• In an Era of Global Competition, What Exactly Are We Testing For? | MindShift

  “The new education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content,” Zhao

  tags: education assessment Zhao curriculum #MustRead

• The Coming Revolution in Public Education – John Tierney – The Atlantic

  A compelling overview of the educational landscape, the reform effort(s), and the impending revolution in public education. Full of links to explore to learn more deeply about the crossroads we face as a nation trying to school our children.

  tags: education revolution reform policy edreform public education #MustRead School Change

• The Agility Factor

  I could imagine that more than a few regular readers of #MustRead Shares – mostly educators – might initially bristle with the early paragraphs in this article about strategic agility. The idea of “profit” in schools might turn people off, as I try to explore the lessons schools can learn from business. However, if one can get past that, there is much to learn from this piece. How are we agile in school administrations, curriculum, instruction, etc.? There is a chart on p. 3 that is well worth contemplating as a school leader!

  tags: agility strategy change #MustRead

• Young Movers, With a Passion for Change – NYTimes.com

  “Given this extraordinary education, it makes you wonder if our schools should focus far more on peacemaking than test taking.”

  tags: school model PBL real-life service learning #MustRead

• 10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

  …and not just the future of “social entrepreneurship,” but the future of most fields.

  tags: social entrepreneurship innovation future transformation #MustRead

• Finland: The Lighthouse of Progressive Education and Divergent Learning « Penn-Finn Learnings 2013

  HT @CurtisCFEE
  @boadams1 @GrantLichtman @pgow Don’t miss @KavanYee on “The Lighthouse of Progressive Ed & Divergent Learning” http://t.co/7LY8tPq7MB

  tags: Finland progressive education #MustRead

• What Matters More in Decisions: Analysis or Process?

  “Looking at how organizations make decisions is a good place to start if we’re trying to improve the quality of decisions and remove cognitive biases.”

  “So what matters more, process or analysis? After comparing the results they determined that “process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.””

  HT @HappyGoth and her comment – this also applies to schools!

  tags: decisions analysis process #MustRead

• 10 Ways to Teach Innovation | MindShift

  “The burden of reinvention, of course, falls on today’s generation of students. So it follows that education should focus on fostering innovation by putting curiosity, critical thinking, deep understanding, the rules and tools of inquiry, and creative brainstorming at the center of the curriculum.”

  tags: innovation PBL #MustRead creativity

• The 6 Key Drivers of Student Engagement — THE Journal

  “We believe that relevant, personalized, collaborative, and connected learning experiences enhance student engagement, which in turn drives student achievement. Although these learning experiences were available in a more limited way before the advent of technology, digital conversion has taken them to an entirely new level.” [HT @CenterTeach]

  tags: engagement relevance collaboration connected #MustRead

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

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Reflections on Storytelling

  “Good storytelling is particularly important when introducing a complex and potentially disruptive offering in the marketplace whose value is not well understood.” [new school models!]

  “There are still people who believe that design is just about making things, people and places pretty.  In truth, design has spread like gas to almost all facets of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking.  For a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change.”

  “Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life.”

  tags: storytelling #MustRead narrative design

• Amazing Things Are Happening Here | NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

  This grab for the #MustRead shares is more of a “mood board” entry – an inspiration. I’d love to see a school take this approach to its website. Imagine the faces on the NYP site as student learners, faculty, parents, alumni, etc. There’s a tease to their story. Then, a deeper click reveals a short about their learning experience in this community. 

  tags: storytelling design #MustRead #MustSee

• La vida es bella : What Does Your Ideal School Look Like?

  “the schools of today are a reflection of the nation of tomorrow”

  This is one of the most beautiful and thought-provoking pieces that I have read all year. To me, among other things, it challenges us and charges us to envision the nation we want and to design the schools that will help us achieve that vision. We should be DOING this!

  tags: #MustRead School Change schoolreform schooldesign

• “The Root, Stem, Leaves, & Fruit of American Education” [Part 2] | chris.thinnes.me

  “Creating the lives they lead tomorrow, and the society in which they will lead them, should be foremost among the goals for students that we promote. Thankfully, the most forward thinking educators already recognize that students’ imaginations are more valuable than their ambitions; their decision-making processes are more valuable than their products; their collaboration is more valuable than their competition; and their engagement is more valuable than their achievement.”

  tags: Thinnes progressive education Dewey edreform #MustRead WhySchool

• Super-Awesome Sylvia in the Not So Awesome Land of Schooling : Stager-to-Go

  (HT @occam98)

  “Don’t you dare tell me that the demands of the curriculum preclude time for such classroom projects. Kids like Sylvia remind us of the authentic nature of learning and the efficiency of project-based learning. Several years worth of lectures on physics, electronics, engineering, computer science and video production would not result in the understanding demonstrated by Sylvia; that is if elementary schools bothered to teach such subjects at all.”

  tags: constructivism maker student centered #MustRead

• Why We Need Principals | Connected Principals

  tags: principals leadership learnIng #MustRead

• “How Do I Teach This?” vs. “What Did We Learn?” | Edutopia

  “We’re writing standards in an attempt to raise the bar — well-intentioned, to be sure — but in the end, students and teachers can only jump as high as their curiosity will let them. For all their digital elegance, the NGSS divert attention away from the much larger issue: we have millions of children in schools learning things on narrative arcs that they had no part in authoring.”

  tags: studentengagement designthinking Student Voice #MustRead

• University of Chicago Laboratory Schools: About Lab » Director Search » Director Search Statement

  An interesting way to explore Dewey and progressive education – study the position statement for University of Chicago’s Laboratory Schools’ new director.

  tags: progressive education Dewey #MustRead

• Is ROI the Right Way to Judge a College Education? – Administration – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  “The conversation about college and its returns gets down to a question that has dogged academe for decades, if not centuries: What is higher education for: Personal growth? A golden ticket? Or some of both?”

  Set in the context of college education, the article contains powerful glances into the purposes of education, too.

  tags: college higher education chronicle #MustRead

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

• http://m.good.is/posts/are-we-educating-for-capitalism-or-democracy

  “If so many of our aspirations in the classroom are governed by the service we provide to “the future”-whether that’s the next grade level, college, or career-I wonder why we can’t together think more creatively, and generatively, about a dynamic vision of a future students can create, rather than a static vision of a marketplace they should simply service.”

  tags: Democracy Dewey Thinnes edreform progressive education #MustRead

• Countering the Authoritarian Reform Agenda

  Don’t miss @JackHassard on “Progressive Principles in Politics & Education” http://t.co/SkBab2gHCh @pgow @grantlichtman @boadams1

  tags: progressive education edreform #MustRead

  • I am going to argue in this post that pro­gres­sive values should set the ide­als of teach­ing and learn­ing in American society. These values are rooted in de­moc­ratic ide­als and citiz­en ac­tion. Un­for­tunate­ly the cloud of aut­horitarian­ism looms over educa­tion, mak­ing it dif­ficult to de­sign cur­riculum and in­struc­tion around pro­gres­sive values.

• Hillbrook iLab Learning can look like THIS

  tags: pedagogicalmasterplanning learning environment iLab Hillbrook Purpose #MustRead

• swissmiss | /Purpose

  tags: purpose #MustRead

• If Robots Will Run the World, What Should Students Learn? | MindShift

  This piece is great… And not really about robots.

  “School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating.”

  tags: creativity MindShift real-world PBL pedagogy #MustRead

• Seth’s Blog: Urgent, please read asap

  tags: seth urgent important time #MustRead

• What You’ll Do Next – NYTimes.com

  “One of my take-aways is that big data is really good at telling you what to pay attention to. It can tell you what sort of student is likely to fall behind. But then to actually intervene to help that student, you have to get back in the world of causality, back into the world of responsibility, back in the world of advising someone to do x because it will cause y.”

  tags: bigdata nytimes com #MustRead

• How Design Can Change a CEO’s Life | LinkedIn

  “I have increasingly become a believer that design can be used to aid leaders in navigating today’s complex landscape. Design gives us the ability to see data visually and spatially, and governed by systematic principles. It cuts through information overload that provides a path to see “the whole”. After all, the word “design” comes from the German word gestaltung, meaning “shape” or “form” – in essence, how we see the big picture and can make sense of aspects of our world. Design affords a toolkit of core principles that straddles the line between beauty and functionality and that goes well beyond “making something pretty”.”

  tags: design linkedin leadership #MustRead

• I used to think… | Wright’sRoom

  “I’m becoming a better teacher by giving up a lot of what I used to think.”

  tags: #MustRead

• Wright’sRoom | Pondering education, technology, and making a difference

  tags: #MustRead

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

• But Then What Did They Know? | SAIS News

  tags: Quotes #MustRead

• Education Week: 3-D Printing Initiative in U.S. School Attracts International Visitors

  Charlottesville schools partner with universities to bring maker learning into classrooms.

  tags: Maker #MustRead PBL 3Dprinter

• Dewey Ever! The Enduring Vision of John Dewey – Independent Schools, Common Perspectives – Education Week

  “Educators in the last few decades have taken much of what Dewey laid out–the need to understand children’s brains and interests, the need for learning to be interactive and experiential, the importance of creativity and craft in the learning process, the centrality of planned and responsive teaching–and applied to it the latest research on cognition, social psychology and organization, and curriculum and assessment design. All this later research has strengthened the philosophical and methodological framework established by Dewey and his followers.”

  tags: dewey progressive education 21C grantlichtman #MustRead

• “The Root, Stem, Leaves, & Fruit of American Education” [Part 1] | chris.thinnes.me

  “The driving question to which we need to calibrate our efforts is simply this: “What is the goal of education in our country?””

  tags: Thinnes progressive education futureofed #MustRead

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

• Socrates (In The Form Of A 9-Year-Old) Shows Up In A Suburban Backyard In Washington : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR

  “These kids are encouraged to think out loud, to say what they think, even if they might be wrong. Each is appreciated. The parents, he says, “are also in awe of their children.” And that frees them.

  “I think there are a lot of kids who think about interesting things,” Zia says. “It’s my guess no one really asks them about it.”

  Maybe that’s what this family does: They turn to their kids, and they ask.”

  tags: socrates wonders wisdom npr #MustRead #MustSee

  • Where, I wondered, did he learn about multiverses, free will, the odds of intelligent life in the universe? How does he manage to be so aware of what he doesn’t know?
  • These kids are encouraged to think out loud, to say what they think, even if they might be wrong. Each is appreciated. The parents, he says, “are also in awe of their children.” And that frees them.

• The Discipline of Managing Disruption

  tags: disruption change Christensen #MustRead

• A Radically Practical Vision of Education | EdSurge News

  “In a world that’s changing so rapidly, why wouldn’t you build our education system around what we don’t know rather than around what we do?”

  tags: vision education EdSurge #MustRead

• Waypoints of the path of wisdom | Experiments in Learning by Doing

  tags: questioning #MustRead

• Visualization as Process, Not Output – Jer Thorp – Harvard Business Review

  “By thinking about visualization as a process instead of an outcome, we arm ourselves with an incredibly powerful thinking tool.” Part of the power of PMP – visualizing our schools’ pedagogical ecosystems so that we can unlock the ideas for systemic transformation.

  tags: visualization process design pedagogicalmasterplanning #MustRead

• Change or Die | Fast Company

  tags: change #MustRead

• Forget About Influence And Change Management, It’s Time To Lead A Revolution! | Digital Tonto

  tags: influence change revolution #MustRead networks tribes

• A Faculty Handbook that Answers the Question “How Can I Be Successful Here” | SAIS News

  “Policies and procedures are important, but the real employee handbook, well thumbed and annotated, should read, “How to help students learn.””

  tags: faculty handbook #MustRead

• Need a Job? Invent It – NYTimes.com

  tags: School Change edreform Ed transformation Wagner #MustRead

• The Creativity Cure – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education

  tags: creativity #MustRead

  • Creativity should instead be infused across the curriculum and assessments,

• Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? – NYTimes.com

  tags: giving nytimes com give #MustRead

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