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How To Promote SEL To Parents
Fordham Institute
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8/11/21
“There is broad support among parents for teaching SEL-related skills in schools, although the term “social and emotional learning” is relatively unpopular… Based on those results, Tyner distills four policy implications, including recommending that SEL proponents focus on specifics rather than nebulous concepts. Faced with specifics such as schools teaching sensitivity to different cultures, parents get it and express approval, but abstract phrasing loses a lot of them. In addition, parents of all political stripes support indirect approaches to imparting the lessons of SEL, such as having teachers model common decency and common sense for their students.”
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On The Role Of Spatial Thinking In School And Workplace Success
New York Times
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7/21/21
“Spatial ability, defined by a capacity for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images, is one of the three specific cognitive abilities most important for developing expertise in learning and work settings.”
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What Skills Lead To Success Re: Employment, Income, Satisfaction
McKinsey
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6/25/21
“To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize.”
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Which Competencies Are Best Embedded In Which Disciplines?
Center for Curriculum Redesign
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6/18/21
“Is Math appropriate to teach leadership, or is critical thinking more likely? Beyond Communication and Creativity respectively, what should Language and Arts focus on? After three years of research, CCR publishes its ground-breaking recommendations in a new report, which describes which disciplines are most conducive to teach given competencies. Among the findings: The importance of the Arts for the development of many Competencies. The importance of modern disciplines such as entrepreneurship, for competencies that are difficult to cover via traditional disciplines (such as Courage and Leadership).”
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Which Disciplines Focus Most On Which Competencies
Center for Curriculum Redesign
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6/1/21
“Every discipline has a key role to play for development of Competency expertise and transfer. If all disciplines focus on teaching their top Competencies, benefits will exist at the curricular, course, and learner level. Curricula will be integrated with relevant Competencies which will in turn increase content relevance and depth of understanding of what it means to proactively practice and contribute to each field. At the same time, teachers will feel less pressure to cover all the Competencies beyond their content area, by either addressing one cursorily or otherwise cognitively overloading learners.”
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What Happens When You Actually Reimagine School? This Does.
Cult of Pedagogy
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5/2/21
“Currently nearing the end of its second school year, this high school is the end product of a group of brave, forward-thinking educators who saw what education could be, and instead of trying to work within the system, asked themselves, “Why don’t we just build it?””
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“What’s The Purpose Of Schooling?”
Christensen Institute
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4/15/21
“To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. “
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The Narrative Of Learning Loss Is Unhelpful. It May Not Matter.
Atlantic
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3/20/21
“If students know that teachers value and believe in them, no matter what they have gone through over the past year, educators can create a classroom environment where high expectations are the norm. When students feel empowered, they care more and work harder. Next time you hear the phrase learning loss, think about whether we really want to define our students by their deficits instead of their potential.”
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Debate Vs. Discussion: How To Connect Rather Than Win
New York Times
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1/31/21
“When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.” When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs.”
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“Helping Our Students Identify As Generalists”
Middle Web
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1/19/21
“Generalists are not experts—but they are skilled at accessing the work of experts. They know how to look at an issue from multiple angles, sift good information from less good information, corroborate and compare what they find.”
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“What is College For? Rethinking…Purpose And Pedagogy”
Inside Higher Ed
-
8/24/20
“These books decry the generational chauvinism that assumes that today’s educational system is superior to all that came before, that the kind of courses and pedagogies we offer are the best imaginable, and that our current curriculum -- which combines excessive requirements without a clearly defined sense of what a graduate should know or do -- is satisfactory. It isn’t.”
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A Gap Year At King’s Academy: Learn Arabic, Explore A New Culture, Prepare for College
King's Academy
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6/7/20
“Students are deferring college in numbers larger than ever before. This is an extraordinary opportunity to discover a language, history, and culture that is entirely new. Find ancient civilizations and IKEA, rigorous academics and relaxing excursions, desert landscapes and a lush campus covered in green quadrangles. All this and professionally-recognized university counseling for college repositioning. A post graduate Gap Year at King’s Academy is a life changing experience.”
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Learn Arabic. Study Islamic Art. Dive Into Modern Middle Eastern History. Online Summer Programs for Teachers (and Students).
King's Academy
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6/4/20
Three week, online courses, professional development for teachers. Dive into language, history, and culture of the Middle East for your summer professional development. The King’s Academy Summer Institute is designed to share the rich culture and language of Jordan and the larger Middle East with teachers and adult learners around the world. The program offers online learners an immersive experience in the language, arts and history of the Arab world.”
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Should Fall Classes Begin With Next Year’s Content, Or Picking Up From The Spring?
Education Dive
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4/30/20
“Sixty-five percent of teachers in a new nationwide poll favor starting next year with ‘"regularly scheduled instruction” over other options, such as revisiting concepts from the end of this semester, extending next school year or offering students the chance to repeat a grade… The results show administrators — who made up about 12% of the 5,555 respondents — think beginning the next year with April 2020 concepts is the best strategy for addressing learning loss due to school closures. Advocates and policymakers, about 250 respondents in the sample, agreed with administrators.”
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“Study: Boosting Soft Skills Is Better Than Raising Test Scores”
Hechinger Report
-
3/2/20
“The researchers compared siblings who attended different high schools, and the ones who attended schools that were better at boosting soft skills had better outcomes.”
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“More Complex Vocabulary Leads To More Complex Thought”
Middle Web
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2/4/20
“I found myself darting around the room having to explain what the word “inevitable” meant. The question of inevitability in history is a fascinating one that middle schoolers of all levels can discuss. But it sure helps to understand what the word “inevitable” means in order to have it. As I heard from another teacher, “vocabulary is a tool of thought.” Without a rich vocabulary, student thought is simplistic.”
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The Case For Minimal Standards, Lots of Reading, And Lots Of Writing
ASCD
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2/1/20
“If we want people to perform well, concision is king: the fewer the criteria, the easier it is to reinforce, practice, monitor—and thus ensure—that those criteria are fully met. When organizations establish only a tiny set of crystal-clear criteria, both performance—and job satisfaction—skyrocket. The same goes for schools. There are both historic and contemporary precedents for minimalist literacy standards which would ensure that students read and write in larger—much larger—amounts.”
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“How Art Can Help Center a Student’s Learning Experience”
KQED
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10/14/19
“She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching. Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores. Studies like this one have led to a resurgence of interest in arts integration, a pedagogy that uses art as a vehicle for learning about any subject.”
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How Collaboration Leads To Persistence In Students
KQED
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9/23/19
“In the workshops students worked on math problems together, considering together what it would take to achieve at the highest levels on different problems. The academic improvement that resulted from the workshops was significant. Within two years, the failure rate of African American students had dropped to zero, and the African American and Latino students who attended the workshops were outperforming their white and Asian classmates.”
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Debunking The Idea That STEM Majors Earn More In The Long Run
New York Times
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9/20/19
“Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.”
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On The Importance Of Teaching Content In Elementary Schools
Atlantic
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8/1/19
“What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them?”
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Woods And Federer: Specialist and Generalist. Where Is The Balance?
Guardian
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7/12/19
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivises or even demands hyperspecialisation. While it is true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases – as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part – we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
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From Expertise To Generalists And Lifelong Learning: The Case Of The USS Gabrielle Giffords
Atlantic
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7/1/19
“Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone… In 20 years, we’ll know a lot more about the costs and benefits of minimal manning and lifelong learning. But nobody on the Giffords was pondering that after the crew finished its unloading job… Everybody I met on the Giffords seemed to share that mentality. They regarded every minute on board—even during a routine transit back to port in San Diego Harbor—as a chance to learn something new.”
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“The Case For Generalists”
Medium
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6/26/19
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, and even demands, hyper-specialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part — we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”
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On Deeper Learning, And The Value Of Extra-Curriculars
Strategy-Business
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6/6/19
“Deeper learning is defined as a set of competencies that include content mastery, critical thinking, collaboration, and effective communication. Mehta and Fine define it as the place where “mastery, identity, and creativity” meet. Students who have engaged in deeper learning have strong expertise in a field, learn to identify themselves as practitioners of the discipline, and acquire the ability to create something new, such as original scholarship or art.”
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Core Knowledge: On The Role Of Knowledge In Learning
Larry Cuban
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6/5/19
“We need to see the reading comprehension problem for what it primarily is -- a knowledge problem. There is no way around the need for children to gain broad general knowledge in order to gain broad general proficiency in reading.”
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“Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World”
New York Times
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5/24/19
“This pattern extends beyond music and sports. Students who have to specialize earlier in their education — picking a pre-med or law track while still in high school — have higher earnings than their generalist peers at first, according to one economist’s research in several countries. But the later-specializing peers soon caught up… The early specializers, meanwhile, more often quit their career tracks.”
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A Definition Of Computational Thinking For Any Subject
Education Dive
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5/15/19
"There are five core computational thinking skills… These are collecting data, analyzing data, decomposing, finding patterns and using abstract thinking.”
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How The Arts Benefit Society: An Interactive Research Synthesis
Mellon Foundation
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5/1/19
“The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is designed as a gateway to research, projects, and support organizations. The goal is to enable people to extract key information at a quick glance, helping users visualize how the arts permeate community life while providing leaders what they need to make visible impact.”
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On The Essential Nature Of Extra-Curriculars
EdSurge
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4/24/19
“We must revisit the largely held perception of school as a primarily academic institution that offers learning opportunities at a fixed time in a fixed setting… Expanding access to out-of-school activities propels our young learners to higher graduation rates, improved academic achievement and higher wages. Out-of-school spaces also offer fertile ground for developing critical thinking, problem-solving and social-emotional skills that are critical for future success.”
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Sal Khan: Technological Literacy Is Necessary To Equalize Our World
USA Today
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4/11/19
"Free mass public education empowered nearly everyone with the historically scarce skills of reading and numeracy. But in an economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people will need much more than literacy and numeracy.”
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Arts Experiences Improve Writing, Discipline, And Compassion
Brookings
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2/12/19
"We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.”
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"Six College Experiences Linked to Student Confidence on Jobs”
Gallup
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1/22/19
“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the job market rises steadily with the number of these experiences they have had.”
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AI’s Growth Means Schools Should Double Down On Interpersonal Skills
Brookings
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10/18/18
"K-12 education should prioritize teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork across subject areas. Teaching students to become analytical thinkers, problem solvers, and good team members will allow them to remain competitive in the job market even as the nature of work changes.”
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Should You Have Honors Classes? A History Of Tracking
Larry Cuban
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9/30/18
“Beginning in the 1960s activists filed federal suits again school systems that tracked minority students… Reformers, leaning on studies done by researchers, worried about school groupings reinforcing inequalities in society by excluding low income students from advanced courses and thereby entry into college. These policymakers (and parents) pressed states and districts to open up Advanced Placement courses, gifted and talented programs, and the like–including Algebra in the 8th grade–to all students.”
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Vermont Expands Work/Farm-Based Credit For High School
Hechinger Report
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6/18/18
“Vermont’s experiment in experiential learning goes back a number of years, but it took off in 2013, when the legislature passed a law that lets students meet state graduation standards through work-based experiences.”
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Assessing Fact v. Fiction Varies with Political Awareness, Digital Savvy, And Trust In Media
Pew Research
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6/18/18
“Even though these characteristics relate in predictable ways to education, these relationships hold true even when accounting for level of education. Further, there is relatively modest overlap among the groups, meaning that each of these groups is distinct. For example, just 32% of those with high political awareness also have a lot of trust in national news organizations.”
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"How History Explains America’s Struggle To Revive Apprenticeships”
Brookings
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5/23/18
“At one time, America’s most celebrated citizens trained entirely outside of college, such as Abraham Lincoln, who studied to be a lawyer with the help of local attorney offices. But, as college became the default path to top professions in the 20th century, apprenticeships fell out of favor with America’s upwardly mobile culture. In order to understand a way forward, I think it helps to understand that it’s possible for a country to have a system of apprenticeships for all types of careers and also investigate the historical reasons why American high skill professions shifted away from apprenticeships in the first place.”
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Even More Focus On Knowledge Instead Of Skills In Early Grades
Atlantic
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4/13/18
“The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under this system, but the neediest suffer the most.”
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How To Have Better Arguments
The Better Arguments Project
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3/19/18
“Across the country, citizen-led efforts are underway that attempt to bridge the divides created or unearthed by the… presidential election. These efforts are admirable. Done wrong, however, these efforts have the potential to compound our political problems rather than ameliorate them. Profound philosophical divides with deep historical roots exist across the country about the role of government, the job of citizens, how to deal with the economy, and what it truly means to be American. Instead of papering over these differences, we need to understand their origins, grow smarter about engaging them, learn to ask better questions, and get better at arguing with one other about them.”
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Danah boyd: Critical Thinking Can’t Solve Everything [video]
SXSWedu/YouTube
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3/7/18
“No matter what worldview or way of knowing someone holds dear, they always believe that they are engaging in critical thinking when they’re developing a sense of right and wrong… Much of what they conclude may be rooted in the way of knowing more than any specific source of information. That’s true for all of us. If we're not careful, media literacy and critical thinking will simply be deployed in the classroom as an assertion of authority over epistemology. Right now, the conversation about fact-checking has already devolved to suggest that there is only one truth.”
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Is The Parkland Curriculum The Reason The Kids Are So Impressive?
Slate
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2/28/18
"These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”
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On the Psychological Impact Of Active Shooter Drills
Atlantic
-
2/28/18
"A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.”
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Trends In Foreign Language Study Since 2005
Quartz
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1/8/18
"From 2005 to 2015, the share of US schools offering major Western languages like Spanish and German fell. Chinese has overtaken Latin. And the “other” category—comprising Arabic, Japanese, and plenty of others—nearly caught up to French.”
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On A Measured Approach To Experiential Learning
Inside Higher Ed
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1/8/18
"Such experience, it is argued, will help students by giving them a leg up in their careers and making them more useful people. And although that may often prove true in the short term, I am convinced it is not reliably the case when we consider a longer time frame -- particularly for students in the foundational arts and sciences disciplines. Take, for example, the following three situations.”
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A Surprising Provocation Against—And For—The Humanities
American Affairs
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11/1/17
"The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
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"The Dying Art Of Disagreement”
New York Times
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9/24/17
"In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.”
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Towards Interdisciplinarity: Mathematician Addresses World Problem
Politico
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9/13/17
"Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math.”
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Sweet Briar College Reinvents Its Curriculum And Cost Structure
Chronicle of Higher Education
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9/6/17
"The curriculum changes, hammered out in just three months by the college’s faculty, will abolish traditional academic departments and instead align professors in three groups, one focusing on engineering, science, and technology, another on the environment and sustainability, and the third on creativity and the arts.”
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Game-Changing PD in Louisiana Through Curriculum Development
Education Next
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9/1/17
"The brilliance of what happened in Louisiana is they didn’t make a single choice for any school district in the state. They simply provided good information, training, and incentives.”
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"The Usefulness Of Useless Education”
Huffington Post
-
7/31/17
"The quest for knowledge is best driven by intense curiosity rather than utility. It requires not only structure but also passion. And as Flexner pointed out, what seems useless today frequently turns out to be exactly what one needs tomorrow. Education is the same. Of course education provides career skills, but like research, it is more than useful facts and skills. Students need to explore because they are themselves curious. They need to develop a thirst for learning. They need to be excited and passionate about knowledge. They need to learn unencumbered by the demands of utility.”
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Is Your School A “Thick Institution”?
New York Times
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4/18/17
"A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.”
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On The Growth Of Code-Free Computer Science Principles Courses
New York Times
-
4/4/17
"Just as children are drilled on the scientific method — turn observations into a hypothesis, design a control group, do an experiment to test your theory — the basics of working with computers is being cast as a teachable blueprint.”
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What Are The Skills Needed To Be A Successful… Adult?
Kappan
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4/1/17
"What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature. Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three, as we found in a recent study… And that was in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.”
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Susan Cain Writes About The Need For Followers, Not Leaders
New York Times
-
3/24/17
"My sons are avid soccer players, so I spend a lot of time watching the “beautiful game.” The thing that makes it beautiful is not leadership, though an excellent coach is essential. Nor is it the swoosh of the ball in the goal, though winning is noisily celebrated. It is instead the intricate ballet of patterns and passes, of each player anticipating the other’s strengths and needs, each shining for the brief instant that he has the ball before passing it to a teammate or losing it to an opponent.”
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How Do Different Disciplines Read, Write, And Think?
ASCD
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2/23/17
"The following lists for each of the major content areas, although not comprehensive, can act as starting points through which communities of teachers can begin to think in terms of disciplinary literacy.”
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Apollo School Has A Four-Hour, Team Taught, Morning Class Every Day
Cult of Pedagogy
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2/12/17
"Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes—English, social studies, and art—all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas. Students set their own goals for each day based on whatever project they happen to be working on at the time: This includes independent and group work, one-on-one appointments with teachers, and attending optional, self-selected mini lessons taught by the teachers. By lunch time, when the Apollo block is over, students resume a regular schedule for the rest of the day.”
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How To Foster Civic Competence And Responsibility
Quartz
-
1/23/17
"To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what’s needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to navigate and participate in it in constructive and meaningful ways: Not what to think, but how to think.”
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The Fall Of Statistics, Rise Of Data Analytics, And Relevant Implications
Guardian
-
1/19/17
"In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation… In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century.”
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Danah Boyd: Media Literacy Alone Isn’t The Solution
Points
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1/5/17
"In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation… We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news media or social media. We need to get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines.
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“Liberal Arts And The Ends Of Education”
NAIS
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1/1/17
"This utilitarian narrowness plagues the American pedagogical conversation, and our persistent promotion of so-called 21st-century skills has made the problem worse… Instead of interrogating the assumption that the demands of the marketplace should drive educational practice, we have rushed to impose new economic models — global, 21st-century ones — on our classrooms. Many educational progressives make the same mistake that the scientist, engineer, and economist made in the joke: They are so busy solving a problem, so captivated by data and method, that they have failed to pose any of the fundamental questions that might lead to self-knowledge.”
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On Extra-Curriculars As Central To Learning And Character Development
Harvard Graduate School of Education
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1/1/17
"Extracurriculars, our work suggests, tend to differ from core classes in a number of important ways. They are voluntary rather than mandatory; they often involve work that is undertaken collectively rather than individually; they feature opportunities for peer leadership and peer-to-peer learning; they involve dimensions of playfulness; and they are aligned to activities that are valued in broader American culture… Finally, extracurriculars draw together opposing virtues that are critical for sustained and deep learning: passion because students have chosen the arena and are seeking to excel in it, and precision because there are ample opportunities for practice and feedback.”
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On Fake News: ”The Ethics Of Information Literacy”
The Frailest Thing
-
12/6/16
"It is one thing to be presented with a set of skills and strategies to make us more discerning and critical. It is another, more important thing, to care about the truth at all, to care more about the truth than about being right. In short, the business of teaching media literacy or critical thinking skills amounts to a kind of moral education.”
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Florida Senate Approves Coding Classes For Foreign Language Req
Miami Herald
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2/24/16
“If it becomes law, the computer-coding measure — which would take effect in the 2018-19 school year — would be the first of its kind in the country… But critics of the proposal worry it could dilute students’ cultural education and place a burden on public schools that already lack adequate technology resources.”
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A History Of The Purported Decline Of The Humanities
Aeon
-
12/17/15
"By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging value structure of the new student generation, comprising goals such as ‘self-fulfillment’, ‘quality of life’ and ‘individual development’.”
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Coding Is Compulsory In The UK. Is This The Right Approach?
Guardian
-
12/3/15
"Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program… Coding lessons in school will not turn every child into a programmer. But the idea behind the new government initiatives is that new generations of children will not have to struggle through bootcamps in midlife, because those with an aptitude for coding will have discovered it at an early stage. And those who are less talented, it is thought, will at least gain an understanding of the digital world in which they now live.”
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Five Skills Underlying Tech/CompSci Education For Kids
Forbes
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10/31/15
“I think about [my kids’] digital futures in precisely the same way that I believe all schools should think about educating our children: equip young people with technological agency; make sure they know how to apply their critical thinking, entrepreneurial, creative, and social skills by wielding digital tools. To do so, all kids will need an introduction to coding—not so that they are able to code, but rather so that they are capable of truly grasping these five fundamentals…”
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Four Learning Goals: Knowledge, Skills, Character, Meta-Learning
Center for Curriculum Redesign
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10/29/15
“The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-dimensional education provides a clear and actionable first-of-its-kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century.”
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A Cognitive Argument For Focusing On Both Content And Skills
Atlantic
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8/12/15
"If the benefit of schooling comes from the content learned, then it’s important to get a better understanding of what content will be most valuable to students later on in their lives. The answers may seem intuitive, but they’re also subjective and complex. A student may not use plane geometry, solid geometry, or trigonometry, but studying them may improve her ability to mentally visualize spatial relationships among objects, and that may prove useful for decades in a variety of tasks.”
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Liberal Arts Colleges Begin Developing In-House Startup Incubators
Forbes
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7/29/15
"With annual symposiums, mentorship programs and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern-day startup incubators–geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging students to pursue entrepreneurship–in particular, social entrepreneurship.”
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Code Schools Continue To Explode—And Place Graduates
New York Times
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7/28/15
"The graduating classes of these coding schools support the trend. They will graduate about 16,000 students this year, more than double the 6,740 graduates last year, according to a survey published by Course Report in June. The 2015 total would be about one-third of the estimated number of computer science graduates from American universities.”
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“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.”
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Perceptual Learning: A New/Necessary Skill In An Information Age
New York Times
-
3/27/15
"This is no gimmick. The medical school at U.C.L.A. has adopted perceptual modules as part of its standard curriculum, to train skills like reading electrocardiograms, identifying rashes (there are many varieties, which all look the same to the untrained eye) and interpreting tissue samples from biopsies. The idea is that you can learn to quickly identify abnormalities. Such modules are equally applicable in any field of study or expertise that involves making subtle distinctions.”
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John Seely Brown’s Essay On Digital Age Entrepreneurial Learning
John Seely Brown
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3/22/15
"This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial learner is constantly looking for new ways, new resources, new peers and potential mentors to learn new things.”
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David Brooks Explores The Unmeasurable Skills We Need Today
New York Times
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3/17/15
"As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch afterward and follow up with four carefully tended friendships forevermore. Then they spend their lives connecting people across networks… Similarly, people who can capture amorphous trends with a clarifying label also have enormous worth.”
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7 Skills Worth Testing: Reinventing What And How We Assess
Boston Globe
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2/26/15
"The answer is not to abandon testing, but to measure the things we most value, and find good ways to do that… After all, in the past 50 years economists and psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle and dynamic as the mechanisms that explain when and why we give in to impulse, the forces that govern our moral choices, and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping.”
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What The American Public Thinks Are The Most Important Skills
Pew Research
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2/19/15
"Across the board, more respondents said communication skills were most important, followed by reading, math, teamwork, writing and logic. Science fell somewhere in the middle, with more than half of Americans saying it was important. [See article for further breakdown]”
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We Don’t Need More STEM. We Need More STEM + Liberal Arts.
Washington Post
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2/18/15
"Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but they’re also nimble thinkers who know to consider chemistry’s impact on society and the environment.“
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Three Purposes of Education, And Some Skills To Achieve Them
Washington Post
-
2/12/15
"An educational focus on asking productive questions and defining meaningful problems isn’t just an academic skill. It is an important disposition across life, work and citizenship.”
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On Integrating Arts Into The Curriculum
KQED
-
1/13/15
"Art is not a second thought at the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA). Instead, artistic learning goals are held up as equals to academic standards and teachers work hard to design lessons that highlight content through art. “If you pick a subject area like science, social studies, math or literacy and you integrate it with an art form, what you do is connect the two and find ways to really integrate the two so they lean on each other,” said Judy Klima, an integrated arts coach at IAA.”
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In Support Of The Gap Year
New York Times
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1/4/15
"Attendance at “gap fairs” more than doubled in the United States between 2010 and 2013, and enrollment in gap-year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Ethan Knight, executive director of the American Gap Association. Many college websites, including Harvard’s and Yale’s, now encourage prospective freshman to consider a gap year; Middlebury even provides links to specific programs.”
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2014 Year in Review: (How) Should We Teach (Coding) Skills?
Hack Education
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12/13/14
“The bootcamp certification – its prestige, its worth – will be an interesting thing to gauge in the coming years. Outside of the tech sector (perhaps), it’s not clear that having a certificate in a particular field is actually that helpful… But the benefit to students is hardly the point here, is it. The benefit is to this massive industry that furthers a story that you must have a degree and now, increasingly, that you must have “skills.” Best prepared to deliver “skills” are not those old liberal arts colleges. It’s the giant for-profit higher education sector."
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Finally, A Study About The Importance Of Experiencing The Arts
EdWeek
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12/3/14
“The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students'... desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic... Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and thorough in how they observe the world. Noticing details in paintings during a school tour, for example, helps train students to consider details in the future.”
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Playing Music Causes (Not Correlates With) Cognitive Improvement
NPR
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11/20/14
“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple brain areas, compared to the others.”
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Chinese Test Success ≠ Educational Success
New York Review of Books
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11/20/14
“China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But... it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism.”
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The Rise of the AP Art Portfolio
New York Times
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10/31/14
“Students are tested not by their mastery of the material but by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. “Readers” must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their way through some 48,000 portfolios of student artwork. That’s more than double the number submitted a decade earlier… But the growth does not necessarily signal artistic aspirations. According to a 2007 survey by the College Board, only about 13 percent of the students major in art. So why take A.P. studio? To try to impress a admissions office, of course, or perhaps to make a rest stop along the academic autobahn or, maybe, art really is a labor of love.”
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Should We Be Increasing Our Focus on Vocational Prep?
Marketplace
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10/23/14
“For years, vocational high schools have been seen as a lesser form of schooling – tracking some kids off to work while others were encouraged to go on to college and pursue higher income professions. But things are changing. At one of those schools - Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts - students can learn traditional trades like carpentry, plumbing and welding. They can also learn high tech fields such as video game design, engineering, and biotechnology."
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Over 350 Institutions Credit Competency-Based Work. Do You?
NPR
-
10/7/14
“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading... Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into diploma mills.”
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Mentoring and Deep Learning Lead to Future Work-Life Engagement
Gallup
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10/7/14
“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning... But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support... If graduates strongly agree with these three things, it doubles the odds that they are engaged in their work and thriving in their overall well-being.”
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Bard College Is Innovating In Ways We Should All Pay Attention To
New Yorker
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9/29/14
“Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games, but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs... Bard... saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year.”
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High Schools Are Offering Credit for MOOCs. Is Yours?
EdWeek
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9/23/14
“Last school year, 13 juniors and seniors in the 6000-student Andover, Mass., school system enrolled in edX courses and received extracurricular credit—but no grades—upon completion of a pass-fail class. The district's goal was to provide its students with a more rigorous and extensive list of course offerings... All but two students at Andover High completed and passed their edX courses, an accomplishment she attributed in part to the school's guidance counselors' making sure students were prepared for the higher-level coursework before they enrolled."
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Friedman on Mentoring and Employer-Driven Education
New York Times
-
9/9/14
"Graduates who... had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.'"
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What is Unschooling? And What Can We Learn From It?
Films for Action
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8/18/14
“The moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand... In other words, the moment we quit trying to teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.”
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San Jose Students Petition and Crowdfund for CompSci Classes
San Jose Mercury News
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7/21/14
“Students aren't waiting for the system to catch up. At Walnut Creek's Northgate, students not only petitioned for a coding class, but also formed a science-technology-math-engineering club, then built a pipeline of future coders by engaging elementary and special education classes in fun projects.”
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Lehigh Creates a No-Credit, No-Curriculum, No-Grade Program
New York Times
-
7/18/14
“A summer program with no course credit, no set curriculum to cover, no competing class schedule and no penalty for failure frees students to experiment, said Alan J. Snyder, a vice president and associate provost at Lehigh. Eventually, the university plans to offer the program year-round, with many more students involved.”
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What Happens When Students Design Their Own Semester, Entirely.
KQED
-
7/14/14
“The school chose to continue the program, which runs for one semester each year and involves nine to 12 students who receive credit and a pass/fail. ‘It was really risky, because we didn’t know how colleges would interpret this on a transcript,’ Powell says. ‘But so far we’ve had only an overwhelmingly positive response,’ including from highly selective colleges, such as Oxford and Williams, that have accepted graduates.”
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Coding: The Best Article Yet on Computational Thinking in Schools
Mother Jones
-
6/1/14
"It was little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy—and our democracy—by not moving faster to make them universal?”
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Wesleyan President: Critical Thinking Is Over-Emphasized
New York Times
-
5/10/14
“Critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science.”
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What Actually Helps Students “Thrive” Later in Life?
NPR
-
5/6/14
“Graduates who said they had a "mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams," "professors who cared about me" and at least one prof who "made me excited about learning" are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
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What Skills Will We Need for Future Employment?
Farnam Street
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4/1/14
“1. Human-computer teams are the best teams. 2. The person working the smart machine doesn’t have to be an expert in the task at hand. 3. Below some critical level of skill, adding a man to the machine will make the team less effective than the machine working alone. 4. Knowing one’s limits is more important than it used to be.”
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How to Teach Experiential Entrepreneurship in High School
Steve Blank
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3/12/14
“Because these were high school kids with, for the first time, a real business relying on them, this portion of the class shook them so badly they couldn’t move from their seats--literally.... Feeling the pressure, after 3 wasted days, one student on one team finally convinced her team they needed to get out of the building.”
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When Google Hires, It’s Looking for “Learning Ability” Not Degrees
Quartz
-
2/24/14
“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
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Should We Build our Curricula Around What Computers Can’t Do?
New York Times
-
2/3/14
“The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract and linger in the mind.”
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Evolution of Education Will Come From Blending Old and New
Chronicle of Higher Education
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1/13/14
“High-impact practices like service learning, research with faculty members, and capstone projects that are a cornerstone of residential learning and have been shown to improve student learning, none of those practices are incorporated into MOOCs right now. To transform higher education for the next generation, we need to better blend game-changing innovations with one another, and with traditional methods.”
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We Shouldn’t Complain About Losing the Great Books
Slate
-
1/7/14
“Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.”
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We Are Losing Our Connection To Great Books
Wall Street Journal
-
1/3/14
“This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western Civilization.”
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Love and Math: Reinventing a Discipline
New York Review of Books
-
12/5/13
“Mathematical proofs, for all their rigorous logic, came to look more like narratives...”
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An American In Finland: What Lessons Were Learned?
EdWeek
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11/26/13
“I’ve already identified three big shifts I’d make right away...”