Gillian and Routines

 So, Gillian and I would NOT get along. 

As a part of my prepping for NaNo I'm reading more about other writers and how they work. I read about Gillian Flynn in the WSJ today. She wrote Gone Girl and is writing Utopia now. So, she's super talented, but it's sad to see that she and I would never, ever get along. 

How do you kick off your workweek? Do you zip down to your office?

I’m not a “zipper” of any sort. My husband and I are very well matched in that he is a morning person, so he gets up with the kiddos, who come barreling into our bedroom. I put my head under my pillow, because some of the best writing I ever do is usually from 11 o’clock at night till about 2. I sleep until about 10, then I amble downstairs; I pretend to be a little sheepish for my husband’s sake—like, “Oh, my gosh. Did I sleep in again?”— then some athletes carbo-load; I definitely caffeine-load. First, I have my bowl of cereal, which is Lucky Charms. That’s my ritualistic cereal. I eat all the marshmallows and good stuff. Then, the sweet milk is left, so I pour it into my coffee mug. It’s the most colorful coffee you’ll ever have. And then, I’m embarrassed to say, my second drink of the day is a Cherry Coke Zero. By about 10, 10:30, my Cherry Coke Zero bandwagon begins.

That's the first question and answer in the series and it only get's worse from there. I don't know how anyone could function like this. I just don't get it. 

My best writing? My best writing comes from a long early morning run or walk with Sadie, followed by a cup of coffee and a computer, with quiet in the house before anyone wakes up. usually this occurs on weekends. Everyone else sleeps in and I get to work on the fun writing. Sometimes it happens on weekdays since Covid started. Lately too, I've been working on weekend afternoons and evenings.

I'm gonna need to up my game some for NaNo. I doubt that just weekends will do it through November, but we shall see. 

If you'd like to see the rest of the article, you can find it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-gillian-flynn-gets-her-best-writing-done-after-midnight-11600691875 or for you that do not have a subscription, feel free to write me and I'll send you a copy. 

Lesson Planning

We provide a leadership series of classes that are unique in our industry. Our bread and butter is the delivery of eLearning on safety training and compliance training. Providing these leadership classes are soft skills training that we rarely have the chance to provide to our learning cohort, but one that we are exceptionally good at. We use facilitators for providing this training who are not just subject matter experts in the industry but are also experts in delivering our content. They have the capability of weaving themes throughout the class and guiding the trainee to learn the content along those "theme roadways" without deliberately or blatantly knocking them over the head with the information. It's a far more dynamic and flexible way of teaching and many of our regular instructors can not easily make the jump from the hard skills training they are used to to the facilitation style that is more along the lines of the developmental and nurturing perspectives that are needed for the leadership training. 

But how much freedom is there in our lesson planning and modules? Are we too set in stone? Are we able to react, adjust and adapt as the lesson unfolds?

 One thing I ran across when writing one of my papers for my class was this quote from Pratt & Collins on the Teaching Perspective Inventory (TPI) regarding the Transmission Perspective, effective teaching assumes instructors will have mastery over their content" (p. 3). Under the descriptions of Nurturing Perspective and Developmental Perspective, the mastering of the information by the teacher is not highlighted, instead the relationship between the learner and the teacher and the learner to the material is more dominant. 

I find that our facilitators in these leadership classes have an overwhelming mastery of the content to the point that they know each learning objective and can guide the learners through the morass of discussions, role-plays, and thought exercises so that they are able to change their views and perspectives on their roles at work and in life. This seems like a combination of nurturing and developmental but without that feature of content mastery as described in transmission the results of the Nurturing and Developmental perspectives would be much harder to achieve. 

Secondly, what I find amazing as I watch our facilitators deliver these classes is that they deliberately set up situations to allow the class to jump off the rails or leave the confines of their lesson plans to see where the class takes it. They do try to guide them back at times if they see the class going off on tangents, but there have also been learning moments when they allow the class to go off on their own and after the class, we update the content and modules to help allow the same tangential experimentation to occur in future classes. 

When reading Pratt & Collins I see that our facilitators are both using Developmental perspective by combining "effective questioning and ‘bridging’ knowledge that challenges learners to move from relatively simple to more complex forms of thinking" (p.3)  and Nurturing perspective in that "their teaching always strives for a balance between challenging people to do their best, while supporting and nurturing their efforts to be successful" (p. 3). The facilitators embrace those moments when the lesson doesn't unfold exactly as they intended. From the standpoint of an auditor, it's a remarkable capability and one that I hope to leverage as I continue learning. 

Pratt, Daniel D. & Collins, John B. (2000). "The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI)," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2000/papers/68

Military Training and life vs Corporate and Industrial Training

It's interesting the differences I see in Military training and life vs corporate and industrial training.

We run a safety council that trains over 2000 employees in industrial safety, leadership, and skills training every day. For the most part our training is "compliance" driven, meaning that before they can go to work, the employees need to have this training. Although we provide the training, and the trainee needs it to continue work, the employee's organization pays for the training and pays for the trainee's time to take it. They usually bill back this training cost to the contracting/owner organization.

For example, a refinery owner like Shell might need 200 contractors for an upcoming project. All 200 workers have to take Shell specific training that we offer on behalf of Shell. The contracting companies all bill Shell for that time and expense of their employees taking the training. To a new observer, it might look like a huge shell game.

When I was in the military I remember that PLDC, Scuba School, Ranger School, Airborne School and more were all a part of my career development and were funded by my company and battalion. I took these courses because I could see how the patches on my uniform, the increase in rank, and the schools in my file directly affected my military career.

In the corporate world there is less of a direct relationship between the courses and classes that an employee might take to their career. Instead the classes and courses are related to specific projects and work events only. The employees jump from contractor to contractor quickly and any career development they might have had is wasted because there are so few classes that are meaningful outside of their organizations.

Until just recently I was a Director of Career Development for a contracting company with over 7000 employees. I was tasked with helping to create a series of career development road maps for our technicians that might appear to them to be more worthwhile for their career potential, and be something similar to the career path that I followed to go from a PFC to a SGT. Sadly, I never found that it positively affected our retention rate the way that we had hoped.

We work with primarily "white truck" supervisors and blue-collar field workers.  They are continually looking for ways to move up the career ladder but are constantly stymied by the paradigm I outlined above. Part of what I would like to create are industry-wide training standards that an employee can take that would directly benefit him and his employer as well as be something he can take with him if he has to leave, much like my Ranger Tab would have been meaningful if I had left the 2/75 RGR and gone to work at the 10th MTN.

BOGO's and Grit

"Failure as teachable moments to identify skills and knowledge students need to add to their strengths and natural talents to achieve their goals." 

I can say this, the SEAL I worked for had a very intriguing and not very profitable business model. He never wanted to sacrifice quality for quantity. He would constantly remind us that he would rather have just three good people in the maintenance program than thirty decent or bad ones. This might be great for keeping the quality of the workouts high, but for people trying to progress from a lower starting point, for a business that has to compete with CrossFit, fun runs, gyms and a myriad of other workout options, it wasn't a growth model. 

A couple of people emailed me to discuss yesterday's post. First, why do I think the grandmother succeeded or the young man failed, or why was it not possible to determine who would and who would not have the grit and perseverance to complete the course; I think alot of it was internal. There were so many factors at play with each bootcamp that I could never have been able to determine or predict the outcome, even if I had asked for a survey prior to the class. Some people came with friends and were there as buddies, some came with children or with parents. Some had a chip on their shoulders or something to prove, others were told to be there by their parents. All of these factors as well as injury, home life, commute times, work-life, played a part in whether or not someone would ultimately graduate. The young man could have gotten to day three and felt the experience was stupid and decided to leave or perhaps his work asked him to fly to Alaska for two weeks at the last moment. The grandmother could have been there as moral support for her granddaughter and was leading the way. 

One interesting fact about all of this is that whenever the office decided to run a BOGO event, a buy one get one free, or a pay for yourself and bring a buddy for free, we would usually get 30-50% more people at the start of class, but we would ultimately lose far far more than usual. Classes that usually started with 20 ended with 15 graduates, but with the BOGO's we would have classes of 30 and only see 9 or 10 graduates. I think that had to do with financial "buy-in" and mass hysteria.  Buy-in in that if you spend $300 dollars for a two-week course you really want to get your money's worth. But if it's just $150 or if your friend picked up the whole tab, well then that's not quite as important nor as valuable to you. Mass hysteria in that once trainees started to see more and more people quit, it no longer had the same stigma as when very few people quit. 

Ultimately it's not about how many pushups you can do, it's all about how much of the yelling, the mess and the muck, the waking up with sore muscles you can endure and what each person's expected outcome expectation is. We graduated people who increased their pushup count over two weeks by going from doing only seven correct pushups to doing 10. But it was the fact that they put up with the nonsense and the drudgery that got them to graduation and then onto our maintenance program. 

Looking back on it now I should have performed some more intensive surveys regarding their rationale for wanting to take the course, then some after graduation surveys of both the graduates and the fallouts to determine if grit can be nailed down pre-bootcamp or not like Duckworth did. Now that the business is defunct I'll have to source a new bootcamp. 

Grit and Quit

For the past two decades I've had a part time job with a former Navy SEAL to help him lead PT every morning from 0530 to 0630, outside in a park near downtown Houston for civilians who want a military style workout. Every other month or so this SEAL PT Course hosted a "bootcamp" for twenty new "lifer" candidates. This bootcamp was a two week course from 0500 to 0700 every weekday morning. Hundreds of buddy carries, burpeees, pushups, situps, mountain climbers, and miles and miles of running. If a candidate graduated they got to go onto our maintenance program. The bootcamp had a 50% failure or drop out rate.

One thing that never failed to surprise me was trying to determine who would and who would not make it through the two week bootcamp course at the beginning of each bootcamp. I was reminded of this when reading about Grit and watching the TedTalk by Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit (here). Duckworth states that "grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future vision not just for a week or months but for years." In relation to the two-week bootcamp, Grit was the desire to hang in there and suck up the punishment dished out by former Spec Ops warriors every morning for two weeks.

I always found it remarkable how impossible it was to determine who would and who would not make it through the full two weeks on that first day formation. Who could have guessed that that young man in his 20's who looked to be in such good shape would not come on Wednesday after we sprayed the class with a hose and had them roll in the sand for 30 minutes. Or who would have predicted that the 50 year old diminutive grandmother who on day one couldn't do a single proper pushup would still be there chugging along with the rest of the group at the end of the two weeks. There was no rhyme or reason that I could tell from the outside, or just by looking at people about how they might perform.

One of the other instructors, Harris, was a former 3rd Battalion Army Ranger, Captain. Whenever he and I worked together in a bootcamp I was surprised by his eagerness to provide guidance and homework to the bootcamp class. Where I was a "if they can't hang let'em quit" instructor, he was a "give them the opportunity to succeed" instructor. Two of his favorite pieces of homework to assign the class was to watch the movies "Touching the Void" about stranded mountain climbers and "The Endurance" about Shackleton's expedition.

What I didn't realize then, but do now is that Harris was creating a learning environment with a growth mindset. In an article I read on Fixed and Growth Mindset in Education and How Grit Helps Students Persist in the Face of Adversity (here), Hochanadel and Finamore write of Duckworth et al saying "Faculty can help students develop grit and a growth mindset to increase their chances of reaching long-term goals, by internalizing the motivation to persist." In her Ted Talk Duckworth quotes Dweck on a growth mindset as "When kids learn and read about the brain they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition." By having the bootcampers watch these stories about overcoming incredible odds and persevering despite the difficulty and challenges, Harris was not only helping the bootcampers put things into perspective, but he was also helping to instill a growth mindset and provide fertile soil for the growth of grit among the trainees.

It would have been nice to have a "Grit Scale" but in the absence of that it was nice to see that after two weeks the graduates who were left after the bootcamp all went on to our maintenance program and there we had the trust in knowing all of them had the grit needed to keep up and persevere.

More Reflection to Become a Better Teacher

I had a chance to talk for a while with Catie, a fellow teacher/trainer/facilitator the other day (and yes I'm trying to get her to be a guest blogger) and she impressed the hell out of me. Really she shouldn't have. It was such a simple thing she was doing, and I should have been doing it myself. I can’t wait to try and implement this with my team. What’s sad is that I’ve been implementing tools like this for the class for years, I’ve just failed to do it for the instructor pool. 

When I was training for my previous job, I would end each class, or even each segment of class by asking each person in the class what they had learned that they hadn’t known before the class started. This I felt did several things: 

1) it made them think back and reflect on the course from their own perspective, wake up those memory cells, 

2) it made them reprocess what I had said and put it into their own words to vocalize it to the class, 

3) it allowed the other trainees in the class to hear it again to help reactivate their memories and 

4) they were allowed to hear it that second time in someone else’s voice, in one of the other trainer’s frame of reference, which might have been different and more in their lingo than mine might have been.

I didn’t know then that I was forcing reflection on the class, but it seemed like the right thing to do so we did. Who knew is was so thoroughly grounded in learning theory. 

Since taking classes and learning about the power of reflection we’ve also created a website group page for our leadership training students. We hope to make it a place they can come and access new tools and tips, hear from others, and reflect again about what they may have learned in the class. A reflection page so to speak. 

I have been reading a book on Skillful Teaching by Stephen Brookfield’s book on teaching, it seemed like every single chapter was filled with feedback loop mechanisms both for the instructor and for the student. It was clear to see that he was a huge proponent of reflection. If I take nothing else from this second life educational journey it will be about the power of reflection for creating resilient long term memory. I see now from your post that I can do more for our cadre of instructors as well in helping them with their own reflection and learning!

Prepping for NaNo

I'm getting ready for my fifth or sixth NaNo (see here). I actually wrote several of my novels by starting them on NaNo. I'm working on my next novel, a thriller because I wrote it two years ago on NaNo. Who knew I had 60K words in a novel sitting there? 

So, I'm prepping for November in several ways. 

First, in the past I've been a (seat of the) "pantser" not a "planner." These are the two types of NaNo writers, Planners and Pantsers. This year I'm going to be more of a Planner. As such I've started my outline. Here it is so far. 

I've been writing it rather than typing it because I'm still in the brainstorming phase. I've also color-coded it and really fleshed it out far more than I have in the past. Helps to start to generate some momentum. 

Secondly, I'm already getting NaNo Writing Buddies. Two are in the same genre, and about a dozen are locals who I can hook up for writing workshops. I've even gotten my cousin in Washington D.C. Involved so I'll have that bit of impetus as well. 

Finally, I've started promoting this blog on NaNo so I can stay accountable to a crowd. Already I'm seeing almost a hundred more views per day which makes me feel that the marketing and publicity is working. And as you've heard me mention, I'm working on getting some guest bloggers to come in. 

Lately, this blog started to waver off piste so to speak. Lots more Adult Learning and Leadership (see here) which I don't intend to stop, but don't you worry, if you're a writer, there will be plenty on writing coming up in the coming weeks. 

Dearth of Lines

I'm not reading as much right now, so there's a dearth of "Morning Lines" (here) or "First Lines" (here). I read a ton for work and for classes. I actually have a week without reading right now having gotten in front of my homework, so I jumped into reading a book for fun. Sadly, there are very few great lines to quote from The Devil and Karl Marx!

That being said, this one hit me the other day. This is a fun song, but these lines struck me:

'I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved

Another Great One

 Recently I got another wonderful review. A few weeks back I wrote about a review I got from a former policeman. He was not someone who wanted to give me a good review, but he grudgingly did (see here). I think I like these reviews from people who don't like my work. 

Thank you KCat. I don't mind at all being compared to Joseph Heller and Earnest Hemingway. I'm happy to hear that. I remember reading lots of Hemingway in high school, in Belgium as a foreign exchange student, and in college. His style never appealed to me either KCat, but Joseph Heller? That's a whole nother issue. 

I love Heller. Catch 22 is one of my faves. Sure there is an ebb and flow that can be tedious, but the writing and the plot, the characters and humor all are superb. I'll gladly let you compare me to Heller.  

It's a tad nerve wracking these reviews. I'm glad I get so many positive ones, but these reviews from folks who don't really like me, they're the best!

No Fan of the Victorian Era, However . . .

 I am no fan of the Victorian Era, however I have started receiving letters from a little group that sends them out that transport me to that time with some Letters from Sherlock Holmes. 

The group that does this is called "Dear Holmes," (see here) and really it's quite fun. For a long while, I participated in Letter Joy, which sent out representations of famous historical letters once every two weeks. It was really interesting but there was no theme to it all. One week would come a letter about a problem installing cabling in the Chesapeake Bay (turned out to be the first telegraph line or something) the next week a riot in Philadelphia, (a voting rights riot), all quite intriguing but no common thread to link it all together. In fact, in each envelope, there were two letters, and in many cases, there weren't commonalities between the two letters! After about a year I gave up on the historical letters through Letter Joy. 

Dear Holmes at leas provides a little, silly, mystery to solve. The one I'm reading through right now is about a museum curator who is writing to Holmes because of break-ins. I'm on my third letter in this case. I predict the next will be the solution. Then it will all start again. 

It's fun to get something through the mail like this. It arrives, I see it on the kitchen counter, I have to take my time, stop life for a moment, to sit down and think and read. It helps me take a step out of the regular hoi-polloi of life. 

I wish there were serial novellas of the same type. Now that I think about it, I betcha there is. Usually, if I've thought of something, some other enterprising entrepreneur has already done it (see here). A serial novella might have that same consistency of theme throughout that I like from the Dear Holmes letters. I'll let ya know!