• Napkin Academy | Learn to solve any problem with a simple picture

  Take the “Back of the Napkin” lessons for visual communication. Everyone is, and can be, an artist.

  tags: visualization Visual Thinking online learning #MustRead

• The Importance of Free Play for Learning | MindShift

  “We can’t teach creativity, but we can drive it out of people through schooling that centers not on children’s own questions but on questions dictated by an imposed curriculum that operates as if all questions have one right answer and everyone must learn the same things.”

  tags: play creativity Student Voice #MustRead

• America’s Tiniest Engineers: Report from Greenville, South Carolina – James Fallows – The Atlantic

  tags: engineering integrated studies school model #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: On doing the work

  tags: achievement #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: Measuring nothing (with great accuracy)

  tags: assessment grading #MustRead

• Meaning markers and routes to success | Experiments in Learning by Doing

  Are our classes merely preparing student learners for what’s next, or are our classes engaging learners with what’s fun, amazing, and relevant to do now? This IS their real life!

  tags: relevance #MustRead engagement real-world

• How Do We Know What Will Create Value? | The Learning Pond

  tags: innovation School Change grantlichtman #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• NAIS Convenes Meeting to Evaluate and Develop Research on the Economics of Independent Education

  “On January 6 and 7, 2014, NAIS convened a group of prominent researchers and thinkers to help the association hone its research agenda. “Our hope for the meeting,” noted NAIS President John Chubb, “is to come away with ideas about what we need to look into more deeply. We want to ensure that the research we have planned best serves our members’ needs, so we’re asking people in the field — both inside independent schools and at education think tanks and universities – to help us brainstorm topics. What questions are most important for NAIS to ask? What data do schools need to make strategic decisions? How can we go about collecting and disseminating information in a way that most helps our schools?””

  tags: Independent Schools NAIS research questions #MustRead

• Smash Your Echo Chamber – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “It’s not uncommon for creatives to get stuck in an “echo chamber” or a feedback loop, where you hear the same voices all the time as they diminish in their power to inspire you to change. The risk is becoming dulled to the effects of new thinking, or a reduced appetite to seek it out.”

  tags: Creativity feedback #MustRead improvement kaizen

• Resilience and Grit: Resource Roundup | Edutopia

  “There’s been a lot of talk lately about resilience (bouncing back from adversity) and grit (persevering through challenges), including the skills associated with these processes and their importance for student well-being and academic success. Edutopia has created this curated list of resources to help educators and parents follow the discussion and create home and school environments that provide supports and opportunities to help students thrive.”

  tags: Grit perseverance #MustRead

• Forget About Learning Styles. Here’s Something Better. « Annie Murphy Paul

  tags: learning_styles #MustRead learning styles learningstyles

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• A Taxonomy of Innovation – Harvard Business Review

  [HT @meghancureton] Seen this? Could be useful for #ATLk12dt and it’s cool! http://t.co/ydopTlFTrg @scitechyEDU @boadams1

  tags: ATLk12dc innovation #MustRead taxonomy

• A Short Memory is Best For Innovation – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “In order to innovate, you need to let go by having a “short memory”: create, then release. Dwelling on the past prevents you from moving forward. While you should carry with you the lessons you’ve learned, you shouldn’t let them define your current project.”

  tags: innovation failure success #MustRead

• Digital Badges | HASTAC

  Great resource bank from HASTAC on badge systems and microcredentialing.

  tags: assessment microcredentialing badges badging dashboards #MustRead

• UC Davis’s groundbreaking digital badge system for new sustainable agriculture program | Inside Higher Ed

  tags: assessment microcredentialing badges badging #MustRead dashboards

• One Simple Practice That Will Revolutionize Your Career | Accidental Creative

  “Cultivating a deep well of stimuli from which to cull insights and apply them to your work is one of the most effective methods I’ve encountered for setting yourself up to thrive in the create on demand world.”

  Provides some pointers for developing a “daily study,” or what I call my personal learning plan (the morning part)… https://itsaboutlearning.wordpress.com/plp/

  [HT @tara_supersub – a former student who quickly became one of my teachers.]

  tags: learning self-initiated self-directed daily_study personal_learning_plan #MustRead

• Find the Coaching in Criticism – Harvard Business Review

  An excellent piece on the 3 triggers that feedback can touch, and an outstanding summary of 6 steps to becoming a better receiver of feedback,

  [HT @chiphouston1976 and @nicolenmartin]

  tags: feedback coaching receiving #MustRead

  • Feedback is crucial. That’s obvious: It improves performance, develops talent, aligns expectations, solves problems, guides promotion and pay, and boosts the bottom line.
  • But it’s equally obvious that in many organizations, feedback doesn’t work.
  • Most companies try to address these problems by training leaders to give feedback more effectively and more often. That’s fine as far as it goes; everyone benefits when managers are better communicators. But improving the skills of the feedback giver won’t accomplish much if the receiver isn’t able to absorb what is said. It is the receiver who controls whether feedback is let in or kept out, who has to make sense of what he or she is hearing, and who decides whether or not to change. People need to stop treating feedback only as something that must be pushed and instead improve their ability to pull.

• Nine educated education predictions for 2014!

  tags: #MustRead

• The Eight Characteristics Of Effective School Leaders – Forbes

  tags: leadership #MustRead

• Laura Eddolls – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  So many lessons here…

  tags: Creativity innovation #MustRead

  • Do you think you need to be multidisciplinary in order to be successful as a creative professional?
  • I think being a relaxed person and having a relaxed style is comforting and attractive to other people. I don’t like formality, and I don’t think many people do, so I avoid it to a certain extent.
  • the curation/incubation of many creative ideas is crucial in order to innovate; others have also suggested that over-saturation of ideas is detrimental to original thought.
  • You continuously have to be aware of your surroundings and who is doing what.
  • why I always blog about my mistakes and what I learn, because I want people to learn from me as I’ve had the chance to learn from others.

• The Benefits of Experience | LinkedIn

  HMW build more experience into school-based learning?

  tags: Experience linkedin #MustRead

• The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course : NPR

  An interesting and important provocation about the first iterations of MOOCs and how online education is learning from the critical core/corp of relationship-based learning.

  tags: MOOC education NPR learning online learning online education #MustRead

• Transforming Education: The One Thing I’d Change in 2014 | Edutopia

  “Learning to listen doesn’t mean that we stop all other work. It doesn’t mean that the principal ceases to lead from a collaboratively built, living vision; it doesn’t mean that teachers stop offering challenging texts or allow their classrooms to become unruly. It would mean that we’d pay much more attention to how we communicate with each other, to how we listen to each other.

  Authentic dialogue could lead to stronger communities, to deeper understandings across difference, and to finding creative solutions to the problems that exist in our schools and country. That’s my hope for 2014: that we learn how to slow down, listen, and effectively communicate with each other.”

  tags: listening collaboration edutopia change relationship #MustRead

• feedly: your news. delivered.

  “Feynman, eloquent and enthralling as ever, illustrates the connectedness of everything to everything else”

  tags: #MustRead real-world connections

  • If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it!

• SpeEdChange: Seven Pathways to a New Teacher Professionalism

  tags: innovation professional learning School Change #MustRead ira_socol Maker

  • What does learning look like? What do learning spaces look like? What questions do humans ask in learning spaces?

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The problem with thinking ‘content is king’ in education

  “Mistaken belief that changing the content of what stus study will magically alter what occurs in classrooms” Cuban: http://t.co/BaadM0f18P

  tags: pedagogy content #MustRead edreform

• Harvard EdCast: Making the Rounds | Harvard Graduate School of Education

  “In School-Based Instructional Rounds: Improving Teaching and Learning Across Classrooms, published by Harvard Education Press, Lecturer Lee Teitel explores this innovative approach of improving teaching and learning. Through case studies at five distinct models of K-12 schools, Teitel examines how the instructional rounds methods were implemented and what the schools have learned from the process.

  In this edition of the EdCast, Teitel speaks about the book and shares his evolving research on school-based instructional rounds. ”

  [HT @cliffordshelley via “LS Chilipeppers” Diigo group]
  Steve Seidel has run educational #rounds at PZ for years. Do any of you do it in your schools/museums/etc.? http://t.co/56wIL2KEl6

  tags: rounds Instructional_Rounds #MustRead

• Teachers: How Slowing Down Can Lead to Great Change | Edutopia

  “It’s time to slow down. In our crazy whirling, we are only creating more chaos and mess to clean up.

  If we slowed down, we could reflect on what we’ve been doing and what’s been working; we could ask questions, explore root causes, and we could listen to each other. And if we engaged in some of these practices, there’s a greater likelihood that we’d uncover authentic solutions, make some significant changes, feel better about our work, and deliver some sustainable results.”

  tags: pedagogicalmasterplanning School Change pace transformation #MustRead edreform Innovation

• Creating Great Students | Edutopia

  HT @cliffordshelley via “LS Chilipeppers” Diigo group

  tags: student centered engagement studentengagement UbD #MustRead

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » Teacher Data Dashboards Are Hard, Pt. 2

  Dan Meyer provides a number of important thoughts and resources in the investigation of Teacher Data Dashboards and progress reporting. This is part 2. 

  [HT @occam98]

  tags: dashboards data assessment progressreporting #MustRead

• dy/dan » Blog Archive » Teacher Data Dashboards Are Hard, Pt. 1

  Dan Meyer provides a number of important thoughts and resources in the investigation of Teacher Data Dashboards and progress reporting. This is part 1. 

  [HT @occam98]

  tags: dashboards assessment progressreporting #MustRead

• Marco Cibola – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “I think it’s very important to never stop learning. There’s a tendency, especially when I’m busy and working for clients, to just become a machine that churns out work that builds a portfolio of clones. There’s a certain comfort and security with repeating what you know and giving the client what they expect. But it can also get boring and unsatisfying. It can feel stagnant. I think that curiosity and going into the unknown is what makes work interesting. I love problem solving, but not when I’ve already solved the problem.”

  https://itsaboutlearning.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/comfort-and-creativity-part-of-why-i-am-compelled-to-explore-create-repeat/

  tags: Creativity innovation #MustRead

• Unstuck’s Best Advice of 2013 – 16 Tip Cards

  Unstuck Point of View
  “There’s no shame in getting stuck. The more we get stuck, the more often we can make life better. Let’s embrace the stuck moment — and then do something about it.”
   
  Put into Practice
  “This year, we had the pleasure of sharing all kinds of tips and ideas in the name of Unstuck. Your response has been gratifying, because every time a tip works, someone’s life gets a bit better. And most likely, that makes someone else’s life better. The ripple effect of getting unstuck is an exponential force for good. So in the spirit of building that force, we present the best of Unstuck’s advice in 2013 as printable and pin-able tip cards to keep handy and to share.”

  tags: ideation cards decks advice unstuck #MustRead

• Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design – NYTimes.com

  “While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

  At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.”

  tags: designthinking design thinking d.school nytimes com #MustRead

• What Stanford’s Startup Garage Teaches Us About Invention and Innovation | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

  “interested in experiential learning for multi-disciplinary teams”

  tags: innovation startup experiential multidisciplinary #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• 8 EduWins of 2013 | Edutopia

  “We’re always hearing about how education is so messed up — so often, the conversation focuses on all the negatives. But there are also plenty of “EduWins,” too — awesome ideas, videos, people, programs, practices, products, Tweeters, teachers, and technologies that are making a difference and changing the lives of real students on a global scale.

  Indeed, as technology continues to quietly revolutionize learning, and models like project-based learning become more broadly accepted, and neuroscience deepens our understanding of how our miraculous brains actually work, it is no surprise that so much is changing in education. And — as with any change — there is the good and the bad.

  So we asked our intrepid team of bloggers to reflect on this year’s biggest eduwins, and here are their thoughts.”

  tags: edutopia trends wins #MustRead innovation

• Kids Speak Out on Student Engagement | Edutopia

  “A while back, I was asked, “What engages students?” Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of babes, here are my students’ answers to the question: “What engages students?””

  tags: engagement Edutopia Student Voice #MustRead

• Why Schools Don’t Educate – The Natural Child Project

  A haunting, provocative, inspiring, and courageous expression of beliefs around the core differences between “schooling” and “education,” given as the acceptance speech when John Taylor Gatto received the Teacher of the Year Award in New York in 1990. [HT: @ChipHouston1976]

  tags: education school edreform transformation real-world #MustRead

• http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/06_AdditionalResources/makingthinkingvisibleEL.pdf

  “What Is Visible Thinking?
  Six key principles anchor Visible Thinking and characterize our approach in schools.”

  #4. “Fostering thinking requires making thinking visible. Thinking happens mostly in our heads, invisible to others and even to ourselves. Effective thinkers make their thinking visible, meaning they externalize their thoughts through speaking, writing, drawing, or some other method. They can then direct and improve those thoughts. Visible Thinking also emphasizes documenting thinking for later reflection.” 

  [HT: @cliffordshelley]

  tags: visiblethinking VTR thinking #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: Heroes of the revolution

  tags: revolution heroes #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.