• Creativity Becomes an Academic Discipline – NYTimes.com

  ““The reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,””

  HT @MeghanCureton & Helen Wills

  tags: creativity iDiploma #MustRead

  • everyone is creative, and can learn to be more so.
  • real genius, of course, is in the how.
  • “I am an absolute evangelist about the value of failure as part of creativity,”
  • Because academics run from failure, Mr. Keywell says, universities are “way too often shapers of formulaic minds,” and encourage students to repeat and internalize fail-safe ideas.

• The End of Work is Where Creatives Begin – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “There’s a new kind of trickle-down effect, and it starts with innovation occurring in spheres of creative enterprise and drips into mainstream culture”

  tags: jobs workforce culture #MustRead

  • By the time the mainstream has picked up a good idea, creatives have moved onto the next.
  • Today there’s a renewed focus on the “meaningfulness” of our work, which means a shift away from money as the sole motivating factor to do our jobs.
  • The desire to offer, and excel at, a particular skill set is characteristically human.
  • we all want to be at the peak of our abilities while also having the opportunity to apply them in collaborative ways.
  • heightened preference for developing niche specialities and functional networks between them

• Looked at the images & knew this would be a wi

  “The Difference Between Knowledge and Experience” @boadams1 #goodread http://t.co/HTUJUWjdmJ
  Looked at the images & knew this would be a winner! MT @treyboden Difference Between Knowledge & Experience @boadams1 http://t.co/fbaEPBzxi0

  tags: goodread knowledge experience real-life Synergy #MustRead

• Share This With All the Schools, Please | Momastery

  tags: assessment #MustRead patterns math ethnography pedagography advisement social-emotional

• 27 Characteristics Of Authentic Assessment

  tags: assessment #MustRead wiggins authentic authenticassessment

• Are Your Students Engaged? Don’t Be So Sure | MindShift

  ” better understand student engagement, challenge the myths around it, and make it a higher priority”

  [HT @cliffordshelley]

  tags: engagement #MustRead motivation student engagement

• ‘Teacherpreneurs’ vie for ed-tech startup funds in ‘Shark Tank’ scene – CNN.com

  tags: #MustRead startup teacherprenuer MVIFI

• Empathic Innovation – The Hub Magazine – Jan/Feb 2014 digital edition

  Empathic Innovation

  tags: design thinking designthinking empathy innovation #MustRead

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

• 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.