From the profile of an INTJ, or “Architect.” Click for the website by NERIS Analytics Limited, which includes a free test and explanation of these personality classifications.
Getting Things Done, Part 1
The school year, regardless of course or level, comes down to two elements:
The GAP process governs our units of study, whether you are an AP student practicing for the exam in May or a tenth grader reading a novel in November. Grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits govern our learning. You receive three profile scores per quarter.
Your personal or community-based projects will be the focus of most Fridays. You’ll be in charge of how you spend that time. Each course will have a calendar that indicates when these projects will be presented and shared, too.
These two elements require you to be organized, and organization is one of the universal skills and traits you need. Load the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits, and notice that the foundation of your learning is organization. The rest of the components concatenate1, but they can’t be linked together without organization:
This screenshot is from one of the older iterations of grade abatement, and I’m using it to highlight the header:
Above all else:
Explore, create, learn
“Explore, create, learn.” That really is the focus of our work, and when you’re immersed in self-directed writing or putting time into your Pareto Project, it’ll be exciting work. But it’s the much-less-exciting work of organization that gets us into that maker mentality.
You are reading this post because you need to organize the academic stuff you have on you. That word, stuff, comes from a root meaning “to equip,” and that’s the idea: You equip yourself every day in order to deal with school and the work it requires. You gear up.
So you need a frank assessment of how you do that. You need to assess your organization. Divide that assessment into these four categories, and then use our in-class discussions and workshops to improve each one.
① Physical Organization
Start by opening up your backpack or bag, any and all notebooks you keep for your classes, your vintage Trapper Keeper, etc., and then pouring that stuff out onto a table. (That can be a metaphorical act, of course.) Then assess the extent to which you have a system in place. Can you find materials you need? How ordered is your physical stuff? What does it all look like?
② Digital Organization
You probably have a number of tabs open right now, as you read this instructional post. Start there: How do you keep track of what you’re reading and studying online? Do you have a system for organizing those tabs? Then consider specifically your use of Google, especially Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Gmail. Do you have a system of folders in Drive to keep your work clear and accessible? Do you use a system to sort through email? How do you keep track of assignments, announcements, and instructional posts?
③ Schedule Organization
Your schedule overlaps with the first two, but it has been helpful in the past to separate it. Consider specifically your use of a calendar or planner. Do you use the calendar provided for this course? If so, to what extent? If not, how do you organize your days and weeks? How do you keep up with your responsibilities?
④ Mental Organization
This category overlaps with the rest, too, but it helps to isolate it. It is, in essence, about the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits that direct all of your learning:
To what extent do you understand the universal skills and traits at the heart of this process? How do you organize your work in here around those skills and traits? Do you use the profiles to map out your work during each GAP triptych panel? What does that learning map look like?
⑤ All Together
Your goal is to find the room for improvement in each one of these organizational categories. To do that, you need accurate self-assessment and observation, discussion with your peers and teachers, and concrete plans for improvement.
If this post is assigned formally, you will be given further directions. You don’t need them, though. You need to test your improvements. You’ll know if they work by putting them into practice.
Getting Things Done, Part 2
As a possibly important sidebar, let’s talk about your personalities. Your self-awareness and sense of self-efficacy are tied to that amorphous idea of “personality,” and you can gain some important insights through simple, online tests.
Start with an introduction to the concept we’ll be using, and then jump right into the test itself:
This isn’t required, of course, but you’re likely to be interested enough in the concept to take the test. It will give you a four-letter code and a detailed explanation of what those letters mean. Once you have the code, either before or while you are reading the explanations, make sure you know what the Forer effect is:
No online test dictates who you are. Understanding the Forer effect is one way to ward off taking these things too seriously. These sorts of tests can help, though, and here is why: When we’re talking about how you organize yourself in here, we’re really talking about you as a whole person. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful, if you are cautious and remember how powerful the Forer effect is.
The idea is not that a personality test is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a website tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement. I have long thought of myself as an INTJ, for instance, but I see more and more of myself in the description of an INTP these days. I don’t need to take the test itself again; I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. Since I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, I have a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing.
It’s the same for you. You want a sense of yourself as a whole person:
This kind of self-assessment is organizational because it can generate forward momentum. It can improve the efficacy of other elements of your approach to learning. If you take this online test — or any others; here’s a much lengthier one called the IPIP-NEO that some students have said taught them about themselves — be sure you read all the context and explanation the site provides, keep the warning of the Forer effect in mind, and then do some reflective and metacognitive writing and discussion.
From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician”
Look that word up. I’ve always liked it because it sounds like its definition — like links being clipped together. ↩