Thursday, September 25, 2014

Worth Reading

Sharing a few intriguing posts from the past couple of weeks.


1. Teacher Reflects On The Perfect Storm For Learning- A high school class, encouraged by a STEM contest, turned an idea to help the community into a prototype

For our project, the convergence of the right components on a focused objective created the potential for a "perfect storm" of learning to take place: curiosity among the students, a potentially daunting data gathering and number crunching component, and the use of math, science, and technology.

2.  John Dewey on the True Purpose of Education and How to Harness the Power of Our Natural Curiosity (Popova)- Dewey distills the purpose and ideals of education

While it is not the business of education to prove every statement made, any more than to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves. No matter how much an individual knows as a matter of hearsay and information, if he has not attitudes and habits of this sort, he is not intellectually educated. He lacks the rudiments of mental discipline. And since these habits are not a gift of nature (no matter how strong the aptitude for acquiring them); since, moreover, the casual circumstances of the natural and social environment are not enough to compel their acquisition, the main office of education is to supply conditions that make for their cultivation. The formation of these habits is the Training of Mind.

3. Why Don't We Truly Embrace Failure (Couros)- the need to fail and have conversations around moments of failure

The part of this process  which is imperative is resiliency and grit.  Resiliency, in this case, being the ability to come back after a defeat or unsuccessful attempt, and grit meaning a “resolve or strength of character.”  These are characteristics that are important in the innovative process as we need to continuously develop new and better ways to serve our students.

4. Maker Movement Reinvents Education (Stewart)- how giving students the chance to create and make reshapes the work we do with kids

“I finally decided I could take on much bigger and more ambitious projects if I got one for myself,” he says. So he sold his laptop on eBay, added to those proceeds all of the birthday money and allowance he had saved over the years, and took out a loan from the Bank of Dad to buy the cheapest 3-D printer he could find online. By the end of seventh grade, he had paid his father back entirely—all from the sales of his customized iPhone cases and little cone toys that he’d designed to flip around like benign butterfly knives. Once his debt was paid, he could finally begin the more ambitious project he’d had in mind: “the zero point energy field manipulator,” or gravity gun, from the video game Half-Life 2. He designed and built a full-size model of it—3 feet long and 2 feet high—“which was pretty difficult,” he explains, “because the actual platform of the machine is 10 inches by 10 inches,” so he had to get creative.


5. The Art and Science of Engagement (Blakley)- Johanna Blakley examines the best ways to understand how documentaries affect our lives. Her talk focuses on the need to balance the filmmaker's creative vision with a nuanced understanding of audience as key to measuring the true impact of media.  Another resource to consider or even share with students in examining what it means to compose.
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In honor of the Captain's last game at the stadium here are some favorite moments from the past 20 years


“This kid is not going to college. He’s going to Cooperstown.”



Where Have You Gone Derek Jeter (Henninger)- Jeter's public life was exemplary. Was he the exception?

Jeter's Iconic Flip


Jeter's Jump Throw


Dive Into the Stands Against Boston




Mr. November

Why School? How Education Must Change

Sharing a few highlights from Why School?  How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere (Richardson).


Today, if we have an Internet connection, we have fingertip, on-demand access to an amazing library that holds close to the sum of human knowledge and, equally important, to more than two billion people with whom we can potentially learn

Based on existing trends, some now predict the year 2020 will see 65 to 70 million freelancers, consultants, and independent workers representing more than half of all U.S. employees. That’s four times the number today.

This narrative focuses on preparing students to be learners, above all, who can successfully wield the abundance at their fingertips... Instead, it’s about asking questions, working with others to find the answers, doing real work for real audiences, and adding to, not simply taking from, the storehouse of knowledge that the Web is becoming.

It’s not “do your own work,” so much as “do work with others, and make it work that matters.”

In other words, let’s scrap open-book tests, zoom past open-phone tests asking Googleable questions, and advance to open-network tests that measure not just if kids answer a question well, but how literate they are at discerning good information from bad and tapping into the experts and networks that can inform those answers.

Herbert Gerjuoy predicts that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. The illiterate will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

One of the challenges I give the schools I work with is this: “How can you make sure that every student who walks on graduation day is well Googled by his or her full name?” At first blush, this question is somewhat disconcerting to them. But after they let it settle, most realize that if we really want our kids to make the most of the connections and opportunities they’ll have online once they leave us (and we should want that, by the way), we have to help them. Just crossing our fingers and hoping for the best simply isn’t good enough — and I hope that any parent would agree.

Tony Wagner recently said, “There’s no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn’t care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know.”

times of great abundance, however, what our children really need are master learners with enough content expertise to help them discover the curriculum. The adults in the room have to be skilled and literate by those 21st-century standards the NCTE is touting. And they have to exhibit the dispositions that will sustain their learning: persistence, empathy, passion, sharing, collaboration, creativity, and curiosity.

That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Worth Reading

Passing along a few interesting reads from the past couple of weeks....


1. Entrepreneurship is Elementary:  How A Project-Based Curriculum Catalyzed A Community (Rappaport)- a program in which elementary students are pushed to think and act like entrepreneurs.

Realizing that our little tech community could essentially be STEM Sesame Street, I set out to design a curriculum that would introduce the students to 21st-century careers and skills, from engineering to design to public speaking. It was one part career day, one part entrepreneurship workshop. As an education entrepreneur for years, I knew that the skills we used daily at our startups--critical thinking, creativity, collaboration--also happened to be central tenets of the fledgling Common Core State Standards.


2. Send Your Students’ (and anyone else’s) High Hopes Up High (Crosby)- update about the High Hopes project where students launch a balloon in the air with a camera attached to it.  The project was explained by Brain Crosby in his TEDxDenver ED Talk several years ago.


3. You Know What You Need... You Need A Learning Contract (Cormier)- thinking about the contracts we make with students in the classroom.  Here is an idea which views the learning contract as the basis for what is accomplished in that it takes the place of a syllabus, a textbook, an assessment model and a social contract.

I’m fascinated by how so many folks seem to have the same response to it that I did the first time I started reading about it – “this is exactly what i need.” It’s a simple concept – come to an agreement with people about what they want to work on, how much they want to work, who’s responsible for what and what everyone expects from the time you’re going to spend together.

4. Knowledge Building, Knowledge Of in Contrast to Knowledge About (Reilly)- what type of knowledge do we value and foster in our classrooms and beyond

Knowledge about dominates traditional educational practice. It is the stuff of textbooks, curriculum guidelines, subject-matter tests, and typical school “projects” and “research” papers. Knowledge of, by contrast, suffers massive neglect. There is instruction in skills (procedural knowledge), but it is not integrated with understanding in a way that would justify saying “Alexa has a deep knowledge of arithmetic”—or chemistry or the stock market or anything else. Knowledge about is not entirely useless, but its usefulness is limited to situations in which knowledge about something has value independently of skill and understanding. Such situations are largely limited to social small talk, trivia games, quiz shows, and—the one biggy—test taking.

5.  The Evolution of Product Design As Told By Citizens Watches- the video depicts this evolution as it occurs on a watch designer's desk, as well as through various taglines and typography over the years. Kramer used a variety of cameras, like a handcranked 35mm from the 1930s and a 1980s VHS camera, to get the looks of each era right. Each new product innovation is marked as "The End," leading to the question, "What if every ending was the chance to start something better?"



6. The History of Our World In 18 Minutes- David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.


7. How Video Powers Global Innovation- Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print.  But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness.





Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Opening Day Thoughts

Keeping the tradition alive I am sharing an old post from Will Richardson about the opening days of school.  In the post Will Richardson lists a series of questions he hopes his children will be able to answer about their respective day at school. 

I think this is a great list of not so much questions but a vision for the work we can do with kids.


What did you make today that was meaningful?
What did you learn about the world?
Who are you working with?
What surprised you?
What did your teachers make with you?
What did you teach others?
What unanswered questions are you struggling with?
How did you change the world in some small (or big) way?
What’s something your teachers learned today?
What did you share with the world?
What do you want to know more about?
What did you love about today?
What made you laugh?