Re-thinking Life !

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 ...

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 t...

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 n...