• Do You have the Personality To Be an Inquiry-Based Teacher? | MindShift

  Great questions regarding the mindset of inquiry-based instruction!

  tags: inquiry-based #MustRead coaching professional learning

• Informal Learning: Facing the Inevitable and Seizing the Advantage | Edutopia

  Great piece about what we call learning and what we call school.

  tags: edutopia informal_learning PBL inquiry-based #MustRead

• A Purpose Guide for Everyone

  How do we teach – coach, really – the ways to find one’s purpose? I’ve yet to see a class called “Purpose” in a school course catalog (and I’m not sure I’d want to see it so silo-ed out). Do we help learners understand and uncover and discover their purpose as much as we help them learn punctuation, penmanship, and prepositions? 

  I love this piece and resource from Unstuck and Stone Yamashita Partners. 

  May we be as concerned with #Purpose in schools as we tend to be with the other P’s above.

  tags: Purpose #MustRead #Synergy

• The Ethics of Innovation & Reform in Education | Connected Principals

  Fascinating, provocative blog post about some questions to ask when innovating in education. For example, #2 is “What will be the possible impacts of your action? Predicting and applying systems thinking to this process is critical. Like Peter Senge writes: ‘today’s problems are a consequence of yesterday’s solutions'”
  [HT @CenterTeach]

  tags: #MustRead Innovation School Change

• Steve Jobs: “Real artists ship.” | bwagy

  “That’s why the latter option mentioned in my previous post of “Get it out the door asap 80% done. For you will make mistakes anyway. Best get first one out the door so the second, third, fourth are even better.” works best when you’re doing something new, different, innovative… ie worth doing.” [HT @jbrettjacobsen]

  tags: #MustRead strategy ShipIt innovation

• Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively – Georgia Everse – Harvard Business Review

  “Here are just a few communications approaches that will help you effectively reach your employees and encourage behaviors that advance your strategy and improve your results.” 
  [HT @ChipHouston1976]

  tags: HBR communications strategy #MustRead

• Turn Creative Fear Into Fuel – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  “Fear has the potential to be a driving force in your creative process.”

  tags: Creativity #MustRead Fear growth mindset

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

• Unstuck – Finding Purpose: 20 true stories

  “purpose defines who we are and what we do in life.”

  tags: purpose #MustRead

• Reframing Failure as Iteration Allows Students to Thrive | Edutopia

  “At New York City’s game-based learning school Quest to Learn, sixth graders take risks in the process of designing a Rube Goldberg machine, which enables more creativity, innovation, and engagement.” 
  [HT @eileen_fennelly]

  tags: failure edutopia iteration Maker video school model #MustRead

• Imagining the Future of Learning Takes Hold at Miami Valley School, Dayton | The Learning Pond

  Great examples of innovation-portfolio items at Miami Valley School.

  tags: school model innovation #MustRead

• It has to do with curiosity.

  Beautiful film outtake w/ transcripted narration of the critical bedrock of curiosity!

  tags: curiosity #MustRead

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

• The Digital Tool Landscape

  “As part of the 2013 Global Innovation 1000 study, Booz & Company surveyed executives at more than 350 companies around the world to learn more about the digital tools that are transforming innovation. Our results show that at the development phase, productivity tools have reached maturity—most are widely used and effective. In other phases, particularly the front end of the innovation process, companies are experimenting with new marketing and customer insight tools that have game-changing potential.”

  tags: innovation #MustRead

• The Design WalkIn – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  COOL! “The Design WalkIn is a storefront design walk in clinic that helps to facilitate relationships between designers and the general public. Designers, just like any other professional, have to be the right fit. We realized we were really good at brokering these relationships. We also had extensive networks within several practices of design, so we set up this clinic called the Design WalkIn that popped up on King St W last year. It was open to the public to come and book an appointment with a specialist.”

  I can imagine MVPS learners creating such a service in Sandy Springs!

  tags: design #MustRead

• We Can Do It: Learn New Things Effectively – Explore Create Repeat – by 4ormat

  A “lesson plan” for #deeperlearning. If I were to have a magic wand or be granted one wish for BIG change in education, it would be to infuse and integrate this kind of philosophy and practice into more of the foundational bedrock of schooling. For me, this connects to my two favorite statements by Sir Ken Robinson: 1) Schools should ask “How are you smart?” not “How smart are you?” and 2) The basics are purposes not subjects.

  tags: self-initiated self-directed 21C PBL #MustRead

  • If you want to learn something new, take it into your own hands.
  • Embarking on a path of innovation and self-initiation, the need for specific skills reveal themselves simply through necessity and process — you can plan ahead, but that can only take you so far.
  • The more you become invested in your idea, the more you’ll want to learn in order to refine it and make it better.
  • A sum of small accomplishments can ultimately pave the way towards bigger things,
    • Teresa Amabile’s work connected to small successes. Links to Growth Mindset and grit work with Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough.

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

• 21 Reasons To Quit Your Job And Become A Teacher | Katrina Fried

  A truly inspirational piece that reminds us professional educators to be grateful for our work. At the same time, I can’t help but think that one does not have to “Quit Your Job and Become a Teacher” if we would work more earnestly for Education 3.0, which could provide more opportunities for student learners to connect with “teachers” in their workplaces… a different way of thinking about “school.”

  [HT @RhettsMustangs]

  tags: teaching #MustRead

• Recruiters Without Borders – Companies Scout Globally – NYTimes.com

  “The third annual Global Employability Survey, designed and commissioned by the French education consulting firm Emerging and carried out by the German market research firm Trendence, asked recruiters and senior international executives to profile an ideal university graduate — and the ideal university producing such graduates.”

  [HT Greg Jones @CoopScience]

  tags: global_competitiveness #MustRead

• Stanford Magazine – Article

  An oldie but goodie! Hat tip to Eileen Fennelly for sending me this piece and reminding me of it. Krakovsky gives a strong summary of Dweck’s mindset work and connects to a number of related researchers and applications.

  tags: mindset Dweck #MustRead

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

• Howard Gardner: ‘Multiple intelligences’ are not ‘learning styles’

  “Gardner’s theory initially listed seven intelligences which  work together: linguistic, logical-mathematical,  musical,  bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal; he later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence and says there may be a few more.  The theory became highly popular with K-12 educators around the world seeking ways to reach students who did not respond to traditional approaches, but over time, “multiple intelligences” somehow became synonymous with the concept of “learning styles.” In this important post, Gardner explains why the former is not the latter.”

  tags: multipleintelligences Gardner learningstyles multiple_intelligences learning_styles #MustRead

• How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business | Wired.com

  “… anew breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.”

  HT @JamieReverb

  tags: sugata_mitra StudentCentered Control pedagogy School Change #MustRead innovation Curriculum engagement passion

  • “The bottom line is, if you’re not the one controlling your learning, you’re not going to learn as well.”
  • But when scientists build machines that are programmed to try a variety of motions and learn from mistakes, the robots become far more adaptable and skilled. The same principle applies to children, she says.
  • Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling.
  • Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”
  • taught the kids about democracy by letting them elect leaders who would decide how to run the class and address discipline.
  • letting children “wander aimlessly around ideas.”
  • higher graduation rate than the city’s average for the same populations. They do it by emphasizing student-led learning and collaboration
  • Now that our society and economy have evolved beyond that era, our schools must also be reinvented.
  • “Intelligence comes from necessity,”

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