#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on May 18, 2014 by boadams1

The Goal of Education Is Becoming – Education Week

HT @nicolenmartin

tags: purpose of education #mustread
- The real goal of education, and of school, is becoming—becoming a “good” person and becoming a more capable person than when you started. Learning is nothing but a means of accomplishing that goal, and it is dangerous to confuse the ends with the means.
A Philosophy of Walking: Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant on Walking

An interesting piece on walking as a way of slowly and deeply thinking – critically important to creative think and innovative progress on complex things.

tags: walking creativity #MustRead
challenge based learning

Project and Learning Matrix structure at Newington CollegeHT @MeghanCureton
Via @rolfek: 4wk integrated lrng project on Sustainability. http://t.co/KJ62Epsvoh CC (@KristynGatesA @EmilyBreite @HollyChesser @boadams1)

tags: CBL PBL DBL TDed Synergy #MustRead
The Overflowing Froth of Realness: Iowa BIG | ThinkThankThunk

HT @occam98

tags: real-world ActionEd Synergy #MustRead curriculum PBL iDiploma
- The teaching and learning of the students overflows beyond any individual teacher so quickly, it’s almost amazing that we’ve intentionally left the community out of education for so long.
- grades are supposed to be communicative over time, instead of summative of a time
- symbiotic, intentionally-built relationship between education, business, nonprofit, government

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

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on May 11, 2014 by boadams1

What Does (and Doesn’t) Progressive Education Plus Technology Look Like? Thoughts on AltSchool

tags: progressive personalization #MustRead
5 Ways Student Choice Impacts Learning – A.J. Juliani

HT @ChipHouston1976

tags: choice Synergy iDiploma PBL real-world empowerment #MustRead
10 Commandments of Innovative Teaching – A.J. Juliani

HT @ChipHouston1976

tags: innovation teaching #MustRead
Seth’s Blog: Connecting dots (or collecting dots)

tags: seth #MustRead
Google Ventures: Your Design Team Needs A War Room. Here’s How To Set One Up | Co.Design | business + design

HT @jbrettjacobsen

tags: learning environment warroom maproom studio #MustRead
What do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates? | the becoming radical

HT @HollyChesser

tags: writing #MustRead
- To offer a negative to the opening question, just as art professors at the college level do not want students who have done only paint-by-number, college professors who ask students to write do not want students who can write only canned essays and students who believe “never use ‘I’” or “don’t start sentences with ‘and.’”
- As writers, then, students need ample experiences in high school with choice—choosing what texts they read and then choosing what types of writing they produce.
- And here, I note, is the key quality college professors want from students in all aspects of academics (and life), including writing: Students who are purposeful, thoughtful, and autonomous. Too often the best students approach professors with “What do you want?” instead of having the background and confidence to make their own informed decisions.
- To offer a negative to the opening question, just as art professors at the college level do not want students who have done only paint-by-number, college professors who ask students to write do not want students who can write only canned essays and students who believe “never use ‘I’” or “don’t start sentences with ‘and.’”
- And here, I note, is the key quality college professors want from students in all aspects of academics (and life), including writing: Students who are purposeful, thoughtful, and autonomous. Too often the best students approach professors with “What do you want?” instead of having the background and confidence to make their own informed decisions.
- As writers, then, students need ample experiences in high school with choice—choosing what texts they read and then choosing what types of writing they produce.
- here are some experiences that high school students need before entering college as young writers
- learning not to act like a student anymore, but to become a writer, and specifically, to become a scholar who writes.
What is Humane Education? | Institute for Humane Education

“What if we all had the passion and skills to solve the most pressing challenges of our time, and, through our daily choices, work, and acts of citizenship, made choices that do the most good and least harm for ourselves, other people, animals, and the earth?”

tags: humane_education solution_seeker Zoe_Weil Synergy PBL Solutionary #MustRead #MustWatch idiploma
Watch Zoe Weil’s Talk | Institute for Humane Education

HT @JennyNovoselsky

tags: solution_seeker humane_education Zoe_Weil Synergy PBL Solutionary #MustRead #MustWatch solutionseeker

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

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

Posted on May 4, 2014 by boadams1

Twitter / 61WatsonWarrior: #ctedchat What are you? How …

HT @scitechyedu

tags: #MustRead leader leadership Instructional_Rounds learningwalk
Stanford 2025

tags: futureofed schools of the future future of schools Future of Learning #MustRead higher ed
http://vip.gatech.edu/

“Undergraduate students that join VIP teams earn academic credit for their participation in design/discovery efforts that assist faculty and graduate students with research and development issues in their areas of expertise.”

tags: research PBL #MustRead credit internships apprenticeship
The Maker Movement Conquers the Classroom — THE Journal

tags: maker #MustRead
- “When kids and teachers are given an opportunity to make, to create,” Moran said, “all of a sudden you see people becoming passionate about who they are as learners.”
22 Things We Do As Educators That Will Embarrass Us In 25 Years

HT @SAISNews #Priceless

tags: #MustRead
Teachers as Technology Trailblazers: Personalizing PD: It’s About Empowerment; Not Tools

“The magic ingredient for personalized learning isn’t prescriptive content; it’s empowerment.”

tags: personalization empowerment #MustRead professional learning professional development
- if you’re defining personalized learning as targeted content delivery, you’re missing the mark.
- the process must “begin with the learner.” This means that the learner is integral to creating the goals, tasks, and methods by which learning actually happens.
- The magic ingredient for personalized learning isn’t prescriptive content; it’s empowerment.
- When people decide what they want to learn, individualized ownership creates the magic.
- As we select the tools that will help us grow the capacity of educators, personalized learning should be considered. But rather than pick tools that prescribe the type of learning that should take place, perhaps we should use our resources to truly answer the following question for every teacher: What do you want to learn?
What is your Purpose? | Shed Some Light

tags: purpose iDiploma #MustRead
Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating | Video on TED.com

tags: success failure ted video growth mindset #MustRead #MustWatch creativity learning
Conceptual Understanding in Mathematics | Granted, and…

Fabulous Grant Wiggins piece on conceptual understanding in math and why we need to focus more on such an objective in schools.

“Conceptual understanding in mathematics means that students understand which ideas are key (by being helped to draw inferences about those ideas) and that they grasp the heuristic value of those ideas. They are thus better able to use them strategically to solve problems – especially non-routine problems – and avoid common misunderstandings as well as inflexible knowledge and skill.”

Good list of misunderstandings/myths, and an interesting little “test” from Grant.

HT @nicolenmartin

tags: math understanding wiggins #MustRead
- There is a world of difference between a student who can summon a mnemonic device to expand a product such as (a + b)(x + y) and a student who can explain where the mnemonic comes from.
- By comparing a variety of solution strategies, children build their understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction.
- Being helped to generalize from one’s specific knowledge is key to genuine understanding.
- Conceptual knowledge refers to an understanding of meaning; knowing that multiplying two negative numbers yields a positive result is not the same thing as understanding why it is true.

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

What if form followed function in school? Inspired by David Epstein #TED talk

Posted on April 30, 2014 by boadams1

On May 11, 2014, I will (quietly) celebrate a third anniversary. That day will mark the moment that I have spent exactly three years watching a TED talk every day.

Being an educator, as I watch TED talks, I think about how they might “fit” into school. I sometimes imagine the speaker as a student in a typical high school, and I wonder what courses and subjects his or her talk would align with.

And often that exercise bothers me. It bothers me because I imagine a speaker like David Epstein prepping and preparing his “Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?” talk embedded below. I wonder…. Would David be doing this “project” in math class? In science class? In history class? In English class as a persuasive speech assignment? Maybe in some technology course? Would he be so lucky as to have teachers who would allow a single project to “count” for all of his courses? After all, the project integrates a number of disciplines that we subdivide and separate in school.

And that entire imagining bothers me because of the ridiculousness of having to think this way. Why do we continue to remain so wed to the unnatural subdivision of the “school subjects?”

What if at least part of David’s school day allowed for him to pursue the project of his dreams and interests and the subject-area lenses were more like threads in a tapestry that David is weaving?

And what if that deep project identification and discernment had developed partly because of more innovative “homework” that encouraged and made room for David to explore his developing passions and curiosities?

And what if the subject areas in his school behaved a bit more like “subjects on demand” and recitations in which David could schedule time with a relative expert to spend some concentrated time digging into the statistics or biology specificity that he needed for his emerging understanding?

And what if his assessments were more akin to badges and endorsements showcasing the disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and understandings that David was building?

And what if David were at the center of his own progress reporting and learning conferences?

Then school would look different. Because form follows function.

Enjoy the talk. It’s amazing.