Yao Hill Professional Reflection

 Today, I accidentally bumped into this video  Achieve more In 1 DAY Than Others Do In 1 WEEK (Ask Who, Not How!) - YouTube  by Little Bit Better. Some ideas are refreshing. This video is a book summary of WHO NOT HOW by Dan Sullivan, who give 11 Lessons for entrepreneurs to better manage their time. The most important lesson is to ask the question of WHO. Who can solve this problem for me? Problems can be divided into two types: technical problems and adaptive problems. Find WHO for the technical problems and focus your time and energy on the adaptative problems that only you can answer.  For example, if you have a business, you need a website. This is a technical problem. Hire the WHO to solve it. On the other hand, how to grow the business is an adaptive problem. It needs your creative ideas. No one can replace you. So you will have to do it. When you go about the adaptive problems, ask yourself the seven questions as the "Impact Filter": 1. What is the project? W...

I love Chris Lysy and his freshspectrum blogs and cartoons. This is an evaluator who knows how to communicate and catch his audience's attention. In a recent blog: Access is NOT a Vanity Metric . Chris proposed five strategies to increase access to one's work, traditionally presented in the form of a report (as PDF files posted on the website) or as journal articles behind the Login gates. His strategies are: take a PDF and adapt it into an HTML-based report. take a long wordy report and adapt it into a string of infographics. take a report written at a post-graduate reading level and adapt it into a report that doesn’t require more than a lower secondary education level. turn big tables or complicated charts into nice, easy-to-follow charts. turn qualitative interview transcripts into a story collection. (Blogging is also what Chris proposed to increase access to and influence of one's work, back in 2011 in fact. And I finally started doing it now in 2023, more than a de...

Private school is expensive. And you have to be really good at academics to be admitted. For these two reasons, I have not thought about sending my kids to private schools. Yet one day in early June, I got a call from the Vice Principal for my 5th grade graduating daughter, recommending her to apply for La Pietra because her teacher considered her as a top 20% student. I was in quite some disbelief. I know my daughter is creative and talented in her way, but top 20% in academics?! But who am I to deny her the opportunity to go to La Pietra. So I went on this process to apply for a private school and below are lessons learned (in progress).  1. You can make the cost manageable by applying for both financial aid and merit-based scholarships from the school and other organizations. The Financial Aid application is done through a third-party vendor and charges a fee ($60 for School & Student Services ). Completing the financial aid is like the experience of filing taxes on your ow...

I have joined the Grand Challenges in Assessment Project (GCiA) Implementation Team in 2021. Over the years, my team and I feel that we do not always know where the project is and where we are going. Reflecting on my personal work habits, I know that I heavily rely on my center's website to document my work and track projects. It just happened that I had a day free of meetings. I ventured into editing the project page: Pedagogical Improvements that I has been leading. It looked like any other project page with just the project goals. See an example from the Drive Innovation team page: Honestly, I do not like editing websites. Because it takes enormous amount of time, speaking from the experience as a webmasters for a student club when I was in grad school, for the professional organizations that I chaired, and for my center's website and project sites that I led. I usually keep my sites as simple as possible. I give a lot of credit to Karen Singer-Freeman who created and ma...