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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
Category Archives: #MustRead Shares – Weekly Reading
#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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#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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The Seven Deadly Sins of Innovation Leaders | Management Innovation eXchange
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Is Self-Evolving Learning Our Holy Grail? « The Learning Pond
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Innovation Excellence | Sustainable Innovation – a conversation with Alan South of Solar Century
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The DaVinci Institute – The Future of Education by Thomas Frey | Diigo
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KnowledgeWorks – Map of Future Forces Affecting Education – Education Map
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LDT alum Brady Fukumoto reflects on 2012 LDT Expo | EdSurge News
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the design process is fantastic, perhaps ideal, for finding optimal solutions to known problems given time and resource constraints, but what can design thinking do for education when we have not even conclusively figured out what the problems are? How can we possibly empathize with students and teachers when each individual varies so much in aptitude, motivation, and socio-economic status? How can we iterate when our testing cycle is 18+ years long?
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What can design thinking do for something as complex as education?
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the design process is never complete and requires always revisiting old ideas to see where they can be improved
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First, Let’s Fire All the Managers – Harvard Business Review
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What DOES Teacher Leadership Look Like in an #atplc School? – The Tempered Radical
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Anatomy of a Khan-troversy – Teaching Now – Education Week Teacher
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The Power of Networks: Shifting our Metaphors for Learning and Knowledge « 21k12
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Best Practices for Leading via Innovation – Rick Lash – Harvard Business Review
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Stephen Ritz: A teacher growing green in the South Bronx | Video on TED.com
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The simple fact is that a college or university education is not job training. In recent decades, it’s become conflated with job training, at least in North America, and this is too bad. A liberal arts education is all about expanding your mind, all about being able to think. It’s not about gaining skills that you are then going to use in a job.
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Why can’t it be both?! Why can’t education be BOTH to encourage enhanced thinking AND to help prepare us for what work is really like? Why do we have to make it a false dichotomy?
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Liberal arts education is to make people into good citizens, not into good workers.
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“Liberal arts education is to make people into good citizens, not into good workers.” Why can’t it be BOTH?!
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Liberal arts education is to make people into good citizens, not into good workers.
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We’re training people to be members of civilization, not employees.
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“We’re training people to be members of civilization, not employees.” Aren’t we doing both?
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Raising Successful Children – NYTimes.com
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But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born.
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If you can’t stand to see your child unhappy, you are in the wrong business. The small challenges that start in infancy (the first whimper that doesn’t bring you running) present the opportunity for “successful failures,” that is, failures your child can live with and grow from. To rush in too quickly, to shield them, to deprive them of those challenges is to deprive them of the tools they will need to handle the inevitable, difficult, challenging and sometimes devastating demands of life.
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There is no parent more vulnerable to the excesses of overparenting than an unhappy parent.
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One of the most important things we do for our children is to present them with a version of adult life that is appealing and worth striving for.
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Raising Successful Children – NYTimes.com
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The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable of doing, or almost capable of doing; and their parents do not do things for them that satisfy their own needs rather than the needs of the child.
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#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Innovation Excellence | Have You Considered the Three Horizon Approach?
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10 Real-World BYOD Classrooms (And Whether It’s Worked Or Not) | Edudemic
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What Every CEO Can Learn From The Olympics’ Wacky Opening Ceremony | Fast Company
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Rethinking Higher Education | The Nantucket Project | Big Think
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Demonstrations of Learning for 21st-Century Schools
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- character (self-discipline, empathy, integrity, resilience, and courage);
- creativity and entrepreneurial spirit;
- real-world problem-solving (filtering, analysis, and synthesis);
- public speaking/communications;
- teaming; and
- leadership.
Conflated from these six resources are the following:
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“current scholarship on the skills and values that will be necessary for students to succeed and prosper in these turbulent and ever-changing times. All five of the sources cited were in extraordinary agreement about the six basic skills and values that will be expected and rewarded in this century. “
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demonstrate the public purpose of private education. We will continue to do so through meaningful service learning — creating not just momentary good, but also the educational and cultural reinforcement of inculcating the habit of giving and serving.
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Singapore Ministry of Education website indicates that “Thinking Schools will be learning organizations in every sense, constantly challenging assumptions, and seeking better ways of doing things through participation, creativity, and innovation…. A Learning Nation envisions a national culture and social environment that promotes lifelong learning in our people. The capacity of the Singaporeans to continually learn, both for professional development and for personal enrichment, will determine our collective tolerance for change.”
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I hope never to read a vision statement that promises to maintain rather than improve
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Mission and vision may indicate improvement and innovation, but do daily practices and protocols?
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we need a system that “focuses on what students learn, rather than on what they are taught, and sets common standards for what they must learn, rather than common amounts of time for them to learn those things.”
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transformers who will invent an entirely new system with teachers as diagnosticians and coaches.
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if we could agree on what well-educated students should be able to do, teachers, schools, and systems could then “backward design” the means to those ends. The “essential demonstrations” that follow could be gathered in a student’s electronic portfolio that follows him or her through the various stages of education, documenting and preserving stages of learning and presenting in ways far more comprehensively than standardized testing a student’s preparedness for the next level of schooling. What we believe is that demonstrations of learning marry skills with content, develop the multiple intelligences, connect thought with action, and exemplify the skills and values for the 21st century that students will need from schools and colleges.
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At your school or college, what is your list of 10 Demonstrations of Learning that should be the exit ticket indicating the school’s work is done, validating the student readiness for the next stage of schooling or life?
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Is Khan Academy and Online Learning a Threat to Formal Schooling? « Center for Teaching
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Filling The Instructional Hole in our Standards Conversation | PRINCIPALLY SPEAKING
Filling The Instructional Hole in our Standards Conversation http://t.co/xZgPARwA via @ideaguy42 < Love #s 4, 7, 8, 10, & 11!
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Between the By-Road and the Main Road: Cue the Rhizome: A Post-Better World
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The Innovative Educator: BYOD in the 21st Century – Video Quickie
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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“Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.”
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Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.
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You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.
Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company? That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.
Even better, when you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..
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Love this idea of throwing people a party when they START at a school, not when they leave!
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A Crash Course in Innovation | Edutopia
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At capacity, SCS will serve 900 students in grades 6-12. Teens learn alongside college role models who are preparing for careers in creative professions.
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Great synergy possible among 6-12 teens and college students studying for careers in creative professions. Interesting model of Ken Robinson’s “not grouping by date of manufacture.”
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HFLI model emphasizes readiness for college and careers, “but we also want students to become active agents in community redevelopment,”
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Can Innovation Skills Be Learned? | Edutopia
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- Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply
- Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own
- Associative or integrative thinking
- A bias toward action and experimentation
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But as an educator and a parent, what I find most significant in this list is that it represents a set of skills and habits of mind that can be nurtured, taught and mentored!
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“Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, it is an active endeavor.
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what you have learned to do is more essential
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But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
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“Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit . . . Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”
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Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
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Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
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the convergent and the divergent
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I wonder…are schools pretty good at the convergent, but relatively negligent of the divergent? If so, could this mean we are scoring a “50” in terms of educating “whole people?”
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People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying
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Educational transformation in ways that enhance and amplify the blurring of lines between “school” and “life” seems to be an idea worth pursuing for a lifetime!
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Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility
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Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”
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This paragraph about sculpting and hard work reminds me of “Grit” from Jonah Lehrer’s talk on 99%. Great connection to Drive, Mindset, Talent Code, Element, etc.
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Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality
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Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted
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Creative people are humble and proud at the same time
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Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping
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Creative people are both rebellious and conservative
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In innovation, you have to play a less safe game
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Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well
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Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
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Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable
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How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity – Harvard Business Review
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If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.
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Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums | Video on TED.com
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Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In Mathematics
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standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels – rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.
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high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges
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develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations
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high school standards emphasize mathematical modeling, the use of mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, understand them better, and improve decisions
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“Modeling links classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making. It is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions. Quantities and their relationships in physical, economic, public policy, social and everyday situations can be modeled using mathematical and statistical methods. When making mathematical models, technology is valuable for varying assumptions, exploring consequences, and comparing predictions with data.”
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Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In English Language Arts
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range of subjects
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Research—both short, focused projects (such as those commonly required in the workplace) and longer term in depth research —is emphasized throughout the standards but most prominently in the writing strand since a written analysis and presentation of findings is so often critical.
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students gain, evaluate, and present increasingly complex information, ideas, and evidence through listening and speaking as well as through media.
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Formal presentations are one important way such talk occurs, but so is the more informal discussion that takes place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding, and solve problems.
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standards help prepare students for real life experience at college and in 21st century careers
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Colleges Awakening to the Opportunities of Data Mining – NYTimes.com
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Social and Emotional Curriculum: Sharing Your Gift | Edutopia
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“Happiness comes from giving, not getting . . . to get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy we must scatter it.”
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This article on sharing your gift seems intimately connected to PBL and the future of schools to me. If classroom work was done more to share gifts, innovation, enhancements and less as just-a-completion-of-an-assignment-only-the-teacher-will-see, then the level of engagement would seem to rise dramatically. The possibility for solutions-oriented education would rise dramatically, too.
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moving from “me” to “we.”
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signposts that can mark the way
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Could these also be some of the signposts for school transformation to a more 21C model?
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10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete | MindShift