SNHU’s Paul LeBlanc On Competency-Based Learning (and More)
Chronicle of Higher Education
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5/27/15
“The credit hour is very good at telling us how long people have sat, not so good at telling us what they've actually learned. And in that model, time is pretty fixed… What they learn is variable… You flip that in a competency-based model. What happens is that learning becomes fixed and non-negotiable, and time becomes the variable.”
“Forest Mondays”: School Takes Kids Outside All Day Every Monday
NPR
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5/26/15
"It's 33 degrees out. He's sitting in water. And he's going to figure out whether that becomes uncomfortable or not," [Eliza Minnucci, the teacher] says. "I don't need to make a rule for him. He's going to figure that out. This is a place where he can learn to take care of himself.” Minnucci worries that U.S. schools have become too focused on academics and test scores and not enough on "noncognitive" skills such as persistence and self-control. There is growing attention on the importance of these skills, but Minnucci doesn't think traditional school is set up to teach them very well.”
5 Tips For Being A Creative Organization (From Xerox PARC Founder)
Fast Company
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5/26/15
“4. Stay small, avoid hype, and pick a boring name… The shortest lived group at Xerox PARC was "Office of the Future," because Xerox executives would not leave them alone. I chose the most innocuous name for my own group, the Learning Research Group. Nobody knew what it meant, so they left us alone to invent-object oriented programming and the GUI.”
How Might You Reorganize Your School As A Team of Teams?
Fast Company
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5/12/15
“Sharing information and creating strong horizontal relationships improves the effectiveness of everything from businesses to governments to cities. His research suggests that the collective intelligence of groups and communities has little to do with the intelligence of their individual members and much more to do with the connections between them.”