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"Educating for Global Citizenship - An ETFO Curriculum Development Inquiry Initiative"

by Will Richardson

"Genius Hour in the classroom is an approach to learning built around student curiosity, self-directed learning, and passion-based work. In traditional learning, teachers map out academic standards, and plan units and lessons based around those standards. In Genius Hour, students are in control, choosing what they study, how they study it, and what they do, produce, or create as a result. As a learning model, it promotes inquiry, research, creativity, and self-directed learning."

"Originally pioneered at places like 3M and HP, Google's vaunted 20 percent time, which lets employees spend a full one-fifth of their time on passion projects, has spawned everything from Gmail to Google News. Now it's gaining ground among educators who are carving out a chunk of their already-limited time with students to work on innovative inquiry-based projects that resonate on a deeper, personal level."

"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."

"In my classroom over the last few years I've shown many Youtube videos to inspire resiliency, grit, hope, and discussion prior to guiding them in the creation of their inquiry questions about their passions and wonders during our weekly Genius Hour time.  This post is a follow up post to my post 23 Videos that Sparked Genius Hour Thinking, Collaboration, and Actions.  Many of those videos and the ones I am sharing now were shared with me through the wonderful connections I have made with educators learners on Twitter, Facebook, and at workshops.  I am continually inspired by the educators in my personal learning network.  Thank you to all of you who share your learning and inspirations daily.  You have helped me make sense of the ideas that are floating around in my head.  I am proud to say that students in my classes are constantly inspiring each other and their teacher.  Some of their work is shared on the list below."

"Ed note: This is the first part of a two-post mini-series (can you call two posts a mini-series?) The second part of this post will be published tomorrow morning, and will focus on the design cycle of genius hour and passion-based learning. For the past eight years students in Year Six at Redlands have participated in a Personal Passion Project during Term Four. It is a way to finish their time in Junior School with a project that connects their passion with all they have learned about managing inquiry/design based projects to that point. Over the years it has proven to be a highlight of the year and has produced amazing results. With a change to the Australian & NSW syllabus we have had to revise our approach to the Personal Passion Project and so now is the perfect time to reflect on the past and identify the lessons learned."

"The Question Game: A Playful Way To Teach Critical Thinking Big idea: Teaching kids to ask smart questions on their own A four-year-old asks on average about 400 questions per day, and an adult hardly asks any. Our school system is structured around rewards for regurgitating the right answer, and not asking smart questions - in fact, it discourages asking questions. With the result that as we grow older, we stop asking questions. Yet asking good questions is essential to find and develop solutions, and an important skill in innovation, strategy, and leadership. So why do we stop asking questions - and more importantly, why don't we train each other, and our future leaders, to ask the right questions starting from early on? In A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, Warren Berger suggests that there are three main questions which help in problem solving: Why questions, What If questions, and How questions."

"As tomorrow's global citizens enter higher education with words like "make," "hack," and "prototype" embedded in their vocabulary, they are fueling a powerful movement toward "learning by creating." Faced with the shifting ambitions of students and changes in institutional funding streams, colleges and universities are embracing "learning by creating," allowing them to leverage the traditional spirit of an educational community with students' growing entrepreneurial focus. In response, these institutions are adopting powerful new models to erode the boundaries of historically siloed disciplinary thinking and empower new levels of discovery. A number of colleges and universities around the world are leading the way as they introduce learning facilities billed as "innovation + incubator + maker centers." These centers focus on multi-disciplinary inquiry that can foster partnerships with industry and fully leverage available grants and funding for research. Advancing these new models can help universities recruit fresh talent, establish new partnerships for success and promote an environment where emerging leaders can explore the complex social challenges of our time."

"The NMC Horizon Report > 2015 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This 12th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are identified across three adoption horizons over the next one to five years, giving campus leaders and practitioners a valuable guide for strategic technology planning. The report aims to provide these leaders with more in-depth insight into how the trends and challenges are accelerating and impeding the adoption of educational technology, along with their implications for policy, leadership and practice. View the work that produced the report at www.horizon.wiki.nmc.org."

"Putting kids to work on meaningful projects can transform classrooms into beehives of inquiry and discovery, but relatively few rigorous studies have examined how well this teaching method actually works. An encouraging new report describes preliminary, first-year outcomes from a study of 3,000 middle school students that shows kids can, in fact, learn more in science classrooms that adopt a well-designed, project-focused curriculum. "

"The embracement of the maker movement is being seen in K-12 schools and districts across the world. As a result, makerspaces are being instituted to allow students to tinker, invent, create, and make to learn.  A makerspace can best be defined as a physical place where students can create real-world products/projects using real-world tools in a shared work space. With natural connections and applications to STEAM areas as well as a focus on self-directed, inquiry-based, and hands on learning, it is difficult not to appreciate and admire the positive impact that makerspaces can have on all students.  In times when many schools and districts have cut programs such as wood/metal shop and agriculture, makerspaces provide a 21st Century alternative to meet the learning needs of our most at-risk students.  "

"All the furniture in the world won't matter if there's not real change in the learning environment, the opportunities for kids, and the style of inquiry offered…"

"A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student's belly to the educator's marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It's okay to say "I don't know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it's that I don't know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don't know means I'm missing information that I'm supposed to have."

"Last week I may have had my best moment ever as a teacher, making a lightsaber with kids. Our current unit of inquiry is looking at how energy can be used to support human progress including the use of circuits. Which of course mean I just had to get my set of Makey Makeys out. I had a huge room of circuitry for the kids to explore but the best part was undoubtedly the lightsaber."