Re-thinking Life !

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Here’s How to Create a Purpose-Driven Organization

This is not, yet another, post on the importance of an organization's purpose. Everyone seems to be writing about it. In fact, it’s the most discussed topic in transformational leadership since every organization should have a purpose of “being”. Talk to any employee and he can either recite his organizational purpose and values statements or remember its key words. In my school, some of our teaching faculty know it by heart, most memorized its buzz words: Well-rounded, Interdependent, Social skills, Robust educational program. WISE they call it. We even have a mission week where our purpose statement is displayed everywhere, football matches are played, and prizes are won. Some banks even force their employees to memorize their vision and mission statements. But in order for an organization to get employees to bring their brainpower and vigor to work, it needs to be purpose-driven not purpose-ostensible. Robert Quinn and Anjan Thakor, both prominent researchers and academics i

Education Reform and Social Cohesion in Lebanon

It is no secret that the MENA region has had a sweeping education reform as the result of the Arab Spring, although the result of this reform, up till now, has not had the desired effect ( Read here ). Lebanon is no strange to education reform. In the post-war torn country, Lebanon sought to reform its education sector to create social cohesion amongst its divided sectarian and religious groups (based on the premise that the cause of the 15 year civil war was religious and sectarian, although many historians argue that social injustice, masked in religious and sectarian factions, was what spiraled Lebanon into a destructive civil war). Two education reforms were thus conceived and implemented, the Educational Recovery Plan in post war Lebanon in 1994, and the National Action Plan for Education for All in 2005. However, two questions arise as we ponder on education reform in Lebanon, a conflict-prone country: 1- Who takes decisions on the need, nature, and implementation of the educat

Hattie’s Effect Size: A pseudoscience or critics just being critics?

Hattie’s meta-mata analysis that culminated in the publication of his most influential work of Visible Learning (2009), and later updated to include more studies, has been hailed as the “holy grail” for educators and education leaders around the world. In particular, his effect size of instructional practice interventions has had the lion’s share of his work. Hattie considered that if schools set the effect size at 0 then “virtually everything works, and so we need to shift the question from “ what works in education” to “what works best in education”. Hattie’s meta-meta analysis of more than 800 meta-analyses studies comprising 50,000 studies (later included more 1500 meta-analyses) revealed that the baseline of the effect size that schools should start from is not 0 but 0.4, termed as the “hinge point”. In other words, for medium to large effect sizes on student achievement, the effect size of an instructional practice should be o.4 and above. This does not mean that we need

Global cooperation depends on the strength of local connections

The story of humanity is one of extraordinary cooperation but also terrible conflict. We come together to build cities, civilisations and cultures, but we also destroy these through violence against each other and degradation of our environment. Given that human nature is capable of both extremes, how can we design societies and institutions that help to bring out our better, more cooperative, instincts? This question is not limited to humans. Life’s domains are replete with many forms of cooperation, from microbes sharing helpful molecules to dolphins providing aid to the injured. This kind of ‘altruistic’ behaviour – helping others at one’s own expense – presents an evolutionary puzzle. As Charles Darwin put it in The Descent of Man (1871): ‘He who was ready to sacrifice his life … rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.’ The question then becomes, what kinds of conditions lead to the evolution of cooperative behaviour, when w

Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy

According to the grit narrative, children in the United States are lazy, entitled and unprepared to compete in the global economy. Schools have contributed to the problem by neglecting socio-emotional skills. The solution, then, is for schools to impart the dispositions that enable American children to succeed in college and careers. According to this story, politicians, policymakers, corporate executives and parents agree that kids need more grit . The person who has arguably done more than anyone else to elevate the concept of grit in academic and popular conversations is Angela Duckworth, professor at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In her new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance , she explains the concept of grit and how people can cultivate it in themselves and others. According to Duckworth, grit is the ability to overcome any obstacle in pursuit of a long-term project: ‘To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purpo

Arabic translators did far more than just preserve Greek philosophy

In European antiquity, philosophers largely wrote in Greek. Even after the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean and the demise of paganism, philosophy was strongly associated with Hellenic culture. The leading thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek literature; Cicero even went to Athens to pay homage to the home of his philosophical heroes. Tellingly, the emperor Marcus Aurelius went so far as to write his Meditations in Greek. Cicero, and later Boethius, did attempt to initiate a philosophical tradition in Latin. But during the early Middle Ages, most of Greek thought was accessible in Latin only partially and indirectly. Elsewhere, the situation was better. In the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the Greek-speaking Byzantines could continue to read Plato and Aristotle in the original. And philosophers in the Islamic world enjoyed an extraordinary degree of access to the Hellenic intellectual heritage. In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Ara