begrudgingly decided to give Twitter a try to improve communications with my stakeholders
Change became a collaborative and collective process that resulted in a school more focused on learning and one that worked better for kids than adults.
""You've got to know the rules to break them." Says McQueen. In my role, this means two things:
It means that you are never asking teachers to do anything other than teach in the ways that they know work and inspire their students. You are simply giving them additional options.
It means that you need to train up teachers to be confident with technology - if they know what they can do, then there is a choice of they do with that knowledge"
When it comes to technology – something so ingrained in our daily lives – what if we stop asking “why” and start asking “how”? What if we told stories about solutions instead of failures?
"I leaned over the shoulder of a student in the library. She was quietly working with headphones in, and completely focused. What caught my attention is that she would continually lift her phone up over the textbook, and then jot something down on the paper to her left. It was a motion and process that she repeated at least seven times before I headed over to see what was going on.
As I got closer I could see that it was a math textbook, and her paper was filled with equations, problems, and steps. I thought to myself, that sure doesn't look like my math homework, which was always a mess of numbers and lines and eraser marks from messing up!
What happened next caught me by surprise. Not because I couldn't believe it, but because it changed the way I viewed math forever."
Teaching is undoubtedly a busy profession and one where the end of the to do list seems to be forever located in a galaxy far far away. There is always more to be done and as each item on the list is ticked off, three, four or more seem to have appeared. If we ever do get close to the end, we find ourselves reflecting on what we have achieved and the many ways in which it might be improved.
"Nick Sigmon first encountered the idea of "grading for equity" when he attended a mandatory professional development training at San Leandro High School led by Joe Feldman, CEO of the Crescendo Education Group. As a fairly new high school physics teacher, Sigmon says he was open-minded to new ideas, but had thought carefully about his grading system and considered it fair already. Like many teachers, Sigmon had divided his class into different categories (tests, quizzes, classwork, homework, labs, notebook, etc.) and assigned each category a percentage. Then he broke each assignment down and assigned points. A student's final grade was points earned divided by total points possible. He thought it was simple, neat and fair."
Computational thinking skills are important for all
students, not just for future computer scientists.
That's one of the key messages from a new report
commissioned by the Department's Education
for a Changing World initiative, and a message
bolstered by growing international evidence.
With the year rushing to a close, this seems like the right time to set goals for the year ahead. To pause and consider what next and make some personal promises.
The trouble is that the history of setting New Year Resolutions is littered with failures. It is so easy at this point in time to make commitments for change and then just a few weeks later to have forgotten what they were.
"Business adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating, fueled by an explosion of data, the rapid growth in cloud computing and the emergence of advanced algorithms.1
In a survey of IT decision-makers that my company, CCS Insight, conducted in July 2017, 58 percent of respondents said they are using, testing or researching the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their organizations.
Respondents also estimated that as much as 30 percent of their business applications would be enhanced with machine learning within the next 24 months - a bullish view, considering the technology's well-documented problems with trust, cost and the lack of skills needed to train machine learning systems."
Sir Ken Robinson's views on creativity are abundantly well documented. In his 2006 TED Talk-still the most-watched of all time-he claimed that "we are educating people out of their creative capacities" and charged the current education system with being too rigid in adhering to traditional academic subjects. Kids, he argued, need time to dance, draw, create and find what they're good at.
But he hasn't given up on schools or education-far from it, in fact. For his follow-up act, Robinson is releasing a new book for parents on how to raise capable children who thrive in school. Make no mistake, though, he's still shaking up the system (and redefining what that actually means).
This unavoidable and irreducible complexity means that schools are challenging place to study, to understand and to manage change within. Even for the teacher who spends everyday inside the school there is so much going on that unguided observations and the plans based upon them come with no guarantee of success. - We need a lens and a lever to manage this complexity. - Such a lens is offered by the 'cultural forces'.
Data occupies a somewhat curious place within education. Mention it to teachers and you tend to get one of two responses. One group will roll their eyes and with great sarcasm how data is "so exciting". The other group responds with something akin to "actually I quite like data" indicating that experience has shown them that they are members of a small group. The question is why do some people find data to be a useful and fascinating tool while others see it as a good method for inducing sleep?