Last time, I focused on ways to motivate my friend's daughter. This post focuses on enabling her—on strategies that focus on personal, social, and structural ability.

Source 2 Personal Ability: My friend’s daughter avoids her math homework until the evening or weekend is nearly over. She often gets frustrated and gives up before completing assignments and exams.
The Goal: She needs extensive deliberate practice. She practices her music at least an hour each day, and practices her sports as much as an hour and a half each day. I would aim for an hour a day drilling in math, using a program like Indian Math Online.

Source 4 Social Ability: Her parents don't work with her on her math. Instead, they do their homework while she does hers. They work independently on their least-preferred tasks. When it comes to music and sports, her parents observe her teachers and coaches and are quick to give them feedback when they disagree with their methods. They don't do the same with her math teachers.
The Goal: Her parents need to seek out new learning approaches and practices, they need to be more involved with her teachers and they need to coach their daughter as she practices her math drills.

Source 6 Structural Ability: Music and athletics have scheduled and structured times for practicing and performing. Other parents and kids are counting on you showing up and doing your part. Math homework doesn't have a schedule or structure. In addition, my friend's house is not designed for doing homework. When you walk through the living room and bedrooms, you see it’s designed for watching TV, talking with friends, and entertaining.
The Goal: The family needs a schedule and some structure to ensure math practice happens. This structure needs to be every bit as rigorous and demanding as her music and athletics practices. Their daughter needs a quiet, comfortable place to practice. Distractions such as TVs and iPods need to be removed from her practice area.

Bottom Line: Notice that combining all these strategies together is a lot of work. It also challenges the family's priorities. Her parents may look at these ideas and say, "If this is what it takes, then we think we'll just let her fail her academics. After all, she's a healthy, happy child; she's doing what she loves; she's a marvelous musician-athlete; and she's not addicted to drugs or alcohol. Maybe it's okay that she's not going to be able to get into college." And maybe it is.

You only use this six source approach on problems you believe are worth solving. It's designed to be especially robust—to have what it takes to overcome stubborn cultural, familial, or personal habits. I firmly believe that any less-robust approach will fail with my friend's daughter. And I personally believe improving her academic performance is a problem that's worth this kind of investment.

So, this brings up a whole new challenge: How do I convince my friends that this problem is worth solving?

I leave this challenge for another blog post

Sandy Pentland, a leading researcher at the MIT Media Lab, describes his team’s work in a new book titled, Honest Signals: How they shape our world. They study nonverbal communication using a digital sensor worn like an ID badge that measures activity, influence, consistency, and mimicry in conversational settings.

They’ve had people wear these badges during sales presentations, performance reviews, job interviews, speed dates, and a variety of other settings. Some have worn these badges for months, so Sandy and his colleagues have real-world data extending over long enough periods to get inside relationships within teams, between employees and their bosses, and inside families. Pretty cool!

Below are a few of their more interesting findings:

• Nonverbal cues signal purpose and relationship—independently of the content of what a person is saying. If you want to judge Mutual Purpose or Mutual Respect, watch the dance.
• These cues are “honest.” Because they are hard to manipulate or control, this nonverbal dance is a more accurate measure of people’s true purposes and relationships than the words they are saying. In fact, people are more accurate when they don’t hear the words.
• We can learn to read these honest signals. In some settings—negotiations, dating, and performance appraisals—people achieve a 95% accuracy at predicting what their partner is going to do.
• When you try to use these social signals to influence or manipulate others, it backfires in a very interesting way. You influence yourself as well as the other person. This effect is so powerful, Sandy calls it “reverse brainwashing.”

This research is still in its infancy, but shows great potential. I’ll discuss it more in a future blog.

How many of us know more about a healthy lifestyle than we practice? Nearly all of us I bet. This is the essence of the Knowing-Doing Gap. Often we know what we should do—the vital behaviors that would get us the results we want—but we aren’t able to get ourselves and others to act on them. 

This challenge leaps off the page in a New York Times article about a company that has broken the code on teaching math. This new company, Indian Math Online, uses deliberate practice to help elementary, middle-school, and high-school students master mathematics. Students take carefully constructed tests that pinpoint gaps in their knowledge, then build mastery through focused drills. And it works! Students who stick with the program improve their math skills quickly and dramatically.

But, here’s the challenge. Most students don’t stick with the program. The company’s own research shows that children of Indian and Chinese immigrants stick with the program, but American kids lose interest after a month or two. I think American families aren’t providing enough motivation to keep their kids on track. Or maybe the program isn’t generating enough intrinsic interest to keep American kids engaged.

I have a friend whose daughter has turned herself into a fine musician and athlete. She labors over her music and her sports, and her deliberate practice pays off. But, when it comes to academics, she doesn’t put in the practice time and her academic performance suffers. She would really benefit from Indian Math Online. But I doubt she’d stick to it. In fact, while her world is perfectly organized to help her become a musician and an athlete, it provides almost no support for her to succeed academically.

Here is the big question: How can we make academic practice as motivating as the practice associated with athletics and music? The challenge is to build her motivation using Influence Sources 1, 3, and 5.

Source 1 Personal Motivation: My friend’s daughter hates math.

The Goal: She needs to take personal pride in her math abilities.  She needs to take pleasure in the little insights and wins that accompany practice. She needs to value the personal accomplishment that comes with mastery.

Source 3 Social Motivation: Her parents don’t like math. They don’t encourage her to practice math or praise her for her math achievements as they do with her music and athletics. Furthermore, when she thinks of people who are good at math, she thinks of nerds and losers.

The Goal: Her parents need to encourage and support her practice and achievements. She needs to see that many of the people she looks up to—her auntie who’s a physician, her cousin who’s an engineer—are who they are because they are good at math.

Source 5 Structural Motivation: Music and athletics involve frequent concerts and competitions—occasions to feel like a winner, to celebrate, and to be recognized by friends and family. Math has exams and grades, but they don’t make my friend’s daughter feel like a winner, celebrate, or be recognized.

The Goal: She needs frequent, short-term occasions to demonstrate her progress in math—and to be rewarded and recognized for her improvements.