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Susan Etlinger: What do we do with all this big data? | Talk Video | TED.com
A truly thought-provoking, personal talk that challenges us to be more mindful with data, context for data, and the assessments that yield interpretable data.
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Student Choice Leads to Student Voice | Edutopia
Connected colleagues at SLA share case students of ways that they are integrating student choice and voice into their work as educational designers. HT @MeghanCureton
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The way I understood school learning shifted the first time I was given an opportunity to design a project of my own.
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For the first time in my life, school had not been about finding ways to meet requirements established by others — it was about work that I believed in.
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Learning that incorporates student choice provides a pathway for students to fully, genuinely invest themselves in quality work that matters. Participating in learning design allows students to make meaning of content on their own terms.
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School works when students have opportunities to produce quality work about issues that matter.
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Education works when people have opportunities to find and develop unaccessed or unknown voices and skills.
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Fabien Cousteau: What I learned from spending 31 days underwater | Talk Video | TED.com
A magnificent “PBL!”
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Marc Abrahams: A science award that makes you laugh, then think | Talk Video | TED.com
Reminds me of MVPS’s “Mistake of the Year” Award to promote risk taking and #failup iterative prototyping!
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How Companies Can Profit from a “Growth Mindset” – Harvard Business Review
What if schools were (even) more purposeful about building growth mindsets in learners young and old? Not only would it impact the immediate, but it might also impact future economic strength and community satisfaction in our country and beyond as those young learners become the business and civic leaders of tomorrow!
HT @NicoleNMartin
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Experiential Learning: Is there really a question about this? | User Generated Education
An intriguing complement to the #MustRead from @HollyChesser this week.
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To Which Word are You More Predisposed: Action or Understanding? | Shed Some Light
A beautiful post that poses a dichotomous question about our preference for “action” or “understanding,” perhaps in effort to inquire as to this recent push in schooling to make and do. For me, both are powerful tools in the toolbox, so to speak, and they are inseparably interwoven.
In another “input” for me this weekend, I heard a podcaster question the idea of “balance.” Instead she challenged us to think about integration. Perhaps action and understanding must be better integrated in the learning arc we call “school.” Maybe that’s what educators are responding to — a sense of disintegration (what some may call imbalance).
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Curiosity: It Helps Us Learn, But Why? : NPR Ed : NPR
HT @TreyBoden
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Students asking questions and then exploring the answers. That’s something any good teacher lives for. And at the heart of it all is curiosity.
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Blackwell, like many others teachers, understands that when kids are curious, they’re much more likely to stay engaged.
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brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.
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curious brains are better at learning not only about the subject at hand, but also other stuff — even incidental, boring information.
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“They feel especially good if they discover something, if they construct knowledge themselves.”
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“Curiosity really is one of the very intense and very basic impulses in humans. We should base education on this behavior.”
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What’s Next for PBL? | Edutopia
Another fabulous PBL piece from Suzie Boss. HT @TreyBoden
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We expect the phrase “deeper learning” will continue to gain traction to describe the multifaceted outcomes of project-based learning.
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His must-have list includes qualities such as “work worth doing,” providing students with authentic audiences, and using assessment practices that emphasize formative feedback.
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During project planning, it’s important to build in enough time for iterative cycles of review, feedback, and revision.
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These trends have the potential to disrupt traditional education; the role of the teacher has to change when students are directing more of their own learning. Yet the same trends should be complementary to PBL practices, which naturally connect with students’ interests and put teachers in the role of facilitator.
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How your culture can promote innovation | Paul Taylor
Great slide deck with strong stimulators. Plus, four points on culture and innovation.
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The culture of some organisations is superbly designed to repel anything new.
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Author Archives: boadams1
Assessments that overvalue and undervalue – what are we doing about them?
I’ve changed my routine for watching TED talks. Because I have pivoted from viewing one a day, I watch a few on the weekends. As I was “catching up” this morning, Susan Etlinger’s talk, “What do we do with all this big data?,” stopped me in my tracks.
He was teaching himself to communicate, but we were looking in the wrong place, and this is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric — in this case, verbal communication — and undervalue others, such as creative problem-solving. Communication was hard for Isaac, and so he found a workaround to find out what he needed to know. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box.
I am thinking a lot recently about assessment, progress reports, and how we communicate about what we most deeply value in schools. Etlinger poses such a powerful challenge: “This is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric and undervalue others.”
What are we overvaluing and undervaluing on our school progress reports? If we look at our students’ report cards, do they express what we most deeply value? Across the city, state, country, and world, we should be deeply involved in resolving such a question.
What if we used adventure and curiosity as more of what we call school?
Fabien Cousteau opens his TED talk, “What I learned from spending 31 days underwater,” with these words:
I have a confession to make. I am addicted to adventure, and as a young boy, I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies. My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t paying attention in class. They didn’t find anything specifically wrong with me, other than being slightly dyslexic because I’m a lefty. But they didn’t test for curiosity. Curiosity, to me, is about our connection with the world, with the universe. It’s about seeing what’s around that next coral head or what’s around that next tree, and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves.
What if we celebrated adventure and curiosity (even more) as a fundamental component of the schooling part of education and learning? What if we moved the needle from thinking that “something is wrong” with a child who drifts in his attention to exploring what it is that might capture his curiosity?
Fabien Cousteau offers an amazing talk of accomplishing three years of science through 31 days of dedicated PBL. How might we backwards design from such adult projects and ventures to design opportunities and make room for such adventure and curiosity exploration in that learning segment we call school?
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Time to Debunk Those PBL Myths | Edutopia
Fabulous piece from Suzie Boss and superb links to PBL resources.
HT @MeghanCureton
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How Can Students Have More Say in School Decisions? | MindShift
Kudos to @Tara_SuperSub
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist | WIRED
“Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist.”
HT @MeghanCureton & Greg Todd Jones (two colleagues in significantly different worlds who sent me the link at exactly the same time.)
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We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.
This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.
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In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered.
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In this paragraph there are so many “project starters” that one could design an entire “curriculum” to weave them into an advanced problem solving component to school!
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Americans need to learn how to discover.
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Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster.
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Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America. Alternatively framed as maker classes, after-school innovation programs, and innovation prizes, these programs are frequently not framed as learning at all.
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Discovery has always provoked interest, but how one discovers may today interest us even more.
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in the course I teach, How to Create Things and Have Them Matter, students are asked to look, listen, and discover, using their own creative genius, while observing contemporary phenomena that matter today.
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Learning by an original and personal process of discovery is a trend on many US university campuses
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Success brings not just a good grade, or the financial reward of a prize. It brings the satisfaction that one can realize dreams, and thrive, in a world framed by major dramatic questions. And this fans the kind of passion that propels an innovator along a long creative career.
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Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.
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The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.
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we need to get smarter in ways that match the challenges we now face.
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Why Experts Reject Creativity – Atlantic Mobile
If you think of “teachers” as the “experts” in this piece, it provides an interesting reflection prompt about why we might struggle to innovate in school curricula, instructional methodology, etc. Are the schools most successful with innovating those schools with the highest concentration of “beginners minds”?
HT @MeghanCureton
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Brian Chesky of Airbnb, on Scratching the Itch to Create – NYTimes.com