Meghan Cureton (@MeghanCureton) provides a zoomed-out perspective and reflection on the inaugural semester of the Innovation Diploma at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation.
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Great piece about creating entrepreneur-oriented educational paradigm, NOT simply inserting an “entrepreneurship course” into school curriculum.
Thx @YongZhaoUO for highlighting the value of @MViDiploma: Not a course, a new model. http://t.co/d2rxdQmCCg cc @jbrettjacobsen @boadams1
HT @MeghanCureton (tweet above)
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Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about the desire to solve problems creatively. The foundation of entrepreneurship—creativity, curiosity, imagination, risk-taking, and collaboration—is, just like the ideas of engineering, “in our bones and part of our human nature and experience.”
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To cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset cannot be achieved by simply adding another course to teach entrepreneurship to the existing paradigm. We now need a new education paradigm—entrepreneur-oriented education, instead of the employee-oriented education. Such a paradigm is really about the human dimensions.
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It is about respecting children as human beings and about supporting, not suppressing, their passion, curiosity, and talent.
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Mount Vernon students use 3-D printer to build a new hand – Reporter Newspapers
An amazing story of students using a 3-D printer to build a hand! #edleader21 #deeperlearning @boadams1 http://t.co/BeVdM8gIB5
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How Dissecting a Pencil Can Ignite Curiosity and Wonderment | MindShift
Very powerful read about how VTR and design thinking can empower learners as agents of change.
HT @Deacs84
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Jahresplaner – The Round Method – Kalender / Calendar
What an incredible innovation to the linear block calendar on 12 printed pages. This circle calendar is this strategic thinker/planner’s dream!
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Participatory Pathways for Teacher Research | T. Steele-Maley
New Post: Participatory Pathways for Teacher Research: http://t.co/vjVG5eJtaD cc: @boadams1 @GrantLichtman @pgow @GeoMouldey
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To create pathways for innovation we must replace myths with methods. I strongly believe one seminal way to do this is through teachers being participatory researchers in the innovation process.
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Opening up our innovation process to ongoing and meaningful contributions from everyone in our institution not just surveying opportunities offered in professional development or school initiatives, but offering ongoing involvement in a measured cycle of experimentation for the practitioner. This is sustained, measured participatory research driven by the end users to contribute to innovations on the ground.
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Grading Standards Can Elevate Teaching – Education Week
HT @NicoleNMartin
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Nearly all administrators readily admit that their teachers’ grades are flawed. And yet teachers receive almost no support for grading in most preservice, in-service, or professional-development study. Why, with this clear need for change, is grading so often a silenced dialogue in schools?
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We need to create a structure that allows each teacher to question her own understanding and beliefs about grading; for example, the assumption that giving zeroes will motivate students to work harder and better equip them to earn a passing grade.
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In 2011-12, I tested this design with a dozen teachers in a medium-size district in Northern California. Together, teachers examined conceptual and empirical research around grading, reflected on their own grading practices, piloted new practices in their classrooms, shared results with their colleagues, refined their prototypes as a group, and then repeated the cycle several times. We saw results we had hoped for: Teachers improved the accuracy of their grading practices, and their students’ passing rates increased significantly. Participants experienced what one veteran teacher described as “the most authentically collaborative experience I’ve had professionally.” But what was truly remarkable were the unintended consequences.
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In addition to the improvements in their grading systems, the teachers’ reflective inquiry changed other aspects of their teaching, including their homework assignments, formative assessments, and even the language and cultural norms of their classrooms.
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Nancy Frates tells a superbly told story about making an impact
Care. Do. Enlist others. Make an Impact. Share your story well.
If you ever come across a situation that you see as so unacceptable, I want you to dig down as deep as you can and find your best mother bear and go after it. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
Nancy Frates: Meet the mom who started the Ice Bucket Challenge
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Weekly Wrap-up: Designing our Identity Unit | GHS Innovation Lab
Design 3.0 curriculum by originating with challenges, opportunities, essential questions, and deep learning curiosities. Then, tag them with subject-area marks to help with the categorization of learning outcomes for those who need to “see the subjects.” As opposed to starting with the subject siloes and looking for projects that will connect our disciplines.
#Amen
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Seth Godin — The Art of Noticing, and Then Creating | On Being
Krista Tippett and Seth Godin share a powerful conversation. Those interested in our times and the mutual exchange of our times with education, schooling, and learning MUST listen.
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2014 WISE Summit Program | www.wise-qatar.org
Tony Wagner sharing about the imperative to practice solving complex problems. As creativity. As innovation. “What the world wants, in a world, is people who can innovate.”
HT @MeghanCureton
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Universal Skills All Learners Should Know How to Do | User Generated Education
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Impact Academy: Rethinking Student Assessment – Education Writers Association
HT @MeghanCureton
Deep learning, validating inquiry, reflective learning, and refining assessment measures: http://t.co/K0x3895cSC cc @boadams1 @EmilyBreite-
Wellington will have to compile another portfolio and defend its contents again as a senior in order to graduate. Called a performance assessment, the exercise is designed to gauge her readiness for college.
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Its project-based approach to instruction, relatively uncommon in U.S. schools, is well suited to the deeper learning the higher-level assessments can measure, according to school founder Bob Lenz.
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federal grant to counter plummeting enrollment by implement project-based learning, an approach in which students “learn by doing.” The change succeeded in revitalizing the school.
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Buzzword Alert: What Does ‘Engagement’ Actually Mean? | EdSurge News
About educational gaming engagement, for the most part, with strong insights that likely apply to other domains of engagement. Highlights very interesting.
HT @EmilyBreite-
emphasize making a distinction between engagement and motivation. They call for engagement to specifically refer to post-decisional or “volitional” processes–that is, the management and implementation of intentions, rather than the formation of intentions.
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propose a similar distinction between what they call superficial game engagement and deep game engagement. In their model, superficial engagement is composed of participation and attention–logging on and looking at the screen, for example–while deep engagement involves four dimensions: a sense of captivation, an emotional pull, a feeling of belonging, and a sense of being part of the activity. Whitton and Moseley believe that these two categories and six dimensions can provide a simpler framework for talking about engagement.
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There is, however, a third way of dealing with the vague nature of engagement: Do away with the term and focus on the specific outcomes it’s supposed to represent.
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Don’t Isolate Innovation in an R&D Lab
HT @MeghanCureton
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Most are stuck in a paradigm where innovation is located in “brick-and-mortar” R&D sites, when what is needed is an adaptive, globally dispersed capability to access critical knowledge from different markets, industries and emerging innovation hot spots.
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Complex knowledge is difficult to articulate and its ownership is diffuse or dispersed in a local ecosystem. It can only be acquired by learning from experience, being immersed in a particular location, growing local roots, and cultivating local relationships.
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Collaboration with local partners only adds value if the capabilities and contributions each partner brings are complementary and co-specialized so the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
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Not all knowledge needed for innovation is complex, so it doesn’t require the cost and commitment of “being there.” Foraying is an agile, flexible, and low-cost alternative to accessing knowledge (usually technological) that’s embedded in user behavior or in the local context. It involves having an idea upfront of what knowledge is required and where it is located before mounting learning expeditions to seek out the new knowledge.
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Foraying depends on having knowledgeable, open-minded, multicultural scouts who are able to assess the value of new knowledge and understand how it can be transferred and incorporated into the innovation pipeline. Much of the feasibility of this depends upon there being an overlap between the knowledge being sought and a company’s existing knowledge base to minimize the potential disruption from integrating the new knowledge.
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There are two different and complementary approaches to attracting explicit knowledge. The first involves accessing wide communities of expertise to seek solutions to very specific, well-defined problems — often through intermediary companies such as YourEncore and NineSigma. The second approach is more discovery-led. Here, companies publicly declare broad areas of interest and research in order to attract ideas from experts, entrepreneurs, and developers around the world.
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Solving The World’s Biggest Problems Takes Ensembles, Not Soloists | LinkedIn
Coupled with Design Gym post.
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Solving The World’s Biggest Problems Takes Ensembles, Not Soloists | thedesigngym.com