Measuring Activity toward Greatness
If ever there were a more ostentatious article title — I’ve yet to see it.
Ridiculous title aside, this is where a high-level objective gets a little more concrete as we try to come up with a measurable key result that shows we're striving for greatness in the goal, “Raise great human beings that will make the world a better place.”
Starting from the assertion that striving = activity, now the question is what activity or activities? Since these are kids the key activity in my mind is learning. I are a Marine, not a teacher, but as a parent, there’s neither training nor instruction, so I’m gonna have to Google this one.
After some research, it looks like there are two different schools of thought about “types” of learning.
School 1: Channel Specific
Researchers have broken down learning into two different groups of channels. One includes four different channels:
Visual
Auditory
Read-write
Kinesthetic
And the other breaks it all the way down to 7 distinct channels
Kinesthetic
Auditory
Social
Solitary
Verbal
Logical
In both these groupings, most of these types of learning take place in a classroom setting.
School 2: There’s only one way and that’s by doing.
Whether you call it “Waldorf”, “practical application”, or just the good old “school of hard knocks” these all have the same idea behind them, which is that you learn by doing.
Personally, I’m in the middle somewhere. I believe that we each learn in different ways, so whether you look at the 4 channel or 7 channel model there is value in it. However, in my opinion far too much of modern learning ignores the kinesthetic channel within the first school and focuses on classroom-friendly channels without enough practical application from the second school. The end result is a lot of knowledge that is ill-equipped for actual use if not outright forgotten in the ensuing years.
My ideal would be to utilize both schools, teaching them via specific channels, likely classroom friendly, but then also taking individual lesson directly into a practical application.
That’s the answer to my question around “what activity” will I be measuring — a combination of both classroom learning AND practical application.
So how does that translate into a tangible key result? I’m thinking there are three related key results:
Key Result 1 (KR): Have one discussion per week about what they want to strive to be better at.
Key Result 2 (KR): Conduct a weekly learning activity to help them strive toward greatness.
Key Result 3 (KR): Maintain a 50% ratio of classroom to practical application activities.
#goalsetting #greatness #dothework
P.S. If none of this makes any sense to you, then you should go read my post about setting life goals, how to measure what “great” means in the first goal and how to measure striving.