A few are gifted with the ability to teach well without working at it. Others must learn the skill. For most of us, learning how to teach means studying and practicing and seeing what we did right and wrong.

[There are] four levels of teaching: at the bottom is the “unconscious Incompetent.” This poor creature is a very poor teacher, but doesn’t know it. He goes on in the same old way, perhaps lecturing in a dull, monotone manner, unaware that he is wasting his time and the students’. We can do nothing towards improving this fellow, because he can’t be changed until he reaches the next level, which is the “Conscious Incompetent.”

The Unconscious Incompetent (The Ignorant)

Now we have a fellow that is bad, but fortunately, knows he is bad. He is looking for help, and the chances are pretty good that he will find a way to improve his methods. He is willing to try something new; he is willing to admit that maybe he isn’t getting through to his students. We can work with him because he wants to become better. If we can show him the tools of the trade, he will start getting results, and he will know why. This means he now has been raised to the third level, the “Conscious Competent.”

The Conscious Incompetent (The Aware)

This person is a good teacher and knows why. He knows what will work and what won’t for him. He has experimented, changed, measured, reviewed and constantly looked for more and better ideas. This fellow knows his capabilities and his limitations. He knows about teaching. He probably would make a good teacher trainer.

The Conscious Competent (The Learned)

There is a final level, though, and it is one that gives us a hard time, because he is the fellow that is a good teacher by nature. Somehow he just always does the right thing, says the right thing and gets the right results. The trouble is, he doesn’t know why he does what he does. He is in the small class of people we will call the “Unconscious Competent.” He’s good, but he doesn’t know what it is that makes him good. The one teaching assignment that he would probably fail at would be in trying to teach others how to teach.

The Unconscious Competent (The Master)

The only bad thing about having [Unconscious Competent] people around is that it leads folks to say, “Well, good teachers are born, not made. You either have it or you don't.” If we haven't accomplished anything else in this series, I hope we have proven that such a statement as this one is very, very untrue.We can all teach somebody something.

The 4 Stages of Competence are a learning model that describes the various psychological stages we go through when learning a new skill: Unconscious competence (ignorance), conscious incompetence (awareness), conscious competence (learning) and unconscious competence (mastery). Its origins can be traced back to management coach Martin M. Broadwell. He developed the model to describe different levels of teaching in the 1960s. It was published in periodical form; this is the original 16th and last part of the series. 

Digitized articles from a conservative Christian peridoical, Gospel Guardian

parenting

Parenting

education

Learning & Education

problemsolving

Problem Solving

humanresources

Human Resources

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Teaching For Learning (The 4 Levels Of Teaching)

I will have to remember:“I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators”.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

habits

Habits

mentalhealth

Mental Health

The Swamp, The Alligators, And The Other Side (Remember What You Need To Do)

How do we make decisions when the outcomes are uncertain?One possible way would be to calculate the expected value of each option by multiplying each possible outcome amount by its probability and then choosing the option with the highest expected value.While this strategy would maximize the payoff in expectation, this is not what we tend to do. In particular, we seem to be irrationally influenced by past outcomes of our decisions when making subsequent choices.

Irrationally Influenced Rational Decisions 

Research in the multidisciplinary field of neuroeconomics has mainly been driven by two influential theories regarding human economic choice:<ul><li>prospect theory, which describes decision-making under risk, and</li><li>reinforcement learning theory, which describes learning for decision-making.</li></ul>

Neuroeconomics

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Japan have developed and validated a model (“dynamic prospect theory”) that integrates the most popular model in behavioral economics to describe decision-making under uncertainty—prospect theory, and a well-established model of learning from neuroscience—reinforcement learning theory.This model more accurately described the decisions that people (and monkeys) made while facing risk than prospect theory or reinforcement learning theory alone, and revealed a systematic violation of prospect theory’s assumption that probability weighting is static.

Dymanic Prospect Theory

Specifically, the researchers asked 70 people to repeatedly choose between two lotteries in which they could gain some reward with some probability. The lotteries varied in the size of the reward, the probability of receiving it, and the amount of risk involved.The results showed that immediately after experiencing an outcome that was bigger than the expected value of the selected option, participants behaved as if the probability of winning in the next lottery increased.

How A Lucky Win Skews A Known Probability

Senior author of the study Assistant Professor Hiroshi Yamada says “This behavior is surprising because winning probabilities were clearly described to the participants (participants did not have to learn them from experience) and these probabilities were also completely independent of previous outcomes.”Using their dynamic prospect theory model, the researchers were able to determine that the change in behavior is driven by a change in the perception of probabilities rather than by a change in valuation of rewards.

How Winning Changes Perception Of The Variables

Professor Yamada also says: “Such learning from unexpected events underlies reinforcement learning theory and is a well-known algorithm that occurs when people need to learn the rewards from experience.It is interesting that it occurs even if learning is not necessary.”This intriguing findin expands our understanding of decision-making mechanisms.

Probabilities & Prospects: Winning Is Believing

Do we know the odds or do we like the odds? 

Researchers established a model, termed "dynamic prospect theory," which more accurately portrays human and monkey decision-making under uncertainty.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

strategy

Strategy

Decision Making: Past Wins (Un)Shape Future Choices

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

The fourth of six volumes collects essays that British social critic Huxley (1894-1963) wrote during a period that witnessed Germany's Anschluss with Austria, the Sudeten crisis, intensifying violence in the Spanish Civil War, Stalin's purges, Japan's invasion of China, and Mussolini's Ethiopian war. The collection includes all his published essays, in their latest version, and a selection of shorter reviews and brief occasional pieces.

writing

Reading & Writing

loveandrelationships

Love & Relationships

books

Books

Complete Essays: Aldous Huxley, 1936-1938

When observing an object, what we see might not be an accurate representation of its actual size. Instead, our perception might be influenced by previously viewed objects – a large object might make the subsequent one seem bigger than it is, and vice versa for a small object.This visual bias is linked with early visual-evoked brain activity and is driven by the residual information retained by neural populations in our brain’s basic visual analysis levels. In essence, what we see is an ‘average’ our brain creates between what’s happening before our eyes and what has occurred in the past.

The Previous, The Subsequent And The Average

Recently published research in the Journal of Neuroscience, reaffirms an intriguing concept in neuroscience: our perceptions are often distorted representations of the external world, rather than faithful reproductions.The researchers suggest that this bias arises from a mismatch between our brain’s limited computational resources and the multitude of stimuli bombarding our senses.This distortion helps our brain find regularities, making the external world more predictable and manageable.

Representations Rather Than Faithful Reptroductions 

New research underlines the brain’s role not only as a receptor but also a constructor of reality.

Our past experiences influence our current perceptions.

mindfulness

Mindfulness

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Perception is Not Only a Matter of Now: Our Past Influences What We See

The neuroscience of fitness, a fascinating intersection of physical activity and brain health, is a rapidly developing area of research. This field explores the profound effects of regular exercise on our brain and nervous system, revealing significant implications for our overall health and quality of life. One key discovery is the relationship between exercise and neurogenesis – the creation of new brain cells. This primarily occurs in the hippocampus, an area of the brain fundamental to learning and memory.

The Neuroscience Of Fitness

Regular physical activity triggers the release of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which nurtures existing neurons and encourages the growth and development of new neurons and synapses.Aerobic exercises like running and swimming are particularly beneficial. They not only stimulate neurogenesis but also increase the size of the anterior hippocampus, leading to improved spatial memory.

Exercise And Neuroplasticity

Moreover, aerobic exercises have been linked to the preservation of white and gray matter in the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortexes, areas that typically shrink with age and are vital for cognitive function.

Exercise And Brain Volume

Exercise also leads to an increase in the levels of certain neurotransmitters, including serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. These chemicals play an essential role in mood regulation, mental alertness, and focus, potentially explaining why physical activity is often associated with reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety.Exercise also helps manage and reduce stress, increasing concentrations of norepinephrine and endorphins, chemicals that moderate the brain’s response to stress and induce feelings of happiness.

Exercise And Brain Chemistry

Regular physical activity also improves sleep quality, a critical factor in brain health. Enhanced sleep quality allows for better memory consolidation and more efficient toxin removal from the brain.

Exercise And Brain Detoxification

Physical activity promotes brain plasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt and form new neural connections throughout life. This is especially important for recovery from a brain injury and counteracting the cognitive decline associated with aging.

Exercise And Brain Plasticity

Additionally, exercise can enhance various cognitive functions, including attention, working memory, executive function, and cognitive flexibility. The prefrontal cortex, a brain area responsible for these functions, appears to respond positively to physical exercise, likely due to the increased blood flow, which delivers more oxygen and nutrients to the brain.

Exercise And Cognitive Functions

The benefits of fitness extend beyond the brain. Regular physical activity reduces inflammation in the body, which can positively impact the brain as chronic inflammation is tied to various neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Exercise Beyond The Brain

Despite these promising findings, there’s still much to explore in the neuroscience of fitness. Questions remain about how different forms of exercise (such as aerobic versus resistance training) impact the brain and how factors like age, genetics, and initial fitness level may influence these effects.However, the current evidence strongly supports that regular physical activity has remarkable benefits for brain health and cognitive function, underscoring the value of integrating regular exercise into our daily lives for physical and mental health benefits.

The Takeaway

Despite ongoing research, the current evidence underscores the powerful role of physical activity in promoting brain health and cognitive function, emphasizing the importance of integrating regular exercise into our lifestyles.

Exercise stimulates neurogenesis, primarily in the hippocampus, influencing memory and learning while increasing key mood-regulating neurotransmitters.

health

Health

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

Exercise and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Fitness Explored

Here are just a few examples. There is ‘gaslighting’, which involves encouraging someone to doubt her own judgment and to rely on the manipulator’s advice instead. Guilt trips make someone feel excessively guilty about failing to do what the manipulator wants her to do. Charm offensives and peer pressure induce someone to care so much about the manipulator’s approval that she will do as the manipulator wishes.

We Are Constantly Subject To Attempts At Manipulation

Perhaps manipulation is wrong because it harms the person being manipulated. Certainly, manipulation often harms. If successful, manipulative cigarette ads contribute to disease and death; manipulative phishing and other scams facilitate identity theft and other forms of fraud; manipulative social tactics can support abusive or unhealthy relationships; political manipulation can foment division and weaken democracy. But manipulation is not always harmful.

Is Manipulation Wrong Because It Harms?

Suppose that Amy just left an abusive-yet-faithful partner, but in a moment of weakness she is tempted to go back to him. Now imagine that Amy’s friends employ the same techniques that Shakespeare’s Iago used on Othello. They manipulate Amy into (falsely) believing – and being outraged – that her ex-partner was not only abusive, but unfaithful as well. If this manipulation prevents Amy from reconciling, she might be better off than she would have been had her friends not manipulated her.

Beneficial Manipulation

Yet, to many, Amy’s friends’ manipulation could still seem morally dodgy. Intuitively, it would have been morally better for her friends to employ non-manipulative means to help Amy avoid backsliding. Something remains morally dubious about manipulation, even when it helps rather than harms the person being manipulated. So harm cannot be the reason that manipulation is wrong.

No, Manipulation Is Not Wrong Because It Harms. 

Perhaps manipulation is wrong because it involves techniques that are inherently immoral ways to treat other human beings. This thought might be especially appealing to those inspired by the idea that morality requires us to treat each other as rational beings rather than mere objects. Perhaps the only proper way to influence the behaviour of other rational beings is by rational persuasion, and thus any form of influence other than rational persuasion is morally improper. But for all its appeal, this answer also falls short, for it would condemn many forms of influence that are morally benign.

Is Manipulation Wrong Because It Is Morally Dubious?

For example, much of Iago’s manipulation involves appealing to Othello’s emotions. But emotional appeals are not always manipulative. Moral persuasion often appeals to empathy, or attempts to convey how it would feel to have others doing to you what you are doing to them.

Morally Benign Influence 

Similarly, getting someone to fear something that really is dangerous, to feel guilty about something that really is immoral, or to feel a reasonable level of confidence in one’s actual abilities, do not seem like manipulation. Even invitations to doubt one’s own judgment might not be manipulative in situations where – perhaps due to intoxication or strong emotions – there really is good reason to do so. Not every form of non-rational influence seems to be manipulative.

Not Every Form Of Non-rational Influence Is Manipulative

It appears, then, that whether an influence is manipulative depends on how it is being used. Iago’s actions are manipulative and wrong because they are intended to get Othello to think and feel the wrong things. Iago knows that Othello has no reason to be jealous, but he gets Othello to feel jealous anyway. This is the emotional analogue to the deception that Iago also practises when he arranges matters (eg, the dropped handkerchief) to trick Othello into forming beliefs that Iago knows are false.

When Is An Influence Manipulative? Think Of Iago And Othello. 

Manipulative gaslighting occurs when the manipulator tricks another into distrusting what the manipulator recognizes to be sound judgment. By contrast, advising an angry friend to avoid making snap judgments before cooling off is not acting manipulatively, if you know that your friend’s judgment really is temporarily unsound.

The Manipulator Knows That He Tricks When He Tricks

What makes an influence manipulative and what makes it wrong are the same thing: the manipulator attempts to get someone to adopt what the manipulator herself regards as an inappropriate belief, emotion or other mental state. In this way, manipulation resembles lying. What makes a statement a lie and what makes it morally wrong are the same thing – that the speaker tries to get someone to adopt what the speaker herself regards as a false belief.In both cases, the intent is to get another person to make some sort of mistake.

The Resemblance Between Manipulation And Lying 

The liar tries to get you to adopt a false belief. The manipulator might do that, but she might also try to get you to feel an inappropriate (or inappropriately strong or weak) emotion, attribute too much importance to the wrong things (eg, someone else’s approval), or to doubt something (eg, your own judgment or your beloved’s fidelity) that there is no good reason to doubt. The distinction between manipulation and non-manipulative influence depends on whether the influencer is trying to get someone to make some sort of mistake in what he thinks, feels, doubts or pays attention to.

Who’s Worse? The Liar Or The Manipulator?

It is endemic to the human condition that we influence each other in all sorts of ways besides pure rational persuasion. Sometimes, these influences improve the other person’s decision-making situation by leading her to believe, doubt, feel or pay attention to the right things; sometimes, they degrade decision-making by leading her to believe, doubt, feel or pay attention to the wrong things.But manipulation involves deliberately using such influences to hamper a person’s ability to make the right decision – that is the essential immorality of manipulation.

How To Recognize Manipulation

It is tempting to think that manipulation is a kind of influence. But as we have seen, kinds of influences that can be used to manipulate can also be used non-manipulatively. What matters in identifying manipulation is not what kind of influence is being used, but whether the influence is being used to put the other person into a better or a worse position to make a decision.

Were There Damages?

So, if we are to recognise manipulation, we must look not at the form of influence, but at the intention of the person using it. For it is the intention to degrade another person’s decision-making situation that is both the essence and the essential immorality of manipulation.

Was There Intent?

Where would Othello be if it weren’t for Iago?

communication

Communication

How To Tell The Difference Between Persuasion And Manipulation

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

[There] are voices which we hear in solitude, but [which] grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

I remember an answer which, when quite young, I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested, — “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied“They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances.

I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right.Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

In Self-Reliance, Emerson expounds on the importance of trusting your soul, as well as divine providence, to carve out a life. A firm believer in nonconformity, Emerson celebrates the individual and stresses the value of listening to the inner voice unique to each of us-even when it defies society's expectations. This new 2019 edition of Self-Reliance from Logos Books includes The American Scholar, a stirring speech of Emerson's, as well as footnotes and images throughout.

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Self-Reliance

Be formless, shapeless, like water.You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.Now, water can flow, or it can crash.Be water, my friend.

On water’s unrivalled and unmatched adaptability. Inspired by a fellow stasher’s comment on my last stash. 

We discuss Bruce Lee’s most famous philosophical quote. What does it mean 
and what inspired him to come up with it? Shannon shares personal stories 
about her dad and unpacks the quote to help us understand its depth and 
meaning.

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

“Be water, my friend.” — Bruce Lee

Water never complains, but always pushes back. Always.Drop a boulder in front of a stream and the water will simply flow around it, taking whatever opening the landscape will give or—when nothing is offered—patiently building up its resources until it rises to a height where a new gap is found.Flow like water. Never complain, but always push back.

Teaching For Learning (The 4 Levels Of Teaching)

The Swamp, The Alligators, And The Other Side (Remember What You Need To Do)

Decision Making: Past Wins (Un)Shape Future Choices

Complete Essays: Aldous Huxley, 1936-1938

Perception is Not Only a Matter of Now: Our Past Influences What We See

Xarikleia