-
Perhaps the most radical characteristic of CEMUS is the degree to which students are given agency and treated as intellectual equals. Students are hired and made responsible for developing both the content and pedagogy of their education. In close collaboration with teachers, researchers, and practitioners, students plan and coordinate the wide range of courses offered by CEMUS.
Diverse academic and professional lecturers, as well as varied student backgrounds, help to both break down and, in course, rebuild bridges between disciplinary boundaries—boundaries so often cemented in educational institutions. A combination of innovative and recognized pedagogical approaches, such as problem-based and explorative learning, forms an environment that is truly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive.
-
The World We Explore- Sir Ken Robinson Zeitgeist Americas 2012 – YouTube
The World We Explore– Sir Ken Robinson, Educator. Curiosity encourages us to push boundaries into uncharted territories. Where can our hunger for discovery take us – both outside and inside ourselves?
-
The Great Collision – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
NB: If you want some simple life or biz advice, here’s a tiny attempt. Tomorrow’s great institutions will be built — as they always have been — not merely by answering today’s preferences with the lowest common denominator, but by seeking radical, transformative paths to resolve the contradictions between preference and expectation, past and future, value and values. Want to build one? Take a hard look at the Great Collision — and blaze a trail that doesn’t end in social, personal, economic wreckage. Don’t just make a difference.
-
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth « Creelman Research Library
At the heart of the battle was his approach to building. Most building projects are fairly mechanical and capitalistic. An architect designs something in great detail on paper and then they pass it to a construction firm that attempts to complete the design as accurately (and as cheaply) as possible. All the thinking is done in the design stage, the builder is just a ‘pair of hands’ to execute it. Alexander’s approach is to work from drawings to mock-ups to the building itself. His approach allows for constant tweaking of the design to create something wonderful that works as a whole. The thinking never stops since it is impossible to know the right answers until you are deep in construction and what is working and not working has become clear. He calls this adaptive approach System A, and the mechanistic one System B.
-
The Missing Link in School Reform | Stanford Social Innovation Review
-
50 Education Leaders Worth Following On Twitter | Edudemic
Category Archives: 21st C Learning
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
-
TeachThought9 Characteristics Of 21st Century Learning | TeachThought
-
Why Do Kids Believe in God but Not Harry Potter? | Harvard Graduate School of Education
-
How to achieve true educational transformation | eSchool News
-
Recasting Teachers and Students as Designers | MindShift
-
we discover that the magic of design in a learning setting is empowerment.
-
Empowerment emanates from the dynamic pairing of possibility and agency, ownership and impact, and the right tools and critical thought to make it all happen.
-
process of seeing possibility and acting upon it is a central concept in critical and engaged pedagogy
-
the intersection of design and learning is more natural than novel.
-
illuminates the innately empowering and democratic power that is true learning
-
In a time when critical and constructive educational theories are threatened, our attention to design thinking in the classroom is crucial.
-
-
How 21st Century Thinking Is Different | TeachThought
Adherence, compliance, and impersonal, external evaluation. This worked when there were no other options, but learning options today don’t just abound, they dwarf formal learning institutions in every way but clout with the power-holders—parents, teachers, deans, and curriculum designers.
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
-
Why teacher training fails — and how we can correct that – The Washington Post
-
Play vs Academics: A False Dichotomy | Not Just CuteNot Just Cute
-
Research Shows Youngest Kids Learn by Thinking Like Scientists – Early Years – Education Week
educare – the Latin root of education – means to draw out that which is already there (not fill like an empty vessel). So what is it we are trying to draw out?
“much like scientists, the youngest kids learn by testing hypotheses against data and drawing conclusions. “Everyday play is really a kind of scientific exploration,” she said. “It’s just that when they do experiment, we call it ‘getting into everything.’ “
-
Gopnik’s research has led her to conclude that the best way to encourage young kids to learn is not by pushing academics, but by providing them with a “safe, rich environment” that will allow them to explore their natural connections to science.
-
-
Rethinking what leads to success in education
After decades of failed education policies, scientists, economists and educators are beginning to rethink their basic ideas about what it takes to succeed in school. They’re beginning to look at so-called “non-cognitive skills” — grit, perseverance, conscientiousness and optimism, for instance — and wondering if they might be as important as cognitive skills.
-
Will the Next “Education President” Please Stand Up? – Global Learning – Education Week
-
STEM to STEAM: Art in K-12 is Key to Building a Strong Economy | Edutopia
-
The Best Way to Remove Your Biggest Obstacle | Pull Not Push
-
How William Root Spent His Summer Vacation in 160 Square Feet – Core77
-
To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop – NYTimes.com
-
The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers,
-
“serial mastery.”
-
“You can’t expect that what you’ve become a master in will keep you valuable throughout the whole of your career, and you want to add to that the fact that most people are now going to be working into their 70s,” she said, adding that workers must try to choose specialties that cannot be outsourced or automated.
-
The struggle is not just to keep up, but to anticipate a future of rapid change.
-
His field is so new, and changing so rapidly, he said, that there is little consensus on established practices or necessary skills. “It’s more difficult to know what we should learn,” he said. “We have advisers that we work with, but a lot of times they don’t know any better than us what’s going to happen in the future.”
-
spends a lot of time comparing notes with others in his field, just as many professionals turn to their peers to help them stay current.
-
In an economy where new, specialized knowledge is worth so much, it may seem anticompetitive to share expertise. But many professionals say they don’t see it that way.
-
“The amount of information that I learned in medical school is minuscule,” he said, “compared to what is out there now.”
-
-
Leaving students to learn social media skills “outside of school” is not a good option. Social media management and leadership should be an integrated part of real-life education at schools. Social media management could be entrepreneurship and citizenship curricula woven into PBL, CBL, DBL.
-
Thoughts on Internet Engagement Inspired by the Times Article on Cycling and Helmets « 21k12
-
Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate – Maxwell Wessel – Harvard Business Review
-
When corporations reach maturity, the measure of success is very different: it’s profit.
-
In school, would “profits” analogue be “getting into college?”
-
-
Once a business figures out how to solve its customers’ problems, organizational structures and processes emerge to guide the company towards efficient operation
-
Seasoned managers steer their employees from pursuing the art of discovery and towards engaging in the science of delivery.
-
No company ever created a transformational growth product by asking: “How can we do what we’re already doing, a tiny bit better and a tiny bit cheaper?”
-
Is this what flipped classrooms and MOOCs are doing?
-
-
It was product development in an operationally-efficient fashion.
This was their biggest barrier, not a lack of vision.
-
Companies like Gerber don’t struggle to identify the next great idea. It may seem like a foolish endeavor at first, but Gerber for adults wasn’t destined for failure. The idea had merit, and the trends the executive team noticed were real. Just look at any smoothie section in your local grocery store. Naked, Odwalla and Innocent sell hundreds of millions of dollars of product addressing the same problem that Gerber identified with a very similar solution.
-
The problem wasn’t the idea; the problem emerged from the relentless pursuit of incremental profit within mature organizations. It’s a pursuit that drives us towards incremental wins by leveraging underutilized assets. And you know what’s wrong with this pursuit? Nothing. That’s the paradox.
-
-
The gamification of education (infographics) — Playful Wingmen
PROCESS POST: Playing with words. Words matter. And all change is linguistic.
Words matter. And “all change is linguistic.”
It’s intriguing to me that we play guitar, we play soccer, and we play a role on stage. Yet, we take algebra, we take English, and we take history. I may be remembering my French incorrectly, but I think many of the expressions for play are composed of the verb “faire” – to do or to make. I love that. Isn’t that what we are realizing about our 2.0 world – that the masses are now empowered to be producers of content and creativity, not just consumers of such? That we are more empowered now to do and to make and to play even.
Are we, in fact, keeping up with this evolution in schools?
Perhaps we should do and make and play more – instead of take – in school.
Or consider the word we often use when one teacher decides to use an idea from another teacher. What do we regularly say? “Oh, I’m going to steal that idea.”
We talk of children getting an education. I’ve written before of children giving an education. Recently, at TEDxAtlanta “Edge of the South,” I heard Brian Preston speak about Lamon Luther and giving hope. I’ve also just read about his story on CNN, where I also watched a moving, three-minute video about the doing and making that helped people discover better lives.
If you read this blog much, you know that I believe school children can do and make this kind of work, too. They are capable. They care. They seek relevance and engagement. They appreciate guidance and support. They can do and make…good and well. They can give…even better than they can get.
To me, a thread that could hold all of the above together is the thread of SHARE. Enough taking and stealing. Let’s do, make, play, and share. Where do we first learn to share? Through play.
Perhaps we should play more. There’s certainly great evidence and thoughtfulness around this idea. The educationese is “play-based learning.”
- Research Shows Youngest Kids Learn by Thinking Like Scientists
- Want to get your kids into college? Let them play
- EQ over IQ: How play-based learning can lead to more successful kids
- Play vs Academics: A False Dichotomy
- Be Playful
When we play, we often find flow. We lose track of time, and an hour can seem like a minute. We perform more optimally as we become absorbed and fully engaged in what we are doing. Often, we are “giving our all” in these situations. Not taking. Something deep within us is being drawn and pulled out of us – something is being forged and revealed.
Words matter. And all change is linguistic.
As I’ve written many times before, I love the root of “education” – educare. To draw out from within. Or to guide out of the regular.
We need to share more. Play more. We should be guiding students to give an education. We should make certain that we are working to draw out from within, instead of trying to fill up from without. We should rebalance and guide out from the regular. We should do. Make. Play. Share.
What a difference could be made.
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
-
“The Audrey Test”: Or, What Should Every Techie Know About Education?
-
“The Audrey Test,” Part 2: What Educators Need to Know about Tech
-
Why Kids Need Schools to Change | MindShift
-
In education, although there are great new models of learning and schooling, they are the exceptions, and the progressive movement has not gained much momentum.
-
“I’m astounded at the glacial pace of change in education,” she said. “Like many academic areas, there’s a huge disconnect between what’s known and what’s in practice. It’s very slow moving.”
-
“The biggest impact you’ll have as a teachers is the relationship you establish with your student.”
-
Try to integrate what students are interested in within what’s happening in class, get to know each student, and have high expectations.
-
“There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom,”
-
In an ideal world, the school day would reflect kids’ changing needs and rhythms.
-
There would be time for free play; school would start later to allow time for students’ much-needed rest; the transition time between classes would be longer, allowing time for kids to walk down the hall and say hi to their friends and plan their next moves; kids would have the opportunity to step away from school “work” in order to regroup and process what they’ve absorbed. “The actual encoding of information doesn’t take place when you’re hunched over a desk,” she said.
-
arts would be integrated into a curriculum, not as an ancillary addition, but as a primary part of learning.
-
PROJECT BASED LEARNING.
-
ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT.
-
SCHEDULING.
-
CLIMATE OF CARE.
-
PARENT EDUCATION.
-