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Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review
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Why Good Design Is Finally Affecting The Bottom Line | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
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Wave 1 (2012-2015) focusing on efforts to turn around the system by supporting teachers and focusing on core skills
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education transformation is to take place over 13 years
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Wave 2 (2016-2020) on accelerating system improvement
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Wave 3 (2021-2025) on moving towards excellence with increased operational flexibility.
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access, quality, equity, unity and efficiency.
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six key attributes that will enable them to be globally competitive
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knowledge, thinking skills, leadership skills, bilingual proficiency, ethics and spirituality, as well as national identity.
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Reminds me of Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future
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1. Provide equal access to quality education of an international standard.
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2. Ensure every child is proficient in Bahasa Malaysia and English language.
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3. Develop values-driven Malaysians.
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4. Transform teaching into the profession of choice.
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5. Ensure high-performing school leaders in every school.
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6. Empower State Education Departments, District Education Offices and schools to customise solutions based on need.
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7. Leverage information and communication technology to scale up quality learning across Malaysia.
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8. Transform ministry delivery capabilities and capacity.
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9. Partner with parents, community and private sector at scale.
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10. Maximise student outcomes for every ringgit.
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11. Increase transparency for direct public accountability.
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Over the course of a year, over 50,000 ministry officials, teachers, principals, parents, students and members of the public across Malaysia were engaged via interviews, focus groups, surveys, and National Dialogue townhall and roundtable discussions.
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Education Week: Graduating All Students Innovation-Ready
Our students want to become innovators. Our economy needs them to become innovators. The question is: As educators, do we have the courage to disrupt conventional wisdom and pursue the innovations that matter most?
Third, to push educational innovation, districts need to partner with one another, businesses, and nonprofits to establish true R&D labs—schools of choice that are developing 21st-century approaches to learning.
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need to develop ways to assess essential skills with digital portfolios that follow students through school
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assess teachers’ effectiveness by analysis of their students’ work, rather than on the basis of a test score. Teachers and administrators should also build digital portfolios
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Third, to push educational innovation, districts need to partner with one another, businesses, and nonprofits to establish true R&D labs—schools of choice that are developing 21st-century approaches to learning.
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we need to incorporate a better understanding of how students are motivated to do their best work into our course and school designs. Google has a 20 percent rule, whereby all employees have the equivalent of one day a week to work on any project they choose. These projects have produced many of Google’s most important innovations. I would like to see this same rule applied to every classroom in America, as a way to create time for students to pursue their own interests and continue to develop their sense of play, passion, and purpose.
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Our students want to become innovators. Our economy needs them to become innovators. The question is: As educators, do we have the courage to disrupt conventional wisdom and pursue the innovations that matter most?
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Day 3: Innovation in Action at Colorado Academy « The Learning Pond
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John Dewey’s Vision of Learning as Freedom – NYTimes.com
Dewey: “The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do,” he wrote. “Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.”
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From this narrow, instrumentalist perspective, students are consumers buying a customized playlist of knowledge
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philosopher John Dewey, America’s most influential thinker on education, opposed this effort. Though he was open to integrating manual training in school curriculums, Dewey opposed the dual-track system because he recognized that it would reinforce the inequalities of his time. Wouldn’t such a system have the same result today?
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Education should aim to enhance our capacities, Dewey argued, so that we are not reduced to mere tools.
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Dewey had a different vision. Given the pace of change, it is impossible (he noted in 1897) to know what the world will be like in a couple of decades, so schools first and foremost should teach us habits of learning.
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awareness of our interdependence
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“The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living is the finest product of schooling.”
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The inclination to learn from life can be taught in a liberal arts curriculum, but also in schools that focus on real-world skills, from engineering to nursing. The key is to develop habits of mind that allow students to keep learning, even as they acquire skills to get things done. This combination will serve students as individuals, family members and citizens — not just as employees and managers.
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Yes, the “key is to develop habits of mind that allow students to keep learning.” However, the type of learning for the future is more expansive than the brand of learning provided in many schools.
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Dewey’s insight that learning in the process of living is the deepest form of freedom
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In a nation that aspires to democracy, that’s what education is primarily for: the cultivation of freedom within society
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higher education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find “large and human significance” in their lives and work.
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Are we? Are we giving all citizens the opportunity to find large and human significance in their lives and work?
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Is Every Single Subject Taught in High School a Mistake? – Education – GOOD
Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Education Week: Graduating All Students Innovation-Ready
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What matters today, however, is not how much our students know, but what they can do with what they know.
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Schools Should Be In The Wisdom Business « The Learning Pond
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Structure of school inhibits learning | What I Learned Today
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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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How To Prepare For The 4th Era of Innovation | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
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The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown – Harvard Business Review
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“the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:
Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place. -
Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.
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one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”
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What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:
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First, use more extreme criteria.
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Second, ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest.
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Third, beware of the endowment effect.
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If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less.
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The Body and the Classroom: Phenomenology and Online Learning
Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.
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Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.
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Still, there is much to be said in defense of the real-world classroom
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Is there any intrinsic value to being bodily present in the classroom?
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Students learn not only from engaging with ideas, but also by engaging each other.
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Online education raises exciting possibilities for universities. MOOCs democratize educational access. But democratic education is also about habituating ourselves to encounter our fellow citizens, to disagree passionately and to tolerate disagreement. Traditional liberal arts classrooms democratize education not in quantitative terms, but in quality of access to Others.
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The Washington Monthly – The Magazine – The Siege of Academe
According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.
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According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.
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The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online.
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The recent surge of money into higher education startups reflects growing interest in the category.
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Is the real money to be made, per Marc Andreessen, in eating the existing education industry? Or will it be in providing service to the industry, helping them do what they do better? In terms popularized by Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen, this is the difference between “disruptive” and “sustaining” innovation.
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So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information, two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.
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To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions,
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In less than a year, online higher education has gone from the province of downmarket for-profit colleges to being embraced by the most famous universities in the world.
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We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.
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Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms.
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Climate Science as Culture War | Stanford Social Innovation Review
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Today, there is no doubt that a scientific consensus exists on the issue of climate change
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And yet a social consensus on climate change does not exist
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answers to this question can be found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.
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people’s opinions on this and other complex scientific issues are based on their prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values—all of which are heavily influenced by their referent groups and their individual psychology.
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We must acknowledge that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology
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The debate over school change must also be over culture, world views, and ideology.
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Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge.
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I wonder what the analogue is to education and the issue of school transformation? “Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge.”
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“logic schism,” a breakdown in debate in which opposing sides are talking about completely different cultural issues.
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No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post
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We can teach people the skills they need if we allow them to choose what interests them and then teach them to predict, evaluate, diagnose, etc., within their area of interest.
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From STEM to STEAM: Science and Art Go Hand-in-Hand | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network
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A List of the World According to the Class of 2016 | NewsFeed | TIME.com
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It’s Time to Re-Think the U.S. Education System – Tammy Erickson – Harvard Business Review
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although there are some encouraging signs of change, several major challenges stand out from my ongoing discussions with today’s 11-13 year olds.
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A disconnect between the way school works and how they function outside school.
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We are not preparing these kids for the world as it operates today.
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Boredom with the teacher-centered learning process.
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Shifting sources of authority.
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new role for teachers (and parents): that of a learning facilitator and coach, rather than of an authoritative source of information.
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Growing interest in pragmatic, job-oriented skills.
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Unease regarding global standing.
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Thurow argued that the most significant invention in U.S. history was the public education system established in the early days of the industrial revolution.
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Thurow argues that this unique educational system produced a workforce that was perfectly matched — in both skills and behavior — to the burgeoning needs of the new industrial economy.
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Students emerging from this system had both the right knowledge (reading, math) to perform the industrial jobs and the right behaviors (punctuality, focus on specific linear tasks) to form an efficient industrial workforce.
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modeled both on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it: specialization into separate subjects, standardized curricula, conformity, batch processing — by age group. The system was designed to leverage a “lock step” approach over set periods of time and using broadcast delivery methods to prepare students effectively for known jobs.
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our current approach to education was designed for a different age
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we all know, most of the jobs of tomorrow will not be industrial jobs.
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gap between the output of our educational system and the job demands of the current century is enormous — and growing wider.
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kids intuitively recognize the gap. They’re asking for a change.
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Cutting the Digital Lifeline and Finding Serenity – NYTimes.com
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Creating a National Collective Voice of Young People « Cooperative Catalyst
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How to Turn Your Classroom into an Idea Factory | MindShift
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Infographic: Highlights from the GOOD Company Project – Business – GOOD
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Corporate Social Responsibility vs. True Sustainability – DAL – November 2011 – Dallas Metroplex
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Innovation Excellence | Can Innovation Be a Structured Repeatable Process?
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Innovation Excellence | To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns
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Timothy Prestero: Design for people, not awards | Video on TED.com
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What Difficult Questions about Learning Must We Ask Ourselves? | CurtisUES.info
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How Can We Invite the Voice of Young Students into the Design of Their Learning? | CurtisUES.info
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Important Power Players Assemble To Discuss How Social Media Can Be Used For Good | Fast Company
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I just had an idea. Each one of our companies has some link buried somewhere with best practices for nonprofits. What if we all made a new website that had everyone’s stuff in one place? If there were one site that says, Here’s how you work with Adobe and YouTube and Twitter and how you combine them–that would be amazing.
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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Zynga – discussing possibility of one common website among them to help people with best practices for non-profits. Wow.
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Successful programs need to have three components: content, community, and a call to action.
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10 Rules for Students and Teachers (and Life) by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent | Brain Pickings
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Usable Knowledge: Education at bat: Seven principles for educators
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4 Lessons The Classroom Can Learn From The Design Studio | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Architect and K-12 thought leader from Perkins + Will explains what education can learn from the architecture studio: 1) a culture of critical collaboration, 2) interdisciplinary problem solving, everyday, 3) tinkering with solutions and reclaiming failure, and 4) the shared power of the pencil and pixel. Includes stung videos from John Seely Brown, and IDEO’s Design Thinking for Educators.
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Bridging the Reasearch-Practice Divide
Making a call for school-centered research, Jennifer de Forest advocates for independent schools to leverage their traits and culture in order to combine practice with experimental research. The positive outcomes that result: 1) improving their own practice, 2) contributing to the professionalization of teaching, and 3) promoting the greater educational good.
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Exciting, Essential Next Steps: Thoughts on the NMC K-12 Horizon Project Short List « 21k12
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The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age – The MIT Press
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The Creativity Crisis – Newsweek and The Daily Beast
.@jennzia here’s a report on decrease in creativity among US children over recent decades http://t.co/jdeekkI1
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The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
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Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
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A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.
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solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
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lack of creativity development in our schools.
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In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.
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When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,”
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Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.
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Herein lies the key…creativity is NOT a class to be taught. Creativity is a foundation to be nurtured in ALL classes, and if those classes are integrated rather than subject-divided…all the better!
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The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off.
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Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way.
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requires first understanding the new story emerging from neuroscience.
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right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together
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A WHOLE new mind! Not “left brain” and “right brain.”
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Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas.
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Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.
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Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.
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Creativity is learnable. Great analogy to basketball playing – being tall helps, but all can get better with determined practice.
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improvising
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“Creativity can be taught,”
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What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages.
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Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas.
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These paragraphs describe high-quality PBL and design thinking!
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And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum
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With as much as three fourths of each day spent in project-based learning, principal Buckner and her team actually work through required curricula, carefully figuring out how kids can learn it through the steps of Treffinger’s Creative Problem-Solving method and other creativity pedagogies. “The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity,” observed William & Mary’s Kim.
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Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.
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Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.
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found highly creative adults tended to grow up in families embodying opposites
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Parents encouraged uniqueness, yet provided stability. They were highly responsive to kids’ needs, yet challenged kids to develop skills. This resulted in a sort of adaptability: in times of anxiousness, clear rules could reduce chaos—yet when kids were bored, they could seek change, too. In the space between anxiety and boredom was where creativity flourished.
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also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship.
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Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.
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In early childhood, distinct types of free play are associated with high creativity.
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role-play
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voicing someone else’s point of view helps develop their ability to analyze situations from different perspectives.
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play is a safe harbor to work through forbidden thoughts and emotions.
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In middle childhood, kids sometimes create paracosms—fantasies of entire alternative worlds
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found a remarkably high rate of paracosm creation in their childhoods.
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From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions.
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As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel.
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quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic.
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creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect.
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contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.
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those who do better in both problem-finding and problem-solving have better relationships
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those high in creative self-efficacy had more confidence about their future and ability to succeed.
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