Real-life learning lessons from an article about the Intel Science Talent Contest #WhatIfWeekly

First, a few quotes:

  • “The program, said Valerie Holmes, one of its teachers, encourages students to find a subject with which they have a personal connection.”
  • “At Stuyvesant she continued to explore what she describes as “how interdisciplinary science can be.””
  • “Part of what the research program teaches students, Ms. Holmes said, is tenacity; Dan and his advisers approached 30 to 40 potential mentors before finding one who would take him on.”
  • “From there she taught herself cellphone software coding and electrical engineering techniques, using “breadboards” and a soldering iron. “Engineering is the field that worships impact,” she said of her choice to enter it, “and to have the greatest impact, it has to be in the developing world.””

[All emphasis mine.]

From “A Laboratory Grows Young Scientists,” By ETHAN HAUSER, NYTimes.com, Published: March 11, 2013.

When students are encouraged and empowered to engage in real-life learning, for which they can see the relevance now, strong progress and achievement is made. And not just for the students, but for the larger world of which they are a part.

From the quotes above, one can see five key components of “real-life learning,” something I write about often here. These traits make for some great education. Schooling could be enhanced to facilitate more of this kind of learning.

  • personal connection
  • interdisciplinary
  • tenacity
  • taught herself
  • to have the greatest impact

What if school possessed more of the characteristics of scientific research, investigation, and exploration? And I don’t just mean that school should “do more science.” I mean that the very culture and foundation of school could look more like the culture and foundations of science – observing, questioning, hypothesizing, experimenting, reflecting, repeating with additional insights from testing, etc. Sounds a lot like innovating, too.

I’ve rarely (never) been to a lab where the scientists spent most of their time in rows and columns of desks receiving content for much of the day, day after day.

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

  • A great example of the intersection of corporate practice, social entrepreneurship, and education. Law schools are opening law firms to serve graduates and low- and moderate-income clients. Also a great example of “outside perspective” – law schools borrowing catalyst from teaching hospitals.

    tags: #MustRead Education3pt0 law schools

  • “Who should lead innovation in education—teachers or entrepreneurs? That key question was in the air here at this year’s South by Southwest Edu conference, which brought together a mix of entrepreneurs and educators for four days of panels and a competition for education start-ups.”

    ME: What if we stopped seeing school change and ed transformation as a competition and we worked together? Education should be everybody’s business, and ALL efforts should begin with inviting in the voices and expertise of educators. But if we started by thinking of business, social entrepreneurship, and education as parts of the same team, we would do better for our learners – from cradle to grave.

    tags: SXSWedu #MustRead

  • “When discussing strategy, executives often invoke some version of a vision, a mission, a purpose, a plan, or a set of goals. I call these “the corporate five” (see exhibit, below). Each is important in driving execution, no doubt, but none should be mistaken for a strategy. The corporate five may help bring your strategy to life, but they do not give you a strategy to begin with.

    Nevertheless, they are often mistaken for strategy—and when that happens, real damage can ensue. If the corporate five are the cart and strategy is the horse, leaders who put the cart first often end up with no horse at all.

    Before they get to the corporate five, companies need to address five much more fundamental, and difficult, questions. Let’s call them the “the strategic five”:

    1. What business or businesses should you be in?
    2. How do you add value to your businesses?
    3. Who are the target customers for your businesses?
    4. What are your value propositions to those target customers?
    5. What capabilities are essential to adding value to your businesses and differentiating their value propositions?”

    tags: strategy vision purpose goals mission plan #MustRead

  • Since children differ in their motivations, interests, and backgrounds, and learn at different speeds in different subjects, there will never be a victory for either traditional or progressive teaching and learning. The fact is that no single best way for teachers to teach and for children to learn can fit all situations. Both traditional and progressive ways of teaching and learning need to be part of a school’s approach to children. Smart teachers and principals have carefully constructed hybrid classrooms and schools that reflect the diversities of children. Alas, that lesson remains to be learned by the policymakers, educators, and parents of each generation.

    tags: open-classroom progressive education student centered #MustRead

  • “The subject of independent schools and inequality is rife with contradictions. In some ways, independent schools work to ameliorate inequities. In other ways, they reinforce and exacerbate them. Those in independent schools who work on social justice, equity, and diversity issues deal with these contradictions every day. Most believe, most of the time, that the good done by independent schools outweighs the bad, but sometimes it is not clear this is the case.”

    tags: income gap 1% problem equity #MustRead finland

  • “I lunched with the faculty of The Children’s School and they stressed the importance of emergent curriculum that is developmentally appropriate for students. Three years ago I visited the school and observed an extraordinary unit on Shakespeare in Kate Miller’s fourth grade classroom. When I returned, I was hoping to go back to Kate’s class and learn more about the unit. But, when I asked Pam if the Shakespeare unit had begun yet, she answered, “No, the kids have not yet decided what they want to study.” Instead of repeating a successful unit year after year as so many teachers do, TCS faculty listen, wait patiently, and develop units arising out of the current interests and passions of their students. It is teaching at its most challenging and, in my view, very progressive.”

    tags: progressive education emergent curriculum PBL Kohn #MustRead

  • tags: progressive education #MustRead

  • “large-scale social change comes from better cross-sector coordination rather than from the isolated intervention of individual organizations. Evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is still limited, but these examples suggest that substantially greater progress could be made in alleviating many of our most serious and complex social problems if nonprofits, governments, businesses, and the public were brought together around a common agenda to create collective impact. It doesn’t happen often, not because it is impossible, but because it is so rarely attempted. Funders and nonprofits alike overlook the potential for collective impact because they are used to focusing on independent action as the primary vehicle for social change.”

    tags: collaboration education impact #MustRead social_change

  • “This forecast previews five disruptions that will reshape learning over the next decade. Responding to them with creativity rather than fear will be critical to preparing all learners for an uncertain future.”

    HT to Mark Hale for sharing this KnowledgeWorks Forecast 3.0 and the work of Andrea Saveri

    tags: future forecast Knowledgeworks #MustRead

  • tags: learning failure TED #MustRead #MustSee

  • tags: Independent Project PBL #MustRead

  • “It is not about a world where designers do their thing and MBAs do theirs, but rather where both recognize and value the power of a successful collaboration, built on solid communication, that brings the strengths of business and design thinking together to drive business innovation by design.”

    tags: design business innovation #MustRead

  • “Instead, we talk about the “Brand of Me” and coach our kids on proactively managing their online identity and on becoming good digital citizens, for the reasons Will Richardson talks about.”

    tags: brand digital citizenship digital_citizenship Online_learning #MustRead

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

How might we hack school to more closely resemble good education? #MustSee Logan LaPlante

We don’t seem to make learning to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools. It’s separate from schools. And for some kids it doesn’t exist at all. But what if we didn’t make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy? Because that’s what it is – a practice. And a simple practice at that.

– Logan LaPlante, 13 years old. TEDxUniversityOfNevada

When I think about what I want for my own children, and when I think about what I want for all children, my list includes the attributes and ideals and realities that LaPlante shares and demonstrates in his profound talk: “Hackschooling Makes Me Happy: Logan LaPlante at TEDxUniversityofNevada.” It may be one of the best TED/TEDx talks I’ve heard.

.

Also this week, I am immersing myself in Tom Little’s tour of 50 progressive schools during the months of February and March. (Thanks, @GrantLichtman!) As I read @ParkDayTom’s posts, I dig into the school websites and links that Little provides about “emergent curriculum,” PBL, and progressive education. I am struck by such things as…

Learning
We believe that learning should be joyful, active, open-ended, project-based, and collaborative in order to foster children’s independence, accountability, intrinsic motivation, and intellectual curiosity.

Engaging
We believe in cultivating a community of civically-active learners, where everyone’s voice can be heard, as decisions are democratically determined through discourse.

Unfolding
We believe in allowing the time, patience and unpressured environment necessary to support the individual developmental unfolding of each child – academically, socially, and emotionally.

– The Children’s School (Chicago) Core Beliefs

And…

Though educators have been challenged in agreeing upon a single definition for progressive education, consensus builds around these defining principles:

  • Education must prepare students for active participation in a democratic society.
  • Education must focus on students’ social, emotional, academic, cognitive and physical development.
  • Education must nurture and support students’ natural curiosity and innate desire to learn. Education must foster internal motivation in students.
  • Education must be responsive to the developmental needs of students.
  • Education must foster respectful relationships between teachers and students.
  • Education must encourage the active participation of students in their learning, which arises from previous experience.
  • Progressive educators must play an active role in guiding the educational vision of our society.

– Progressive Education Network

When Grant Lichtman and I talk, and when I am privileged enough to hear Grant speak and facilitate with bigger audiences, he often says that his own tour of 64 schools in 12 weeks, exploring what innovation in education looks like, could be boiled down to one word – Dewey.

How might we work and take action to help transform schools so that more of them possess these core characteristics? Theses core values?

How might we hack school to more closely resemble good education?

#MustRead Shares (weekly)

  • tags: change #MustRead

  • Great resource from Business Innovation Factory —
    “BMGF contracted the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) to better understand the feedback that teachers receive, in what ways that feedback is shared, and under what conditions the feedback impacts teacher performance (both negatively and positively).”

    tags: feedback teachers professional learning teacher_effectiveness #MustRead

  • What if school were not modeled on an industrial paradigm – seemingly composed of various parts that make a whole? Perhaps instruction, curriculum, assessment, etc. are not parts but more accurately a system of one “material.” Using such natural paradigm for the design of schools could result in a more organic and human way of learning. 

    I enjoyed discovering Neri Oxman’s work via Business Innovation Factory. There is much here to translate to school transformation and redesign.

    tags: innovation #MustRead

  • “The central strategy for Bennington turned out to be disarmingly simple and straightforward: to turn the world’s most pressing problems themselves into major definers and organizers of the curriculum. They would be accorded the same authority to generate and organize curriculum now held exclusively by the traditional disciplines in the arts and sciences.”

    tags: #MustRead PBL real-life Challenge_Based_Learning Bennington problem_based_learning

  • “In recent years interest has grown in ‘pedagogy’ within English-language discussions of education. The impetus has come from different directions. There have been those like Paulo Freire seeking a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ or ‘critical pedagogy’; practitioners wanting to rework the boundaries of care and education via the idea of social pedagogy; and, perhaps most significantly, governments wanting to constraint the activities of teachers by requiring adherence to preferred ‘pedagogies’.

    “A common way of approaching pedagogy is as the art and science (and maybe even craft) of teaching. As we will see, viewing pedagogy in this way both fails to honour the historical experience, and fails to connect crucial areas of theory and practice.”

    tags: pedagogy #MustRead

  • “The school’s mission statement spells out the core ingredients such a re-imagining will require: “cultivating creative, joyful and compassionate inquirers who use courageous and innovative thinking to build a harmonious and sustainable world.” “

    tags: transformation #MustRead

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

School in the Cloud – Sugata Mitra’s TED Prize

We’re born learners…

Onstage at TED2013, Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish: Help me design the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more at tedprize.org.