#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Category Archives: 21st C Learning
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Young People Are the Geniuses Who Change the World | Switch and Shift
“At Choose2Matter, our opening line in speaking to young adults is “You Are a Genius, and the World Needs Your Contribution.” Next, we tell them they can change the world.
Why do we say this?”Brief profiles of young people CHANGING the world, not just being prepared to change the world. This could BE SCHOOL!
Young People Are the Geniuses Who Change the World http://t.co/pwLs4NB3wV Look @boadams1 @jbrettjacobsen @GrantLichtman design in action -
Making Education More Like Real Life Through Design Thinking | Lee-Anne Gray Psy.D
“Mary Cantwell, Design Thinking Coordinator and IT Faculty Support at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School (MVPS) in Atlanta GA has greatly influenced my thinking about design thinking (DT). A coach at Stanford’s D school program, she created DEEP: Discover, Explore, Experiment, and Produce as her DT platform at MVPS. Design thinking involves immersing students in what she calls situations for discovery.”
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Cultivating Innovators in Independent Schools | The Puzzle
Greg Bamford offers strong encouragement for realizing the potential of innovation in independent schools. (Of course, great advice and truth apply to more than just one sector.)
@boadams1 @jgough @lottascales @HillbrookHOS @romano47 Thought you’d be interested in my new post on #indyschools: http://t.co/JP3vnMcUIy -
The Real Education Reform Choice: Democracy or a Doctrine of Repression | Education on GOOD
Reading @CurtisCFEE’s superb post GOOD Lite:The Real Education Reform Choice: Democracy or a Doctrine of Repression http://t.co/2JXUuJi21O
“our facilitation of more authentic learning, and our design of more authentic policy, will emerge from the restoration at every level—from our classrooms, to our capitals—of an understanding of the purpose of education in, and for, our democracy.”
Mathematical Revolutions with @JoBoaler and @ProfKeithDevlin
Mathematics is everywhere, and it’s truly beautiful. Yet, “school” tends to approach mathematics instruction from an imbalanced procedural, algorithmic and computational angle.
Thankfully a number of educators are trying to revolutionize the ways that mathematics is typically taught in school. Two of these incredible revolutionaries are at Stanford University – Dr. Jo Boaler (@JoBoaler) and Dr. Keith Devlin (@profkeithdevlin).
For the past two months, I have learned mightily from participating in a MOOC with Dr. Boaler – EDU115N “How to Learn Math.” And just this morning, I listened to a podcast of Krista Tippett interviewing Dr. Devlin. When I returned from my morning walk with Lucy, I had an email from Dr. Boaler announcing her new non-profit for revolutionizing mathematics teaching and learning – YouCubed.
Of course, I wanted to share these strands and do my part for mathematical evangelism.
Mathematical equations are like sonnets says Keith Devlin. What most of us learn in school, he says, doesn’t begin to convey what mathematics is. And technology may free more of us to discover the wonder of mathematical thinking — as a reflection of the inner world of our minds. – See more at: On Being
Change the World… Change School
From “Young People Are the Geniuses Who Change the World,” Angela Maiers, Switch & Shift: Human Side of Business, 7/28/2013 [HT Angél Kytle]
At Choose2Matter, our opening line in speaking to young adults is “You Are a Genius, and the World Needs Your Contribution.” Next, we tell them they can change the world.
Why do we say this?
Because studies show that, at the age of five, 100% of students believe they can, and will, change the world. When I visit with first-graders, they always confirm this by enthusiastically charging the stage en masse when I invite them to share their genius and tell me their ambitions for changing the world.
By the age of 9, only half of students believe they are geniuses who can change the world.
By the age of 16, just 2% of students believe they are geniuses who can change the world.
When I visit high schools, I see something very different than I do in elementary schools. The genius is still there, but it’s buried under years of schooling. How? I’ve actually had educators and parents comment on my posts that we shouldn’t tell students they can change the world, because it sets unrealistic expectations. My response: unrealistic for whom?
An incredible post that then highlights nine young people who are changing the world. One of the people is Jack Andraka, whom I spotlighted on my own blog before. And there are eight more.
Correction. There are THOUSANDS more! MANY THOUSANDS!
A few more of the many – all whom I’ve met thanks to TEDxAtlanta:
Brittany Wenger – post and TEDxAtlanta Profile and Talk
Brittany Wenger, a high-school senior, is well on her way to making the diagnosis of breast cancer less painful and more accurate.
Clare O’Connell – TEDxAtlanta Profile and Talk
At age 20, Claire O’Connell is a co-founder of EyeWire, an online game / “citizen science initiative” that’s helping to map the human brain by mapping the connections between retinal neurons.
Hannah Salwen – TEDxAtlanta Profile and Talk
Kevin Salwen is a writer and entrepreneur. With his 15-year-old daughter, Hannah, he is co-author of The Power of Half. The book is the story of a eureka moment by Hannah that resulted in the Salwen family’s commitment to reduce their consumption by half — started by selling their house and moving into one half its size.
School is not just preparation for real life. School is real life. And real life could be school.
Einstein said, “It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Survives.
How might we enable curiosity to THRIVE in formal education?
By helping school become more about the “business” of real-life, relevant work. There are armies and armies of young people who care and want to change the world. A few will demonstrate the initiative to do so in spite of the rigidity of an industrial-age school system. But how many more might be activated, inspired, and motivated IF school were structured to nurture such inherent passion for wanting to make the world a better place – while the learners are IN school?
Recently, at our school, Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, faculty T.J. Edwards (@TJEdwards62) and Mary Cantwell (@SciTechyEDU) have invited and enlisted others in our ranks who might want to work on OpenIDEO’s Creative Confidence Challenge.
What if we ALL participated?!
#RipplesInAnEndlessPond
#ItsAboutLearning
#ItsAboutMakingADifference
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Related Posts:
- Human-Centered & Relational [A taste of how @MVPSchool is changing the world by changing school]
- Could There Actually Be One C to Rule Them All?
Human-Centered and Relational
From Dr. Lee-Anne Gray, “Making Education More Like Real Life Through Design Thinking,” Huffington Post, 9/18/2013
Design thinking asks students to become investigators in their world, attempt to solve problems, bridge gaps of knowledge independently, collaboratively, and resourcefully.
From Tyler Thigpen, “Taking a Relationship-Centered Approach to Education,” Education Week, 9/10/2013
What if schools used real-world scenarios to teach? What if learning were tied to complex problem-solving? What if students graduated from high school knowing how to negotiate peace treaties, stimulate depressed economies, and reduce obesity rates in America?
Now imagine a school where students and teachers decided collaboratively that the future of energy, the problem of inadequate access to safe drinking water, and the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms were among the topics of study. In this model, students would be taught to use skills and knowledge from the traditional disciplines—math, science, English, social studies, and so on—to take steps toward scaling and solving aspects of these complex issues. Teachers would work together, leveraging their content expertise in service of a problem. Students would navigate complex, unpredictable situations using a multitude of educational resources. This real-world problem-solving approach would partner with expert field practitioners, community members, research scientists, political leaders, and business owners, all showing students ways of addressing the pressing problems facing the world, from the local to the global.
“Design Thinking” and “Transdisciplinary Education” may be called buzzwords and trends by some. For me, they are long overdue innovations in the school world that promote and empower relevant, real-world solution seeking as the foundations and trunk lines of time spent in school. School should be life. School is life.
At their core, #DT and #TDed are about the corps. The people. Design thinking and transdisciplinary education are human centered and relational. They are about inquiry, empathy, and impact.
@MVPSchool is about #DT and #TDed. #ILoveMySchool
What an honor it has been to see the core/corps of our school discussed in Education Week and The Huffington Post these past few days. Thank you.
it's about learning 