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"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

"This page has lots of information about First Nations, Metis and Inuit culture! Whether you are a student in need of help with your homework, or a teacher looking for fun and exciting ideas for your classroom, you have come to the right place!"

"General wellness is an important concept for leading a healthy life wrapped up in a generic term. What does wellness look like and how can you encourage it in a class setting? Sketch-noter Sylvia Duckworth created the graphic above to share tips for supporting a culture of wellness in schools.  Children spend a significant amount of each week day in a classroom, making it not only a place to learn academics but also an opportunity to teach life skills that will serve them beyond the schoolyard, like self-care, community involvement, and fostering a sense of connection and belonging. "

"As a parent and an educator I strive to invite joy into my classroom and my home everyday. Joy is much more than happiness. Joy is a process in and of itself where we creatively learn to embrace all our emotions including disappointment and failure. Here I offer 5 entry points based upon the influential work of Marta Davidovich Ockuly (2015) and Catherine Camden-Pratt (2008), where we may foster and cultivate JOY in our own lives and the lives of those we influence."

"Cultivating an innovative culture inside your classroom and enhancing your students inquiry-based approaches to learning is not an easy task particularly in the light of all the surrounding distraction coming from digital media. It is probably one of the major challenges facing educators and teachers in the 21st century classroom. However, no matter how big the challenge is there are always ways to come to grips with it. Our colleague Mia MacMeekin from anethicalisland has designed this beautiful graphic where she featured 27 ways teachers can help their students be innovative."

"Whether this is your first year teaching and you're right out of school or you've been teaching for 30 years, the students sitting in your classroom are facing a different type of classroom than you had as a student. There is more technology, the subject material may vary slightly, but the biggest differences are likely cultural and social."

"ducators have lots of ideas about how to improve education, to better reach learners and to give students the skills they'll need in college and beyond the classroom. But often those conversations remain between adults. The real test of any idea is in the classroom, though students are rarely asked about what they think about their education. A panel of seven students attending schools that are part of the "deeper learning" movement gave their perspective on what it means for them to learn and how educators can work to create a school culture that fosters creativity, collaboration, trust, the ability to fail, and perhaps most importantly, one in which students want to participate."

"Are you looking for the most impactful, the most inspiring, the most beneficial books that will help you succeed in the classroom? Perhaps you need ways to improve the way in which you motivate students. Perhaps you want to build a better classroom culture. Need new ways to teach reading and writing across the curriculum? Or, you might be curious about trends like Genius Hour and project-based learning. Boy, do I have a list for you."

"When I talk about the maker movement in schools I do talk about tools and spaces, but I try to make the point that it's about giving agency to kids in a system that most often considers students to be objects of change, rather than agents of change. One of our reasons for writing the book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom  was to try to create momentum for the return of progressive principles of education, principles that have been yanked away from kids and teachers by politicians, corporations, and Silicon Valley gurus who think they know how to fix everything with an app. I think this is a historic time, a second Industrial Revolution, where everything is coming together right at the right time. And like the Industrial Revolution, it will not be just a change in technology, but will resonate in politics, culture, economies, and how people live and work worldwide"

"The humble question is an indispensable tool: the spade that helps us dig for truth, or the flashlight that illuminates surrounding darkness. Questioning helps us learn, explore the unknown, and adapt to change. That makes it a most precious "app" today, in a world where everything is changing and so much is unknown. And yet, we don't seem to value questioning as much as we should. For the most part, in our workplaces as well as our classrooms, it is the answers we reward -- while the questions are barely tolerated. To change that is easier said than done. Working within an answers-based education system, and in a culture where questioning may be seen as a sign of weakness, teachers must go out of their way to create conditions conducive to inquiry. Here are some suggestions (based on input from question-friendly teachers, schools, programs, and organizations) on how to encourage more questioning in the classroom and hopefully, beyond it."

"If the promise of mobile technology in classrooms has been to equalize opportunities for all students through access to the internet, that potential has yet to be realized. National surveys consistently show that students in low-income schools are getting short-changed when it comes to using technology in school. A 2013 Pew study revealed that only 35 percent of teachers at the lowest income schools allow their students to look up information on their mobile devices, as compared to 52 percent of teachers at wealthier schools. And while 70 percent of teachers working in high income areas say their schools do a good job providing resources and support to effectively integrate technology into the classroom, only 50 percent of teachers in low-income areas agree. The reality is that while some teachers have found powerful ways to use mobile devices - both those owned by students and those purchased by the school - teachers at schools in very low-income areas are often battling a persistent student culture of disengagement. Many students have learning gaps that make it hard for them to stay interested in grade level materials and little desire to be in school at all."

""Failing Forward" is a relatively recent entry into our cultural lexicon-at least as far has headlines go anyway-that has utility for students and teachers. Popularized from the book of the same name, the idea behind failing forward is to see failing as a part of success rather than its opposite. Provided we keep moving and pushing and trying and reflecting, failure should, assuming we're thinking clearly, lead to progress, So rather than failing and falling back, we fail forward. Tidy little metaphor. So what might this look like in your classroom?"

"I led a training last week on blended learning and asked teachers to brainstorm the biggest challenges they face in the classroom. One answer resonated with me. "Learned helplessness." On my drive home, I kept mentally returning to this phrase. Then in my own classroom last week, my students were beginning a research project that would culminate in student presentations. We've done this type of task before, yet I was bombarded with questions: "Tucker, what should we title this?" "Tucker, how big should the font be?" "Tucker, how do we add an image to the background of our slide?" I have a stock response I use in this situation, "Figure it out." That may strike some teacher as harsh, but I disagree. Our students are conditioned from a young age to ask a teacher for help the minute something doesn't go right or the moment they have a question. Where is the curiosity? Why don't they want to figure it out themselves?"

"I am a big advocate for embedding a maker culture in my classroom to deepen students understanding of topics. With an interdisciplinary approach, making, tinkering, and STEAM activities enable our students to design and create a piece of work that is embodied by teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking. "Maker centred learning helps students see themselves as people that can effectively take action in the world". (2017, Clapp, E. P., Ross, J., Ryan, J. O., & Tishman, S). Designing lessons around making principles empowers students to embrace a continuous learning cycle, where a growth mindset and accepting failure is part of the journey to achieve success. "The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge" (Seymour Papert)."

From the site: "I am hoping to connect our school with some other schools in a project where early elementary students share about their family and/or cultural traditions during the December holidays. This project is designed so that it does not require a lot of classroom time to complete and does not involve very complicated technology skills. It also will introduce teachers to Smilebox - which is a neat free tool for sharing images on the web and easily allows students and parents to leave comments."

The Classroom of Popular Culture What video games can teach us about making students want to learn

"Learning from failure has become a popular idea in education recently, partly because it feels like common sense to many people. In a general way, the idea of "picking yourself up after a fall" has long existed in American culture as in many other parts of the world. Teachers are hoping that if they can instill this idea in their students, the small, everyday setbacks inherent to learning new things won't feel so emotionally charged to students, who might instead see them as part of the path to greater understanding and ultimate success. But turning the difficult experience of failure into a positive isn't as easy as telling students to change their mindsets; it takes careful lesson design, a strong classroom culture and an instructor trained in getting results from small failures so his or her students succeed when it matters."

" It is a myth that we operate under a set of oppressive bureaucratic constraints. In reality, teachers have a great deal of autonomy in the work they chose to do in their classrooms. In most cases it is our culture that provides the constraints. For individual teachers, trying out new practices and pedagogy is risky business and both our culture, and our reliance on hierarchy, provide the ideal barriers for change not to occur. As Pogo pointed out long ago, "we have met the enemy and it is us." http://www.cea-ace.ca/blog/brian-harrison/2013/09/5/stop-asking-permission-change "