This year, we formed our first ever book club at DCSS for interested staff and twelve colleagues have joined. We are reading a chosen book and meeting together to discuss it every two weeks after work. We met for the first time on Nov. 3rd.
The intention with each book is to:
· Talk about what points or passages stood out for us and why.
· What curious questions we have.
· Compare key points and examples to our own profession.
· Take away relevant, key learnings and apply them to own daily work.
Simple as that! The benefit of the book club is that we get to learn together. And what’s different is that we are choosing books that are not about education. We live education 5 days a week, so we thought reading other books that give different perspectives or even enlighten us on how the business world experiences things would be refreshing.
Our first book until December is Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner published this year. The authors’ premise is about teaching us how to think more productively, more creatively and more rationally while offering us a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. Can you start to see why we chose to read this book? So far, we’ve read the first two chapters and already I found myself having a-ha moments and saying ‘yeah, that makes sense’.
For example, consider the following:
- It’s okay to say, “I don’t know”.
“Until we admit what we don’t know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what we need to.”
- First, we need to put away our moral compass. When we are focused on “the rightness and wrongness of a given issue, it’s easy to lose track of what the issue actually is. And our moral compass can convince us that we are certain we already know everything we need to know about a subject so we stop trying to learn more.”
- The key to learning is feedback. “The more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedback. We can gather lots of facts, but to measure cause and effect, we need to purposefully go out and create feedback through an experiment. It’s an opportunity to try out new ideas, ask new questions and challenge our existing beliefs.“
Another advantage to the book club is that it brings a group of readers together who have their own experiences to share and thoughts about the authors’ messaging. Everyone in the group has something to contribute that can add clarity, create a shift in thinking and/or help explain how they understand a passage. Combined, it becomes a rich, meaningful conversation that can include laughter and even lively debate. For myself, I find myself stretching my thinking and learning more.
I look forward to reading more of Think Like A Freak, but more importantly to the next time our DCSS Book Club gets together to share learning out loud! It happens again in a week.
Excepts taken from Think Like A Freak - Levitt & Dubner (2014)
Diana Lindstrom
November 10th, 2014
The intention with each book is to:
· Talk about what points or passages stood out for us and why.
· What curious questions we have.
· Compare key points and examples to our own profession.
· Take away relevant, key learnings and apply them to own daily work.
Simple as that! The benefit of the book club is that we get to learn together. And what’s different is that we are choosing books that are not about education. We live education 5 days a week, so we thought reading other books that give different perspectives or even enlighten us on how the business world experiences things would be refreshing.
Our first book until December is Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner published this year. The authors’ premise is about teaching us how to think more productively, more creatively and more rationally while offering us a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems. Can you start to see why we chose to read this book? So far, we’ve read the first two chapters and already I found myself having a-ha moments and saying ‘yeah, that makes sense’.
For example, consider the following:
- It’s okay to say, “I don’t know”.
“Until we admit what we don’t know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what we need to.”
- First, we need to put away our moral compass. When we are focused on “the rightness and wrongness of a given issue, it’s easy to lose track of what the issue actually is. And our moral compass can convince us that we are certain we already know everything we need to know about a subject so we stop trying to learn more.”
- The key to learning is feedback. “The more complex a problem is, the harder it is to capture good feedback. We can gather lots of facts, but to measure cause and effect, we need to purposefully go out and create feedback through an experiment. It’s an opportunity to try out new ideas, ask new questions and challenge our existing beliefs.“
Another advantage to the book club is that it brings a group of readers together who have their own experiences to share and thoughts about the authors’ messaging. Everyone in the group has something to contribute that can add clarity, create a shift in thinking and/or help explain how they understand a passage. Combined, it becomes a rich, meaningful conversation that can include laughter and even lively debate. For myself, I find myself stretching my thinking and learning more.
I look forward to reading more of Think Like A Freak, but more importantly to the next time our DCSS Book Club gets together to share learning out loud! It happens again in a week.
Excepts taken from Think Like A Freak - Levitt & Dubner (2014)
Diana Lindstrom
November 10th, 2014