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The Evaluation: schooling at the end of teaching, unions, & care « Cooperative Catalyst
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The Next Age of Neuroscience – What’s Next – CNN.com Blogs
“Like the telescope, the SpikerBox is a simple tool, but it allows anyone to begin exploring and making their own predictions. In the few short years since starting on this venture, high school students have made suggestions and have contributed to developing new experiments that highlight new areas of the nervous system.”
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“A lot of educational and cognitive research can be reduced to this basic principle: People learn by creating their own understanding. But that does not mean they must or even can do it without assistance. Effective teaching facilitates that creation by getting students engaged in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level and then monitoring that thinking and guiding it to be more expert-like.”
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Does the “school cliff” matter more than the fiscal cliff? | Daniel Pink
“As this Gallup blog post explains: “[Our] research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.” Primary school kids begin their educations deeply engaged — but by the time they get to high school, more than half are checked out. And the problem is even worse for our most entrepreneurial students.”
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The Failure of Progressive Educational Methods – The Daily Beast
Why in the world did I include this piece in the #MustRead Weekly Shares? Because it communicates the core of why many educators resist PBL – project-based learning. What’s described in this short piece is NOT PBL. What’s described may be projects, but I would not classify it as PBL. We need to come to more shared understanding of what PBL is, means, and does.
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The future of the classroom – Fortune Tech
“But despite all the hoopla over gadgets and new software, the future of education really hinges on the shifting roles of teacher and student.”
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But despite all the hoopla over gadgets and new software, the future of education really hinges on the shifting roles of teacher and student. “
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“The old model of getting educated in four years and coasting for the next 40 years” is growing increasingly less relevant
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Accelerate! – Harvard Business Review
“The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.” John Kotter
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Hillbrook iLab – Hillbrook School showing a way to work at the intersection of practice and research. How to take risks. How to play and experiment with flexible learning spaces to adapt the environment to the needs and creativity of the learners.
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Education Week: Federal Effort Aims to Transform Learning Technologies
“One project financed through the program, being led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, seeks to produce classroom breakthroughs through the creation of a “learning dashboard,” a system that uses a statistical and cognitive model to record and compute how well students have learned particular skills, and provide them and their teachers with instant feedback on what they’ve learned and what to do next.”
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What Innovators Can Learn From Artists | Blog | design mind
“golden rule artists and innovators have in common: only if they allow ample space for new things to happen that could happen, will they happen.”
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The Best and Worst of Times to Teach – EdTech Researcher – Education Week
“TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN: It’s the best and worst time to be a teacher, opines Justin Reich in Education Week in his 2012 signoff. His enthusiasm over technology’s ability to connect and share best practices and resources are dampened by the simultaneous desire on the part of policymakers to focus on high-stakes testing and a narrow (STEM-driven?) curriculum. “We face a moment where technology dramatically widens the scope of educational feasibility while policy dramatically narrows the scope of classroom possibility.”” from @EdSurge Wednesday Newsletter edition 099, 2 Jan 2013
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“In summary, OERs as they are currently being promoted (the current ”push’ model), will be a passing fad with respect to mainstream university and college education, because the core assumptions on which initiatives such as edX are based are false. However, OERs in terms of resources freely available over the web will be a game-changer, but in a ‘pull’ rather than a ‘push’ model. The one exception to this will be in the area of continuing education for the masses, where there will be continuing demand for structured, prepackaged courses built around the edX model.” (HT @EdSurge)
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Singapore’s 21st-Century Teaching Strategies (Education Everywhere Series) | Edutopia
Running two operating systems in concert. #PLC #ATPLC #Leadership #Strategy
From John Kotter’s article “Accelerate!” in Harvard Business Review, November 2012 –
The existing structures and processes that together form an organization’s operating system need an additional element to address the challenges produced by mounting complexity and rapid change. The solution is a second operating system, devoted to the design and implementation of strategy, that uses an agile, networklike structure and a very different set of processes. The new operating system continually assesses the business, the industry, and the organization, and reacts with greater agility, speed, and creativity than the existing one. It complements rather than overburdens the traditional hierarchy, thus freeing the latter to do what it’s optimized to do. It actually makes enterprises easier to run and accelerates strategic change. This is not an “either or” idea. It’s “both and.” I’m proposing two systems that operate in concert.
[access is by registration/subscription]
During my fourth year as a middle school principal, in 2006-07, we began to restructure as a professional learning community, implementing the incredible work of Rick and Becky DuFour and Bob Eaker. As we progressed in this restructuring around a different work ethos, we tapped volunteers to co-lead the various departmental learning teams. Together these co-faciliators created the PLC-Facilitators PLC – a kind of meta-team to serve as a guiding coalition for the entire PLC transformation.
We ran two operating systems – an admin team known as the Guidance Committee (hierarchical), as well as the PLC-Facilitators PLC (networked). The Guidance Committee was tremendous at running the logistical operations of the school, just as Kotter describes the strengths of a hierarchical administration. The PLC-Facilitators PLC, and the “solar system” of PLCs throughout the middle school, was tremendous at adeptly navigating – even map making – for the strategic transformations necessary in a learning community being influenced by technology enhancements, brain research, assessment literacies, pedagogical improvements, etc.
Two operating systems may seem counter-intuituve. Yet, it was this practice of running two systems in concert that permitted us to embrace complexity versus trying to manage it.
[HT to Tod Martin for the Kotter article!]
“It’s a system… and so too should be our strategies for change.” Jon Kolko @TheAlpineReview #PedagogicalMasterPlanning
From Jon Kolko in The Alpine Review, No.1
It’s perhaps obvious to point out that the world we live in is interconnected, yet the simple statement is at the crux of our downward digression: our political system is intertwined with economics, intellectual property is connected to technology, design is at the heart of consumption and marketing feeds the beast. It’s a system, and so our critique of it should be systemic, and so too should be our strategies for change.
What if we blueprinted the architecture of the inner workings of a school – of the interconnected elements of the ecosystem – and designed the construction plans for the transformations it is undertaking? Then, we could act on what matters.
#PedagogicalMasterPlanning
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Only Fools Claim To Know The Future
“Good players don’t forecast the future, but adapt to it. That is the origin of the saying “keep your eye on the ball”.”
“Raynor argues that the solution to this is to develop methods for planning that account for strategic uncertainty.”
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Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
This piece made the #MustRead because of the section “organizations also lose skill with age.” There are valuable insights and provocations here worthy of much school attention. Immediately, I think of brain science and the skill we should be developing in that domain as educators. If we did more of that, I think our skill would trump our luck more regularly. Additionally, we might focus more on learning than teaching.
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Instead of Making Resolutions, Dream – Whitney Johnson – Harvard Business Review
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The Future of You – Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – Harvard Business Review
Helping learners with self-branding, entrepreneurship, and hyper connectivity.
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DREAMers, MOOCs, and Charter Schools: The Coming Year in Education – Emily Richmond – The Atlantic
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Why Do We Need to Play? (My #rechat Reflection) « Cooperative Catalyst
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Between the By-Road and the Main Road: When Excellence is a Single Standardized Measure
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Shy of the Social Media Spotlight? Get Over It. – Dorie Clark – Harvard Business Review
I used to think, but now I know. Three inspiring thinkers and doers in #EdInnovation
“I used to think, but now I know …”
This prompt and stem is a tremendous tool for reflecting and expanding thinking. Occasionally, I have used such a prompt when facilitating workshops, meetings, or early explorations. It serves as something of a mental-emotional bridge.
Over the past few weeks, I have gathered three examples of this prompt in action – employed by three inspiring thinkers and doers in educational innovation. I encourage you to click on a link below and read. If you read one, I imagine that you’ll want to read all three. (I’ve tried to make my intro short – it would be better for you to spend your time reading the links below.)
- “I used to think…” Wright’s Room, by Shelley Wright (@wrightsroom).
- “What I Know Now.” Will Richardson, by Will Richardson (@willrich45).
- “Dreaming of Connection: Woven into we.” A Fine Balance, by Carolyn Durley (@okmbio).