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The Critical Move From Vision to Action: St. Christopher’s School, Richmond | The Learning Pond
“If a school organization asks people to implement classroom tactics aligned with a vision of innovation, asks people to do things differently than they have in the past, the school needs to provide three things: a clear, overarching articulation of how these changes en toto support the vision; a picture of what innovation looks like; and the time and resources to learn the new skills they require. The second two are a matter of resource alignment: spend some money and send people out in to the world to see what analogs are working for other schools. The first issue requires a critical step in planning between the vision statement and the classroom tactics. The school needs to make sure that their systems are compatible with the new pedagogy.”
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Three Huge Mistakes We Make Leading Kids…and How to Correct Them
“While I applaud the engagement of this generation of parents and teachers, it’s important to recognize the unintended consequences of our engagement. We want the best for our students, but research now shows that our “over-protection, over-connection” style has damaged them. Let me suggest three huge mistakes we’ve made leading this generation of kids and how we must correct them.”
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Why the Creative Class Needs to ‘Lean in’ to Education Reform | Education on GOOD
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Kids don’t hate history, they hate the way we teach it | History Tech
“He was very clear about it:
‘Kids don’t hate history. They hate the way we teach it.’
I couldn’t agree more.”
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Seth’s Blog: Toward zero unemployment
“build these assets with novelty, with a fresh approach to an old problem, with a human touch that is worth talking about.”
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Why Innovating Is About Doing, Not Talking | LinkedIn
To become a better innovator, it’s all about experiencing as many cycles of doing as you can.
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Why Are the Students In Your Class? | Practical Theory
“This is our challenge – to help every student we teach find the reason they are in our class. We must strive to ensure that the time we spend together will help every student become a better citizen and person, both today, and in the future. Our classrooms must then be lenses on the world, not just for the students who fall in love with the same content we love, but for every child.”
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“The main message I’d like to promote is ‘Develop yourself, explore the world around you, and try to do something to make a change,’ ” he says.”
Another example of self-motivated learning. It remains interesting to me that a number of examples of self-motivated learning come into conflict with “schooling.” But isn’t the learning that is happening with this example (many of these examples) exactly what we want our students to pursue, learn, develop, etc.?
Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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4 Words You Should Never Say to Your Boss | Brazen Life
An important reminder for us educators to beware things like, “I am a math teacher.” Implies a certain focus of the job. While it might sound corny, I wish we called ourselves “facilitators of learning.” That covers all manners of work in a school/learning setting!
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“We build to think.” IDEO uses a Make-a-Thon to engage in a creative ideation exercise about… itself. What if schools did this more?!
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Capturing the character of the IBM brand | VSA Partners
Great two-minute piece about IBM brand. Strong lessons for schools.
“We don’t try to manage the IBM brand. We try to manage our character as a business. And we’ve never defined IBM by what we’re selling. So if we’re not going to define our brand by what we make, what defines us? And it comes back to this notion of our corporate character. And that’s our belief system and our purpose and our mission and what makes us us. We tend to that and the brand takes care of itself.”
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Dept of Ed Report Encourages Sharing Across Disciplines | EdSurge News
“The entire third chapter covers the potential for combining data from traditionally siloed systems to better address student needs.”
Part 3 of 3 of @appratt’s series on US DOE Expanding Evidence Report.
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‘Expanding Evidence’ Report Tempers Research With Design | EdSurge News
“In each of these examples, the design-based approach to continuous improvement involves multiple stakeholders sharing and reflecting on many kinds of evidence. But in common practice, designers, researchers, technologists, and teachers work in silos. Or at least, they hang out all too infrequently. Innovators who can successfully cross disciplines, on the other hand, have the potential to build powerful education interventions by combining evidence and problem-solving approaches from different professional communities.”
Part 2 of 3 in @appratt’s series about the US DOE Expanding Evidence Report.
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Latest Department of Education Report Urges More Collaboration | EdSurge News
3 part series from @appratt about US DOE “Expanding Evidence” Report. Calls for collaboration among sectors – corporate, social innovation, education [like Unboundary 7.0] to innovate education in more profound and meaningful ways.
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Mozilla’s Debuts Open Badges To Showcase Out of School Learning and Skills | EdSurge News
“SHOW ME YOUR BADGE: Away with the gold stars. The Mozilla Foundation officially unveiled Version 1.0 of its Open Badges project at the Digital Media and Learning Conference this week. It’s the culmination of eight months of beta testing and development, during which over 600 companies, non-profits, foundations, and other organizations have issued over 60,000 badges.”
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What a Startup and a School Have in Common | EdSurge News
“A couple of weeks ago we posed the question, What Happens When You Cross a School and a Startup? Voilà, Clever on Campus was born.”
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Let’s Save Great Ideas from the Ideas Industry – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
While I do not agree with the general blanket that Haque lays over “TED thinking,” I am stirred by his insistence that heart and action are required and not just sharing of cognitive ideas. Haque’s writing is writing that I seek to challenge me. Because I watch (consume?) so many TED talks, this seems an important challenge to me. To us.
“To me, this is the greatest and truest failure of today’s idea industry: it is a mind without a heart. TED thinking cheats us of the better angels of our nature; of ethos itself, the highest, truest, and noblest of all the arts of human thought.
“Great ideas, then, demand something from us — something more than pleasure. They demand more than just our “attention” — and far more than our standing ovations. They demand not just our eyes, wallets, and hands, but our hearts, minds, and souls. They demand our heartbreak, our hurt. They demand our minds don’t just “accept” — but, as critical thinkers, object, protest, question.”
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Sparks and Experiments: The Right Way to Manage and Execute Side Projects – 99U
“What if they created an entire product division, meant to execute internal “what if…” and “wouldn’t it be cool…” ideas?”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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How to Find and Amplify Creativity – Bruce Nussbaum – Harvard Business Review
“Creative competence is like a sport. You can train for it and increase the capacities of yourself and your organization.”
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SXSW: Forget Stories. Your Brand Needs a Narrative. | Beyond PR
“Narratives differ from stories in two important ways, according to Hagel. First, narratives don’t have an end. They are open ended, and the resolution is yet to be determined. Secondly, narratives invite participation. The inherent message isn’t “Listen” — it’s “Join.””
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To Become More Adaptable, Take a Lesson from Biology – Rafe Sagarin – Harvard Business Review
“All of Earth’s successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven’t held “planning exercises” or created “predictive frameworks.” Instead, they’ve adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be.”
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Measuring Creativity: We Have the Technology – Werner Reinartz – Harvard Business Review
“Clearly, if you’re going to be creative, you need to apply divergent thinking. It would seem, to be a no-brainer. But the numbers show that remarkably few people engage in divergent thinking.”
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It’s Time for Tenure to Lose Tenure – James C. Wetherbe – Harvard Business Review
“To make such changes possible, colleges need to make use of the same tools used in the business world such as employment contracts instead of jobs for life, process innovation, better allocation of resources, and more careful scrutiny of how research gets funded. Every college’s business school has taught how restrictive work rules and high labor costs for many years made American automotive, electronics, and other industries less competitive. Now universities need to adopt their own teachings and end tenure.”
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Educational Leadership:Creativity Now!:The Case for Curiosity
“The irony is that children are born with an overpowering need to know. They want to know what every object feels and looks like and what will happen when they attempt to do different things with that object. They want to know why people behave the way they do. This voracious appetite for knowledge defines us as a species. And it doesn’t evaporate when babies become toddlers. Every preschool teacher knows that children between the ages of 18 months and 5 years are insatiable for information. Their curiosity drives much of their learning—through asking questions, watching what others do, listening to what adults say, and tinkering with the world around them. But somehow the incessant curiosity that leads to so much knowledge during the first five years of life dwindles as children go to school.”
(HT @centerteach)
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Don’t Assess the Project: Thoughts on Assessing Project-Based Learning | 21k12
Jonathan Martin offers a fabulous look at PBL and assessment. There is much great soil here for learning, and there is incredible fodder for discussion and development. I don’t agree with everything, but Jonathan has given my much to expand my own knowledge and thinking.
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Designing Integrated Curriculum – YouTube
Great 6 minute “documentary” about how a team of subject-area teachers work to design interdisciplinary projects, with real-world elements and applications.
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Rob Fields: How Brands Can Provide Cultural Leadership – PSFK
“My interest is this: How can brands achieve their business goals by leading and influencing the direction of our collective sensibilities and our evolving understanding of how we make meaning of our lives?”
Now, re-read, but replace “brands” with “schools,” and maybe strike “business.”
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The Professors’ Big Stage – NYTimes.com
“Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know.”
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Five Ways Free Online Classes Will Change College, or Not | LinkedIn
“Because MOOCs are attracting so much attention and hype, they are often conflated as being the silver-bullet solution to all that ails higher education. They’re not. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be yesterday’s news by this time next year. Just like online shopping didn’t put brick-and-mortar stores out of business, online education can co-exist along traditional residential campuses. Shoppers need and like both forms of purchasing and college students like both forms of course delivery when they offer flexibility. Here are five ways MOOCs will and will not change higher ed in the coming years:”
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“Let Us Plant Dates:” Our Role & Our Moment in Schools | chris.thinnes.me
“So there we were, having our umpteenth private and personal conversation about what school could be like, and what role we could plan in it (“We could start a ______;” “We could try a ______;” “We should talk to _____”), painting together on a Philadelphia streetcorner a picture of the world we want to live in, and the schools we want to help create. At some level it was deeply moving; at some level, too, it was of no more consequence to education than Fantasy Football is to the sport. And we spent some time exploring our relationship between ‘that’ world, and ‘this’ one.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms – NYTimes.com
A great example of the intersection of corporate practice, social entrepreneurship, and education. Law schools are opening law firms to serve graduates and low- and moderate-income clients. Also a great example of “outside perspective” – law schools borrowing catalyst from teaching hospitals.
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“Who should lead innovation in education—teachers or entrepreneurs? That key question was in the air here at this year’s South by Southwest Edu conference, which brought together a mix of entrepreneurs and educators for four days of panels and a competition for education start-ups.”
ME: What if we stopped seeing school change and ed transformation as a competition and we worked together? Education should be everybody’s business, and ALL efforts should begin with inviting in the voices and expertise of educators. But if we started by thinking of business, social entrepreneurship, and education as parts of the same team, we would do better for our learners – from cradle to grave.
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How Leaders Mistake Execution for Strategy (and Why That Damages Both)
“When discussing strategy, executives often invoke some version of a vision, a mission, a purpose, a plan, or a set of goals. I call these “the corporate five” (see exhibit, below). Each is important in driving execution, no doubt, but none should be mistaken for a strategy. The corporate five may help bring your strategy to life, but they do not give you a strategy to begin with.
Nevertheless, they are often mistaken for strategy—and when that happens, real damage can ensue. If the corporate five are the cart and strategy is the horse, leaders who put the cart first often end up with no horse at all.
Before they get to the corporate five, companies need to address five much more fundamental, and difficult, questions. Let’s call them the “the strategic five”:
1. What business or businesses should you be in?
2. How do you add value to your businesses?
3. Who are the target customers for your businesses?
4. What are your value propositions to those target customers?
5. What capabilities are essential to adding value to your businesses and differentiating their value propositions?” -
The Open Classroom : Education Next
Since children differ in their motivations, interests, and backgrounds, and learn at different speeds in different subjects, there will never be a victory for either traditional or progressive teaching and learning. The fact is that no single best way for teachers to teach and for children to learn can fit all situations. Both traditional and progressive ways of teaching and learning need to be part of a school’s approach to children. Smart teachers and principals have carefully constructed hybrid classrooms and schools that reflect the diversities of children. Alas, that lesson remains to be learned by the policymakers, educators, and parents of each generation.
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“The subject of independent schools and inequality is rife with contradictions. In some ways, independent schools work to ameliorate inequities. In other ways, they reinforce and exacerbate them. Those in independent schools who work on social justice, equity, and diversity issues deal with these contradictions every day. Most believe, most of the time, that the good done by independent schools outweighs the bad, but sometimes it is not clear this is the case.”
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ParkDayTom: The Children’s School – Chicago
“I lunched with the faculty of The Children’s School and they stressed the importance of emergent curriculum that is developmentally appropriate for students. Three years ago I visited the school and observed an extraordinary unit on Shakespeare in Kate Miller’s fourth grade classroom. When I returned, I was hoping to go back to Kate’s class and learn more about the unit. But, when I asked Pam if the Shakespeare unit had begun yet, she answered, “No, the kids have not yet decided what they want to study.” Instead of repeating a successful unit year after year as so many teachers do, TCS faculty listen, wait patiently, and develop units arising out of the current interests and passions of their students. It is teaching at its most challenging and, in my view, very progressive.”
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Collective Impact | Stanford Social Innovation Review
“large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is still limited, but these examples suggest that substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact. It doesn’t happen often, not because it is impossible, but because it is so rarely attempted. Funders and nonprofits alike overlook the potential for collective impact because they are used to focusing on independent action as the primary vehicle for social change.”
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“This forecast previews five disruptions that will reshape learning over the next decade. Responding to them with creativity rather than fear will be critical to preparing all learners for an uncertain future.”
HT to Mark Hale for sharing this KnowledgeWorks Forecast 3.0 and the work of Andrea Saveri
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Should Designers Fear Design-Thinking MBAs? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
“It is not about a world where designers do their thing and MBAs do theirs, but rather where both recognize and value the power of a successful collaboration, built on solid communication, that brings the strengths of business and design thinking together to drive business innovation by design.”
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Guest Post: @braddo on Digital Footprints and the Brand of Me – The Tempered Radical
“Instead, we talk about the “Brand of Me” and coach our kids on proactively managing their online identity and on becoming good digital citizens, for the reasons Will Richardson talks about.”
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Seth’s Blog: You can’t change everything or everyone, but you can change the people who matter
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Great resource from Business Innovation Factory —
“BMGF contracted the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) to better understand the feedback that teachers receive, in what ways that feedback is shared, and under what conditions the feedback impacts teacher performance (both negatively and positively).” -
The Broken Model Theory of Innovation | Business Innovation Factory
What if school were not modeled on an industrial paradigm – seemingly composed of various parts that make a whole? Perhaps instruction, curriculum, assessment, etc. are not parts but more accurately a system of one “material.” Using such natural paradigm for the design of schools could result in a more organic and human way of learning.
I enjoyed discovering Neri Oxman’s work via Business Innovation Factory. There is much here to translate to school transformation and redesign.
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“The central strategy for Bennington turned out to be disarmingly simple and straightforward: to turn the world’s most pressing problems themselves into major definers and organizers of the curriculum. They would be accorded the same authority to generate and organize curriculum now held exclusively by the traditional disciplines in the arts and sciences.”
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“In recent years interest has grown in ‘pedagogy’ within English-language discussions of education. The impetus has come from different directions. There have been those like Paulo Freire seeking a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ or ‘critical pedagogy’; practitioners wanting to rework the boundaries of care and education via the idea of social pedagogy; and, perhaps most significantly, governments wanting to constraint the activities of teachers by requiring adherence to preferred ‘pedagogies’.
“A common way of approaching pedagogy is as the art and science (and maybe even craft) of teaching. As we will see, viewing pedagogy in this way both fails to honour the historical experience, and fails to connect crucial areas of theory and practice.”
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Sam Chaltain: Stories of Transformation: Blue (School) Skies Ahead
“The school’s mission statement spells out the core ingredients such a re-imagining will require: “cultivating creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” “