TALENT CODE SUMMARY:

CHAPTER 7

How To Ignite A Hotbed

Two Ways of Hotbed Ignition

1. By a lightning strike: a breakthrough star, a magical victory. Not predicted or planned

2. No lightning strike but talent and motivation bloom anyway. Relates more to our daily lives

Mike and Dave’s Ridiculous Idea: Putting up a New School

• Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP): more classroom time, quality teachers, parental support,
administrative support
• They stole: the best teachers, lesson plans, teaching techniques, management ideas,
schedules and rules
• Goal: do whatever it takes to get the students into college
• Motto: “Work hard, be nice”
• The program started with 50 students, with only 53% passing English and Math tests, but
after a 60 Minutes report, their numbers bloated to the thousands, with 80% of the students
going to college

KIPP Culture

• Covers lifestyle: how to walk, how to talk, how to sit at a desk, how to look at a teacher or
classmate who is speaking, etc.
• Teachers constantly remind the students of their goal: going to college
• “If you work hard and are nice, you WILL go to college and have a successful life. You will be
extraordinary because here we work really, really hard, and that makes you smart. You will
make mistakes. You will mess up. We will too. But you will all have a beautiful behavior.
Because everything here at KIPP is earned.”
• Primal cues the KIPP students receive: (1) You belong to a group; (2) Your group is together in
a strange and dangerous new world; (3) That new world is shaped like a mountain, with the
paradise of college at the top
• The KIPP environment creates a signal rich world so seamless that it creates new patterns of
motivation and behavior.
• Environmental Coherency: every element of the KIPP world sends clear, constant signals of
belonging and identity
• Stopping the School: When someone violates a significant rule, classes stop and the
teachers and students hold a meeting to discuss what just happened and how to fix it
• Every time a KIPP student forces himself to obey one of the rules, a circuit is fired, insulated,
and strengthened.
 CHAPTER 8

The Talent Whisperers

Master Coaches

• People who are talent whisperers. Instead of the stereotype of being coaches who love
giving pep talks or highly inspirational, they are people who spend most of their time
offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity
to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student’s personality.

Examples of Master Coaches

1. Hands Jensen (Cello Teacher)

• His kind of teaching: “He didn’t only tell them what to do: he became what they should do,
communicating the goal with gesture, tone, rhythm and gaze. The signals were targeted,
concise, unmissable, and accurate.”
• Master Coaches – “their personality – their core skill circuit – is to be more like farmers:
careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin.”
2. John Wooden (Basketball Coach)
• In a research of how Wooden coaches, it was found that: 6.6% were expressions of
displeasure, 6.9% were compliments, and 75% were pure information: what to do, how to
do it, when to intensify an activity.
• The “Wooden” (M+, M-, M+) technique for teaching a three part instruction where he
modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way, and then remodeled
the right way.
o Even the smallest of details were always considered.
• The “Whole Part Method” (teaching in chunks) he would teach players an entire move
then break it down to work on its elemental actions.
• He had his own Laws of Learning: Explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and
repetition.
o “The importance of repetition until automaticity cannot be overstated… Repetition
is the key to learning.”
3. Mary Epperson (Piano Teacher)
• She taught through Ignition, by creating and sustaining motivation and teaching love.
• The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved,
captivated, hooked and to get the learner to need and want more information and
expertise.
• Research showed that some of the greatest first class performers were taught by “average
teachers” (teachers who actually taught through ignition).

Comparing Wooden and Epperson:

• Wooden uses the deeper practice part of the talent mechanism, speaking the language of
information and correction, honing circuitry. Epperson deals in matters of ignition, using
emotional triggers to fill fuel tanks with love and motivation. They succeed because building
myelin circuits requires both deep practice and ignition.