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The Value of Scalable Learning, Or How a Hardcore Geek Became a Softy | Big Think Edge | Big Think
“What is the half-life of a skill? It used to be about 30 years, says Brown. In other words, you could go to school and expect to learn a skill that would last throughout most of your career. In today’s rapidly changing world, however, the half life of a skill is more like 5 years, Brown says. That means that what you learn in school only gets you so far. The rest of your learning will need to come on the job.
Moreover, the business model of the last 100 years that aimed to achieve scalable efficiency, according to Brown, is the very thing that stands in our way now in our unpredictable world.
So how do we move institutions to a model of scalable learning?”
[HT Jenn Graham, Unboundary, (co)lab] -
Five Principles to Turbocharge Innovation
“Matanovic outlined five simple yet profound principles for the day. These are leadership values that you can articulate and model to reframe group work to maximize creativity and minimize destructive politics; overcome barriers and avoid rabbit holes; and bolster enthusiastic engagement. They aligned nicely with work that I have done and research I have encountered exploring systems-based leadership:”
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How to Make a New Product Unique
“Most important, the culture of the organization changed from one of silos, largely indifferent to one another, to one of intensive cross-functional alignment, with a strong feeling of mutual commitment.”
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Establishing that kind of advantage—unique product attributes, supported by a differentiated set of capabilities to buoy them up—is harder than it seems at first glance. Essentially, it involves making a big bet on a very few capabilities, and giving up all the other activities that don’t feed into that commitment.
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“It’s easy to be exposed to education, but actually quite a challenge to learn.”
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21st c. competencies as transfer: NRC’s Educating for Life and Work | 21k12
“21st century competencies are the outcomes of deeper learning; they are what students are able to do and demonstrate by leveraging their previous learning to transfer to real world problem solving and life long learning.”
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Playing with Professional Development (Literally) | The Creativity Post
“But sometimes, putting teachers and students out of their comfort zones can encourage them to interact and design solutions with one another.”
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Walt Disney On Fullfillment – 99U
The 4 Cs at the heart of the other Cs.
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Why the Maker Movement matters to educators | SmartBlogs SmartBlogs
“Giving kids the opportunity to learn about what they love means they will love what they learn.”
Great “Lessons from the Maker Movement”
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Not Too Hard, Not Too Easy: Finding Flow In Your Work – 99U
Not the best piece I’ve read on Flow, but still a great thought-provoker on how we might design for flow in school.
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Parents: 19 Meaningful Questions You Should Ask Your Child’s Teacher | Edutopia
What if “back-to-school night/day” for parents was handled by preemptively addressing these Qs as a faculty?!
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How You Climb A Mountain Is More Important Than Reaching The Top
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Debunking the Genius Myth | MindShift
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Einstein
Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
@boadams1 @scitechyEDU u may have seen this before… http://t.co/Ww60nXEdfY #dtk12chat [HT @bombayscot]
Love this manifesto!
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I often hear K-12 folks say something like, “But the universities and professional schools have the leverage on what we do in K-12.” Well, I feel like I see more and more evidence and sharing about universities and professional schools shifting and transforming. So, is that excuse for K-12 nearly gone?
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7 building blocks for the future of schools | @mcleod
“If I had the chance to build a new school organization (or redesign an existing one), I would start by attending to the educational movements listed below.” [HT Edutopia and MindShift for find]
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Why My Six-Year-Olds Blog (And Why Your Students Should, Too) — THE Journal
“In a digital world, learners of every age should be taking their first steps toward establishing an online presence. Here’s why.”
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Are You Ready for the Post-College SAT? – WSJ.com
“The test [CLA+] is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials.”
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Inquiry: The Cornerstone of Teaching–Part I
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In the Global Thinking Project teachers from different cultures came together to develop a curriculum was inquiry-based and involved students in solving local problems, as well thinking globally about these problems by participating in a global community of practice. Inquiry was at the heart of the project.
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Inquiry is the sin qua non of experiential teaching and learning.
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classrooms organized as democratic spaces encourage imagination
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Becoming an inquiry teacher is a life-long phenomenon that emerges from the craft of teaching in the context of classrooms and schools that advocate professional collaboration and a pursuit of wisdom in teaching.
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Increase Your Potential by Thinking Like a Rookie – Explore. Create. Repeat. – by 4ormat
“What creative doors can we open when we start thinking like a rookie? Is it possible to reclaim that sense of unlimited potential for growth we had at the beginning of our careers?”
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Why I spent 10th grade online – The Washington Post
Great account of a learning sabbatical engaged by a tenth grader. Relates some pros/cons of traditional and emerging schooling. (HT @occam98)
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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http://atlas.edupunksguide.org/index.html
The EduPunks’ Atlas
“What’s this? Mapping education’s evolving landscape; a sortable database of educational resources from the Edupunks’ Guide and around the web.” -
Chaos and Creativity: Forum | KQED Public Media for Northern CA
“Fostering chaos in the workplace may not be an obvious route to business success. But in his new book “The Chaos Imperative”, Ori Brafman advocates the use of “contained chaos” to encourage and develop innovation. We talk to Brafman and creativity expert Keith Sawyer about how to achieve the most productive balance between structure and chaos.”
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“THE TRUCK CONTAINS TWO 3-D PRINTERS, A LASER CUTTER, SEWING MACHINES, AND A CLAY OVEN—AND ITS MEANT TO FOSTER A NEW GENERATION OF MAKERS.”
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Guerrilla Geography – National Geographic Education
Be an explorer. Be a guerrilla geographer. [HT @jennynovoselsky]
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10 of the Most Counterintuitive Pieces of Advice from Famous Entrepreneurs | The Creativity Post
Not sure I agree with the “Goals” advice, but the other contradictory suggestions resonate with me for school and Ed innovation.
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How Bezos, in his first memo to Washington Post staff, achieved believable optimism | Poynter.
Amazing piece of communication and leadership.
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5: Anything can be prototyped. You can prototype with anything. | metacool
“A wise person operates with the worldview that anything can be prototyped, and we can prototype with anything.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Academic article on research surrounding the effects of peer + self assessment on achievement. Developing a heightened sense of what one knows. Meta-cognition and mindset.
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Academic article on research surrounding the differences in 1) giving grades, 2) giving diagnostic feedback, and 3) giving both. Developing a heightened sense of what one knows. Meta-cognition and mindset.
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Finding Ways to Nguyen Students Over: When I Let Them Own the Problem
I’m engaged in a Stanford MOOC called “How to Learn Math” offered by Dr. Jo Boaler. It is amazing and integrated with Dweck’s work in Growth Mindset. This example of a math re-design is a wonderful case study of big, open problems vs. small, closed problems.
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How Your Brain Reacts To Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset – Association for Psychological Science
“people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.”
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Peter Sims, on Finding Creativity Through Imperfection – NYTimes.com
“This is how comedians and entrepreneurs must work — by making countless small bets to discover what works. The real genius is in the approach.
The same holds true for leaders, managers and collaborators. They must to be willing to learn from mistakes. Affordable risks should be encouraged, and small failures celebrated — these are the mark of learning organizations. Otherwise, risk aversion will lead to stagnation and decline.”
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8 Tips and Tricks to Redesign Your Classroom | Edutopia
Incredible case study and resource curation for space redesign of learning environments (“classrooms”)!
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I Believe in One Size Fits All Professional Development
A great piece about doing what we know works, as a team, with “band adjustments” so that PL (PD) does, in fact, fit all, instead of none.
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Rebuilding Joplin High School | DesignRealized Adaptive Reuse Course
This is a different kind of #MustRead – a web session about…
“A 55 DAY DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
A deadly tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri last May 22, and leveled the town’s high school. School officials were determined that school would start on time on August 17, just 55 days later.
This session takes a look at the condensed design and construction process of transforming a vacant big box retail store into a 21st Century learning environment. It demonstrates how community involvement and a committed team created a space that surpassed all expectations.” -
It’s past time that we rethink what we mean by “classroom.”
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Diana Laufenberg: Classroom Redesign Challenge! Think Like a Designer | MindShift – newsle
What if there were a show on HGTV about classroom redesign? Like “Design on a Dime” or “Trading Spaces.” But for learning environments in schools!
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness – Emily Esfahani Smith – The Atlantic
“Being happy is about feeling good. Meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way.”
Connected to “giving an education.”
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Why Teachers Need to Be Great Storytellers | Edutopia
“The bare facts don’t engage emotions in the way that a recent New Tech graduate does when she tells her former teachers, “Your students graduate not just prepared, but inspired to chase their own whys.””
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“When (and where) were you when you learned best?”
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One of Chaltain’s suggestions that I’d love to see schools adopt: Host “story slams” where parents, teachers, and other community members share memories from their own personal learning journeys.
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What the New SAT and Digital ACT Might Look Like – NYTimes.com
“Big changes are coming to the nation’s two competing admissions tests.
Mr. Coleman, who became president last October, is intent on rethinking the SAT to make it an instrument that meshes with what students are learning in their classrooms. Meanwhile, the ACT, which has always been more curriculum-based, is the first of the two to move into the digital age. In adapting its test for the computer, ACT Inc. is tiptoeing past the fill-in-the-bubble Scantron sheets toward more creative, hands-on questions.”