Metathinking With Toby Groves, Phd

Perceptions of Paradox Illusions of Professional Skepticism Perceptions of Paradox:   Illusions of Professional Skepticism When I saw Beverly Hall's picture, I was reminded of my favorite elementary school teacher, Mrs. Foreman. Hall was Jamaican- American and her smile, like Mrs. Foreman's,  seemed extraordinarily kind. She was the superintendent of the Atlanta public schools and named the national superintendent of the year in February 2009 by the American  Association of School Administrators. The honor had been earned by raising test scores,  including those on standardized tests that had been designed to hold teachers accountable as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. By October the test scores were under scrutiny after being deemed statistically improbable. The truth was, there was cheating going on. A lot of cheating, but this time it wasn't by students. Erasure patterns were discovered on answer sheets that made it appear as though educators had corrected student's answers immediately after the tes

Social Immune Systems The Hidden Psychology of High-Stakes Organizational Decisions     The hidden psychology of high stakes organizational decisions           Some of the very best critical thinking research in the world has been done with flight crews and medical teams.  There is an almost endless number of fascinating cases to explore. There's one, though, that I've become more obsessed with than others.  It happened on Thursday, January 25th, 1990.  At 9:34 pm, after a long flight and multiple holding patterns, Avianca flight 52 was given clearance to land on runway 22L at JFK.  Wind shear was terrible that night and visibility was limited.  The crew found themselves descending quickly and only 200 feet off the ground more than a mile from the airport.  If you listen to the cockpit voice recorder, you hear the captain abruptly ask the first officer where the runway is, and the first officer answers “I don’t see it."  The ground proximity warning system gave them voice alerts to pull up, and they executed