Listening to
Nicola Morgan at the
HMC conference this week, having already dipped in and out of her books on the
teenage brain at home, one of her power-point slides made me revisit the need to support introverts within a school context.
Extroverts and Introverts: In a nutshell. Extroverts thrive and re-energise through engaging in social situations, and feel more drained when alone; introverts do just the opposite, gaining their energy from time on their own to think. The
Harvard Business Review’s 2015 article by Professor Francesca Gino is illuminating on this subject, starting with a rank yourself extrovert/introvert template. There’s a more detailed quiz of sorts
here, assessing CEOs against each other on a sliding scale of qualities.
On a personal level, I came out as an
extroverted introvert in a similar profiling thing you sometimes have to do in job interview situations, and I’d like to think that I fundamentally tick some of the boxes for what’s so good about
introverts, but we are very much a mixed household both at home and within the SLT at
Freemen’s. I’d wholly disagree with Pierce Brown’s claim in
Golden Sun: ‘There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extrovert.’ Come one, come all.
No discussion of introverts is complete without a nod to Susan Cain’s TedTalk,
the power of introverts. I recognise much here as being inherent to the introverts in my life.
An interesting read in the
HBR discusses the subsets of
four types when analysing team/business chemistry; I was taken with the idea also that the ‘neurotics’ (their term!) are who get things done in the
UCLA study of types.
This 2016
article from David Cutler, a teacher in Boston, has been doing the rounds again recently. It takes a look at how to balance group and individual work within a classroom context.
