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Giving Students Their School Day
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the very existence of Community Time in the schedule sends an important implicit message to students: “We, your teachers, don’t set the agenda for everything that’s important to learn
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The practice they have gained through Community Time has contributed in part to the success of a new, student-led Community Standards Committee in which students drive topics such as the gender-appropriateness of our dress code, raise cultural awareness around identity, and work with the dean of students to address our more serious disciplinary matters. The success of that group, in turn, drives the administration to consider other, bolder means of teaching through experiences and developing programs that reflect the understanding of cognitive science. Ultimately, Community Time is not a final product, but a meaningful step in an ongoing effort to ensure that we are teaching in every aspect of our school day, not just in the classroom.
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Re:imagine/ATL at Atlanta Tech Village | Mount Vernon School News
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I think that this proved further that students should be the ones solving the world’s problems.
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create a student-led design challenge
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a bunch of high school students who had never met before can come together and discuss as well as come up with solutions to Atlanta’s biggest problems. This shows that students are capable of a lot more than most adults give them credit for.
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We need to look at the world around us and consider what global problems modern society will need our children to solve.
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America needs massive change in our understanding of the learning experience, not simply in our exam results.
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to change the world, we need a generation of new minds equipped with new ways of thinking.
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Prototype Design Camp was created by Christian Long, a visionary educator, to introduce and infuse design thinking skills into the K-12 landscape.
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Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading
Coca-Cola Workplace 2020 – Visit to AOC
What might the world and functions of innovation demand of our workplaces? How might our work environment complement – even promote and spur – the activities and necessities of an organization striving to innovate? Such questions are a major line of investigation for me and for the school where I am blessed to work – Mount Vernon Presbyterian School. And so, we explore and research in order to learn.
On Friday, April 15, 2016, I was fortunate to visit and tour the Coca-Cola Atlanta Office Complex (AOC). Thanks to friend Rodney Drinkard, who works in security and risk-management at Coke, I ventured into the Workplace 2020 transformation happening at Coca-Cola corporate headquarters, and I was accompanied by colleagues Blair Peterson, Head of Upper School, and Rosalyn Merrick, Chief Philanthropy Officer, at Mount Vernon. The time at Coke’s AOC was invaluable and incredibly thought provoking. They are doing tremendous work there to leverage brand and culture to transform space…and to create a virtuous cycle for space to build brand and culture even more purposefully.
As detailed in Design Leveraged,
Enter Workplace 2020, a massive project to instill Coke’s facility with a sense of optimism matching what consumers feel when they see the brand’s polar bears or hilltop singers. That may all sound touchy-feely, but this project is far from a feel-good exercise; the goal is to increase brand value, grow product lines faster and boost the bottom line.
From the very beginnings of our Coke tour, I was reminded of my recent visit to IDEO in San Francisco. At IDEO, the office is intentionally designed to facilitate creative collisions for collaborators. Similarly, at Coke AOC, the Workplace 2020 transformation, partly informed by input from IDEO, seeks to purposefully facilitate such creative collisions and collaborations, too. With innovation stemming from networking and associative thinking, an environment that supports bond-making rather than isolated task-doing promotes the conditions needed for enhanced innovation. Overall, the surroundings at Coke are constructed so that people will benefit from the principle of “we are smarter than me.” While individual space still exists in great quantity, the quality and number of spaces to meet, work together, share and collaborate are superb.
Two of the many things that impressed and intrigued me:
- The brand qualities of optimism, happiness, and sharing a Coke with a friend were expressed as part of the physical architecture and decor. The space felt alive with the culture that Coke works to exude.
- The degree of prototyping going on was tremendous! There were future product prototypes in numerous places, and the Workplace 2020 team was utilizing experimental space to conduct user tests for various configurations and work-pattern sites.
The photo gallery below contains my image captures from the fabulous visit to Coke AOC. I know that there will be countless views that I make to this gallery as the team at MVPS continues to research and design according to our principle and practice, “Learning demands interactive and flexible spaces.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Stop Trying to “Do It All” – 99U
“That promise of more productivity is just a seductive way to avoid facing up to trade-offs.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Grades, Learning, and Change – Leading, Learning, Questioning
HT @eijunkie
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Data Dashboards a High Priority in National Ed-Tech Plan – Education Week
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the two key questions his company always addresses with schools when they sit down to create a dashboard are: “What is the purpose of the dashboard? And who is the audience who is going to be seeing it?”
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kinds of dashboards “can offer promising opportunities to help students take control of their own learning.”
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The purpose of a dashboard determines what kind of data you need and with what frequency the data need to be updated, so understanding the purpose of a dashboard is a key step.
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#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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What Do Parents Think About Online Gradebooks? – The Atlantic
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Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework – Salon.com
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If the assignment does not promote greater love of school and interest in learning, then it has no place in an elementary school-aged child’s day.
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The Power of Creative Cross Training: How Experimentation Creates Possibility – 99u
HT @MeghanCureton
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Empowering Teachers to Empower Young People — A New Game — Medium
HT @MeghanCureton
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Within the limits imposed by our genes, the extent to which we become self-empowered is determined to a very large extent by the experiences we have throughout childhood and adolescence.
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If we want the new world to become our better world, then we need to give every young person access to coherent experiences — in and out of school. Experiences that are woven and scaffolded throughout their childhood and adolescence — and in which adults and young people are consciously helping each other become self-empowered.
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