🌿 The Binder That Started it All
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Hello Reader! A teacher we all know spent August in a familiar way... She went to three professional development sessions, bought a stack of new books, and came home from each one with a fresh strategy she was certain would change her classroom. By the time the first day of school arrived, she had a binder with twelve tabs in it: restorative circles, retrieval practice, a new grading philosophy, a seating chart system, two different note-taking frameworks, and more. She opened the binder on Sunday night before students returned, looked at all those tabs, and felt something we suspect you have felt too. The particular exhaustion of being handed more tools than any one person could actually use… and use well. The obvious seems simple, but it rarely is. More strategies should mean more capability, right? Research on skill acquisition tells a different story. Psychologist Anders Ericsson, who spent decades studying how people actually develop expertise, found that meaningful skill growth comes from sustained, focused practice on a narrow target, not from broad exposure to many techniques at once. Depth builds competence. Breadth, chased alone, mostly builds a binder. Man, this hits home, doesn’t it? This is an invitation to do what that teacher friend aspired to do. Choose one thing worth going deep on, and let the rest wait. Here are a few questions to sit with:
Doing less, and better, is always where we want to land, and this season we are going to watch what that looks like in practice, one Monday at a time. We would love to hear which tab you would keep if you could only keep one. Yours, P.S. Don't miss out on tomorrow's email... it's the podcast Season 7 preview! Give this ad a click! It's free to learn about the product but a little kick back comes to me for your clicks! Appreciate it! |
