Malcolm Gladwell: Lessons from Fleetwood Mac

Education Week is blogging and providing summaries of the activities at NECC this week.  Malcolm Gladwell provided a keynote speech to attending educators that draws on lessons learned from Fleetwood Mac.  I’ve read several of his books and rather enjoy his take on things.

Here are excerpts.  Please read the entire post at Education Week.

So what did Malcolm Gladwell talk about during his keynote speech at NECC? Fleetwood Mac. No, really. Looking closely

NECC 2009

at the evolution and success of the late 60s rock band can teach us three important points about creating meaningful learning environments, he said.

1. The first is that effort is more important than talent.  “When we look at people who come to master something … we have a tendency to telescope how long that learning took place—to think that the learning happened overnight.”   In fact, almost every successful individual or organization puts in at least 10,000 hours of practice first, which averages out to about four hours a day for ten years, he estimates.
2. The second lesson educators could learn from Fleetwood Mac’s success is the importance of a compensation strategy, rather than a capitalization strategy. In other words, instead of building on successes, the band became better and more successful because they put their energy into compensating for their weaknesses.
3. The third lesson is, the path to genius is often riddled with experiments involving many different methods and strategies over a long period of time, said Gladwell.  Learning does not happen in one big burst of genius. “Sometimes the struggle to learn something is where the actual learning lies.”

Several interesting comments by readers have been posted.  Some agree, some disagree.  What do you think?

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