• Make Your Move: Turn Motion Into Action – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “regardless of how many blueprints you draw, you won’t have a house at the end of your efforts unless you start to build.”

  From thinking and talking…to DOING.

  tags: motion action transformation #MustRead

• A Robotic Arm, Or ‘The Coolest Thing Ever,’ Changed 4 Lives : Shots – Health News : NPR

  “The three Rice students heard about Dee in an unusual freshman engineering class. Instead of learning engineering principles from a book, students form teams to come up with engineering solutions for real-world problems.”

  As more and more colleges pivot to increased chances for design-thinking and project-based learning, K-12 education will need to rethink what it means to help get students “college ready.”

  tags: PBL real-world design thinking #MustRead engagement Curriculum School Change school model

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• Q&A: Design Thinking and Its Role in Industry and Education | Blog | design mind

  tags: design thinking designthinking #MustRead

• From Cardboard Construction to Wearable Tech: Making and Tinkering with Parents and Students | Findings

  “This post reports on the Maker sessions run by Dr. Gary Stager at ASB on November 10 and 16, 2013. The report is written by Shanoor Seervai, a freelance journalist.”

  tags: Maker #MustRead

• How to Offer Praise and Criticism | PDK International

  What if the entire Educational community got well versed in Growth Mindset?!

  tags: mindset #MustRead

  • the type of praise adults use with kids can shape their mindsets.
  • the type of praise adults use with kids can shape their mindsets

• This Is What It Looks Like When a Google Manager Gets Feedback – David A. Garvin – Harvard Business Review

  Fascinating feedback and performance review example. HT @GrantLichtman and @HollyChesser

  tags: feedback improvement professional development professional_development #MustRead

• Age of Distraction: Why It’s Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus | MindShift

  Do we need to teach a concentration curriculum in schools or do we need to transform schools to focus more on work that matters…work that naturally grabs and holds our attentions…work that generates from our curiosities?! [HT @DrTonyWagner]
  Ability to concentrate more important for adult success than IQ or SES. Requires that we give kids work worth doing. http://t.co/ewk2aG7eab

  tags: focus attention success concentration #MustRead

  • The ability to concentrate was the strongest predictor of success.

• Seth’s Blog: The moderation glitch

  2 Lessons:
  1) “Smart organizations need to build moderation-as-a-goal into every plan they make…. 2) Habits matter. When good habits turn into bad ones, call them out, write them down and if you can, find someone to help you change them.”

  Among many other thoughts, this piece (HT @jbrettjacobsen & @ChipHouston1976] made me wonder about a number of things that have become habitual in school life that need re-examining.

  [In econ, we called a lot of what Seth is riffing on Diminishing Marginal Utility.]

  tags: innovation moderation decisions #MustRead

• Clean Up The Way You Communicate – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “Most creative work is about delivering a message…” The critical importance of clear communication.

  tags: communication #MustRead

• Exemplary Teacher Evaluation, Part 1 | Granted, and…

  “The purpose of any proper evaluation is legitimate accountability and helpful feedback. Accountability means that we must be both responsible and responsive to feedback against legitimate organizational goals. Humans need to be held accountable because we have blind spots as well as good intentions. So, formal feedback against results is useful for both organization and employee in a healthy system.

  Evaluation asks: how are we doing against our obligations? i.e. in schools it means asking: how well are students engaging, learning, and achieving? What have been our personal successes as causers of learning? What (inevitable) improvements are suggested by results to better honor our responsibilities?”

  tags: evaluation professional learning professional development #MustRead

• Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You – President’s Blog

  “In this, the very week that the nation remembered President Kennedy, I met with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. I was joined by our own Jefferson Burnett, who has represented NAIS during four administrations. The secretary was joined by Deputy Secretary Jim Shelton, whom I had worked with in the private sector a decade ago. As the meeting began, Jim asked, “What can we do for you?” I knew my reply, “We’re here to ask what we can do for you.””

  tags: publicpurpose private schools public purpose #MustRead Chubb NAIS

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• Thinking Big By Acting Small – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “Goal-oriented planning relies on disciplined project management.” Innovation is big ideas and small, iterative nudges to get there. A great house is built with many swings of the hammer!

  tags: innovation productivity #MustRead

• Inspirations | The New School

  A fabulous exploration guide from a school opening in Atlanta in fall 2014 – The New School.

  tags: #MustRead School Change school model school3.0 Curriculum engagement inquiry-based Innovation

• Why Intuit Founder Scott Cook Wants You To Stop Listening To Your Boss | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

  Running portfolios of experiments to learn in more amplified and accelerated ways. Change by experimentation versus persuasion. Connected to DT and #Decisive “ooching”

  tags: experimentation experiment ooching #MustRead Innovation

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• If You Were the Next Steve Jobs… – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

  “You don’t get to tomorrow by solving yesterday’s problems.”

  tags: Innovation Problem-solving #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: Understanding critical path

  Wow! This piece on critical path could help revolutionize school innovation and transformation. If we would just practice such discipline.

  How to integrate w/ #Decisive, #ShipIt, #Switch, etc?!

  tags: understanding School Change transformation criticalpath #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: Salmagundi on offer is not the shortcut it appears to be

  Brilliant advice for schools! (Understandably, out of love for children and learning, schools try to be all things to all people. More and more, schools must consider “What will we be extraordinary in, and what will we stop doing in order to achieve that extraordinary?”)

  tags: #MustRead purpose value Seth GodIn

• How Visual Thinking Improves Writing | MindShift

  “She thinks it’s important for students to have a space to express themselves without specific writing assignments or limitations. They write and draw what matters in their own lives and in the process develop their voice, humor, and point of view. They get to play with language and break out of cookie cutter forms of writing like the persuasive essay.”

  Connection to #Synergy observation journals.

  tags: writing Synergy #Synergy Student Voice observation journals #MustRead VTR

• Google Reveals Its 9 Principles of Innovation | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

  HT @grantlichtman

  tags: google innovation #MustRead

• From Brooklyn to Jakarta: Teaching Teachers Well | Edutopia

  “What if all professional development modeled the pedagogy that school leaders ask of their teachers?”

  Great case study piece on using what I call the Golden Rule of pedagogy: Do unto teachers as we would have them do unto students.

  tags: professional development professional learning #MustRead GoldenRuleofEd Leadership

• Dive Into Science With Zombies, Superheroes, and Fairies | MindShift

  Fabulous case study and example of a teacher who foundationed on student interest and curiosity and THEN worked to ID the formal learning outcomes that we subject-silo in formal schooling. Brava!

  #Synergy method

  tags: PBL inquiry-based curiosity #Synergy #MustRead Student Voice Curriculum engagement

• In India, a School that Empowers Students and Teachers | Edutopia

  An incredible job description for TEACHER. Also, navigation to educational innovation and school transformation.

  “My role in the classroom is not to deliver content,” Newcomb says. “It’s all about listening — and listening some more. You listen to find out, what do students wonder about? What are their frustrations, their passions? My job is to listen and then make connections, to turn them into knowledgeable networkers as opposed to knowledgeable workers.”

  tags: Innovation inquiry-based PBL suzieboss edutopia #MustRead

• Why We Fail

  An interesting look at why we fail to do and accomplish certain things, even when we possess the knowledge and understanding. While the main-thread example is medicine, one could easily replace “medicine” with “schooling.”

  tags: failure learning innovation #MustRead

• Unstuck iPad app – How to live better every day – Unstuck

  “Free-flowing gratitude can help you get unstuck. “Feeling good lubricates mental efficiency…”

  tags: gratitude #MustRead unstuck

• Design Thinking in Schools: An Emerging Movement Building Creative Confidence in our Youth – Getting Smart by Guest Author – design thinking, IDEO, Innovation | Getting Smart

  “The need for design thinking. This movement to build a generation of design thinkers could not be more timely or more relevant. We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.”

  tags: designthinking #MustRead d.school IDEO

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• Do You have the Personality To Be an Inquiry-Based Teacher? | MindShift

  Great questions regarding the mindset of inquiry-based instruction!

  tags: inquiry-based #MustRead coaching professional learning

• Informal Learning: Facing the Inevitable and Seizing the Advantage | Edutopia

  Great piece about what we call learning and what we call school.

  tags: edutopia informal_learning PBL inquiry-based #MustRead

• A Purpose Guide for Everyone

  How do we teach – coach, really – the ways to find one’s purpose? I’ve yet to see a class called “Purpose” in a school course catalog (and I’m not sure I’d want to see it so silo-ed out). Do we help learners understand and uncover and discover their purpose as much as we help them learn punctuation, penmanship, and prepositions? 

  I love this piece and resource from Unstuck and Stone Yamashita Partners. 

  May we be as concerned with #Purpose in schools as we tend to be with the other P’s above.

  tags: Purpose #MustRead #Synergy

• The Ethics of Innovation & Reform in Education | Connected Principals

  Fascinating, provocative blog post about some questions to ask when innovating in education. For example, #2 is “What will be the possible impacts of your action? Predicting and applying systems thinking to this process is critical. Like Peter Senge writes: ‘today’s problems are a consequence of yesterday’s solutions'”
  [HT @CenterTeach]

  tags: #MustRead Innovation School Change

• Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship.” | bwagy

  “That’s why the latter option mentioned in my previous post of “Get it out the door asap 80% done. For you will make mistakes anyway. Best get first one out the door so the second, third, fourth are even better.” works best when you’re doing something new, different, innovative… ie worth doing.” [HT @jbrettjacobsen]

  tags: #MustRead strategy ShipIt innovation

• Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively – Georgia Everse – Harvard Business Review

  “Here are just a few communications approaches that will help you effectively reach your employees and encourage behaviors that advance your strategy and improve your results.” 
  [HT @ChipHouston1976]

  tags: HBR communications strategy #MustRead

• Turn Creative Fear Into Fuel – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “Fear has the potential to be a driving force in your creative process.”

  tags: Creativity #MustRead Fear growth mindset

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