirit

Stephen Covey looks at the dimensions of mind, body, heart and spirit and their associated mental, physical, emotional and spiritual intelligences to describe the whole person. 

He believes that the highest manifestations of these intelligences are vision (mental), discipline (physical), passion (emotional), and conscience (spiritual). 

He does not claim any original thought, but I believe he has put various earlier ideas together in a coherent model. He places conscience at the center of a circle of vision, discipline and passion, implying that conscience is the guiding force for the other three intelligences. Ultimately, Covey’s message is that our “unique and personal significance, or our voice” as individuals can be found at the nexus of our gifts or intelligences. 

If you are a Covey fan, or if you are interested in exploring the concept further, pick up The 8th Habit by Stephen Covey.

Reading & Writing

What are some habits that may cognitively help students develop into better learners?  It appears that anyone who reads widely and regularly, and writes a daily reflective journal should acquire a better disposition for learning and understanding. Yesterday, I was pleased to witness a rare sight - a student with her nose obliviously buried in a novel while eating a burger at Wendy's. How can we encourage more of that among our students (the reading for pleasure - not the burger)?  As educators, we should share our own passion for reading, recommend titles to our students and even suggest they join or form a book club. Every time we see a child with her nose in a book, we can reinforce that behavior by engaging her in conversation about her reading. 

Reflective writing also exercises cognitive “muscles.” How can we revive the habit of journal writing among our students? One technique is the one-minute reflective paper after each class meeting. If we need to start small, we could have students write a short reflective paper at the end of each week instead. Pose the same two questions: “What was the big thing you learned this week?  What is the big unanswered question you are left with this week?” This would be a practical way to introduce reflective writing as well as assess student understanding.

A student who keeps a reflective journal and regularly reads for enjoyment is automatically developing vocabulary, comprehension and thinking skills. Reading a story is cognitively more engaging than listening to the story on tape, and listening to the story on tape is cognitively more engaging than watching it on television. 

Left Brain – Right Brain

Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, posits that while left-brain activities remain important, more of the right-brain characteristics will be needed for success in the future. The following is a review of the stated differences between right-brain and left-brain activities (quoted directly from  A Whole New Mind):

(1)  The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body; the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body.

(2)  The left hemisphere is sequential; the right hemisphere is simultaneous.

(3)  The left hemisphere specializes in text; the right hemisphere specializes in context.

(4)  The left hemisphere analyses the details; the right hemisphere synthesizes the big picture.

While we all use both sides of the brain, we do have a bias towards one side, Most of us, through traditional schooling, have been trained to use the left hemisphere of the brain. How can we help our students develop and use their ‘whole mind’? Encouraging students to generate challenging and meaningful questions, inquire, think critically, and create novel responses, may be a step in the right direction.

Those interested in learning more should read Pink’s book and see how his suggestions of Design, Story, Symphony Empathy, Play and Meaning can help develop the whole new mind. 

Meaning – Thought – Action

Jerry Porras, the co-author of Built to Last, and, Good to Great, while talking to the builders of great companies and ideas, found that these men and women represented a variety of very different personalities. However, what appeared to be common in these individuals was the clear alignment of three essential elements – Meaning, Thought and Action. I offer a very brief summary of these elements as described in Porras’s third and most recent research endeavor, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters.

Meaning is linked to what you love and are passionate about. You may not have just one passion but a portfolio of passions. This is a similar concept to what is described in Gladwell’s Outliers and Robinson’s The Element.  How do we as educators, draw deep meaning and purpose from our work with students? 

Thinking can either kill or allow our passions to take flight. Builders are somehow able to overcome self-doubt as well as the doubts of family and peers when it comes to persisting at what they find meaningful. While fortune or glory have come to many builders, it did not figure at all in their thinking. Rather, they trusted their passion enough to strive to become experts at it for its own sake. How can the way we think influence our own craft and improve our abilities to reach  our students?

Builders take action to achieve BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) for themselves. Just the act of setting these goals requires unreasonable confidence, because although they have a clear objective, they often don’t have a clear roadmap. Builders draw meaning from the journey. They learn from failures, persevere and improve, and get to the end of the journey through “thousands of tiny steps.” What personal BHAG can help drive our passion as educators?

The above just scratches the surface of Success Built to Last by Porras, Emery and Thompson. It pulls together a lot of what Gladwell and Robinson have to say on the subject and offers the practical aspects of aligning meaning, thought and action. 

Practice & Passion

Malcolm Gladwell who wrote both Blink and The Tipping Point has a new book called The Outliers. If you read and appreciated his insights in the first two books, you will enjoy The Outliers. One of his conclusions is that while a certain amount of intelligence is necessary for excelling in a particular field, super intelligence does not register as a major factor. Besides the necessary luck and attitude, he discovered that outliers of achievement in a particular field of expertise (those who are impressively beyond the average) all had at least 10,000 hours of association with their field of expertise before they began to make their mark. Among the examples he provides are Bill Gates and the Beatles.

Ken Robinson also has a new book out called The Element. One of Dr. Robinson’s conclusions is that only when we discover our passion and work at it, do we experience work being invigorating, exciting and meaningful. Dr. Robinson describes this as being in one’s element or being true to one’s calling.

If Gladwell’s and Robinson’s conclusions are correct, all our students have within them the seeds of true excellence and achievement in some field or calling. What they need is help in discovering where their passion lies. One way we can help, is to encourage those flashes of creativity, insight and aptitude we notice in our students – even if that passion may lie outside our own course or subject area. That word of encouragement may inspire further inquiry and a subsequent aha elemental moment!