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"Kids are creative, every moment of the day… in the way they draw, the way they experiment with language, the way they interact with objects, the way they imagine new worlds. At IDEO we believe that creative confidence - believing in your ability to create change and having the courage to act on it - is something all of us are born with. But as David and Tom Kelley write in the book Creative Confidence, too often people lose this innate ability as they grow. Perhaps they get a "creativity scar" when somebody tells them they aren't a good artist or they're doing things the wrong way. They become fearful of what other people think. They play it safe. And the safe answer is rarely the most creative or innovative one."

"nly if you are truly open to the possibility of being wrong can you ever learn, says researcher Alex Edmans. In an insightful talk, he explores how confirmation bias -- the tendency to only accept information that supports your personal beliefs -- can lead you astray on social media, in politics and beyond, and offers three practical tools for finding evidence you can actually trust. (Hint: appoint someone to be the devil's advocate in your life.) This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxLondonBusinessSchool, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you. "

"When you're the big fish, it's not OK to pick on the little fish just because you can. That's an important lesson for everyone. But some Houston first-graders got a particularly vivid demonstration in the form of a musical puppet show, which featured fish puppets and an underlying message about why it's wrong to bully others. The show left an impression on the students at Codwell Elementary, according to their teacher Shelea Bennett. "You felt like you were in that story," she said. "By the end of the story they were able to answer why [bullying] wasn't good, and why you shouldn't act this way." The puppeteer's show was part of an effort to expand arts education in Houston elementary and middle schools. Now, a new study shows that the initiative helped students in a few ways: boosting students' compassion for their classmates, lowering discipline rates, and improving students' scores on writing tests. It's just the latest study to find that giving students more access to the arts offers measurable benefits. And adding time for dance, theater, or visual arts isn't at odds with traditional measures of academic success, according to the research - which amounts to one of the largest gold-standard studies on arts education ever conducted. "Arts learning experiences benefit students in terms of social, emotional, and academic outcomes," write researchers Dan Bowen of Texas A&M and Brian Kisida of the University of Missouri. The study, released Tuesday through the Houston Education Research Consortium, looked at elementary and middle schools - which predominantly served low-income students of color - that expressed interest in participating in Houston's Arts Access Initiative. There appeared to be significant need: nearly a third of elementary and middle schools in the district reported lacking a full-time arts teacher."

"Math has been a traditionally thorny subject in many American schools. Lots of children dislike math and many more adults stopped taking mathematics as soon as they are able, even when they were successful in their classes. At the same time, mathematical thinking is a crucial part of many of the most exciting and growing careers in science, technology, engineering and math, not to mention important for a general understanding of the mathematical world around us. So, what can U.S. math educators do to shift this dynamic? Stanford Mathematics Education Professor Jo Boaler is championing a dramatic shift in how many math teachers approach instruction. Rather than focusing on the algorithms and procedures that make mathematics feel like a lock-step process -- with one right way of solving problems -- Boaler encourages teachers to embrace the visual aspects of math. She encourages teachers to ask students to grapple with open-ended problems, to share ideas and to see math as a creative endeavor. She works with students every summer and says that when students are in a math environment that doesn't focus on performance, speed, procedures, and right and wrong answers they thrive. They even begin to change their perceptions of whether they can or can't do math."

We have some strange ideas about intelligence, many of them are wrong. Some of our ideas can have a damaging effect on the people we label as intelligent. When we look at some of the research behind intelligence we find that our assumptions based on what we were once told about it need to be updated. 

"Remember the hype around gamification? About a decade ago, FarmVille and other Facebook games were all the rage. It led the Horizon Report, an annual attempt by a panel of experts to forecast educational trends, to predict in 2012 that gamification would be a major force in education within three years. But here we are in 2019, and people aren't talking much about gamification in education. In fact, after 2015, the Horizon Report stopped mentioning it at all. This week Educause released the higher education edition of the Horizon Report for 2019, and for the first time it looked back on how well past reports did at accurately predicting what would be on the horizon. Titled "Fail or Scale," the new section of the report includes three essays that look back at three predictions from past reports with the benefit of hindsight."

We struggle to achieve balance with so many parts of our lives. We see things in dichotomies and try to weigh one against the other believing that we must give time to one and not the other. This tendency to see things in often false dichotomies leads to the problem of the "want to' vs the 'have to'. Unfortunately, when we are faced with this dilemma we often make a choice in favour of the 'have to' but we chose this option for the wrong reasons.

"I was painfully bored during my K-12 education. I looked forward to college anticipating that it would be different - more engaging, more interesting, more innovative. I was wrong. My undergraduate education, except for a few bright spots, was just an extension of my K-12 education including more grill and drill with sages on the stages (literally since I went to such a large university); taking notes and taking lots of multiple choice tests. During my freshman year, I thought that if I had one wish, it would be to change the educational system (which has stayed with me ever since). One of those bright spots was being asked to read Carl Rogers, Freedom to Learn, which was published 1969 in an upper level Educational Psychology course. The big aha for me was that school systems should be focused on helping learners develop the skills for how to learn not what to learn, one that was sorely lacking in most of my K-graduate-level education and a concept and goal that as an educator I've held onto ever since."

""Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." We should learn from experiences, particularly if those experiences show our previous beliefs to be untrue. So why are people so easy to fool when it comes to beliefs about learning? For years, a stream of articles have tried to dispel pervasive but wrong ideas about how people learn, but those ideas still linger. For example, there is no evidence that matching instructional materials to a student's preferred "learning style" helps learning, nor that there are "right-brain" and "left-brain" learners. The idea that younger people are "digital natives" who use technology more effectively and who can multi-task is also not supported by scientific research."

Assessment is arguably the piece of the learning cycle we get most wrong. Whether looked at from the perspective of the learner, the teacher, the school administrator, the politician or the parent, assessment is misunderstood and poorly utilised as a tool for learning. The importance of changing this situation is only made more salient in light of the countless research studies from the likes of Jon Hattie & Dylan Wiliam that points to the power of effective assessment. So, what are the common mistakes and how might we avoid them?

"This school year we added a new feature to our daily lineup of student activities. Called "Picture Prompts," these short, accessible, image-driven posts feature photographs and illustrations from The Times, and invite a variety of written or spoken responses - from creative storytelling to personal narrative to constructing an argument or analyzing what a work of "op-art" might be saying. Teachers tell us they use these prompts to inspire student writing - whether in their journals, as a timed opportunity or to practice inferring meaning "without worrying about getting the right or wrong answer." They also use them with a variety of learners, from high school to middle or elementary school students to English Language Learners of all ages. As one teacher put it, she uses them "for helping teenagers to start talking to each other." Below, we've categorized the 160+ prompts we published during the 2016-17 school year based on the type of writing they primarily encourage students to do. All are still open for comment. Plus, we have a lesson plan on how to teach with Picture Prompts, along with other Times images, in case you're looking for more inspiration."

"Bright Side has prepared illustrations for you that won't test your math skills or ability to think outside the box. Instead, they'll challenge your observation skills. Each of the following pictures has one inaccuracy in them. How quickly can you spot it?"

"At a recent talk for special education teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District, child development professor Maryanne Wolf urged educators to say the word dyslexia out loud. "Don't ever succumb to the idea that it's going to develop out of something, or that it's a disease," she recalled telling teachers. "Dyslexia is a different brain organization that needs different teaching methods. It is never the fault of the child, but rather the responsibility of us who teach to find methods that work for that child." Wolf, who has a dyslexic son, is on a mission to spread the idea of "cerebrodiversity," the idea that our brains are not uniform and we each learn differently. Yet when it comes to school, students with different brains can often have lives filled with frustration and anguish as they, and everyone around them, struggle to figure out what is wrong with them."

"I was listening to Chris Molanphy's excellent Hit Parade podcast this week, which is based on his equally great Hit Parade column for Slate Magazine. In this episode, he details the circumstances that lead the Beatles to hold the still-unbeaten record of having the top 5 spots on the Billboard charts all at once. More remarkably, it's not that this feat was achieved through their own talent - it was almost entirely a snafu caused by the lack of interest in the Beatles by major labels. Indeed, much of the feedback they had received from labels and the American music industry was tepid at best and negative at worst. Dick Rowe at Decca Records cemented his place in history by declining to sign the Beatles, saying "Guitar groups are on the way out." He wasn't wrong - the data he had showed that there wasn't likely to be much of a return in signing the Beatles. Instead, Decca signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who would cost them less money. And so, you're probably wondering how in the world this connects to education. When I look at this moment in history, I see a lot of talented people making choices which are informed by data. As teachers, we too need to look at data. It's how we understand our students better, and when used properly, can be influential in shaping our practice to make our teaching more effective. Certainly data is used as a summative tool, but it is most useful as a formative tool for students and teachers alike. How does the use of data in regards to the Beatles relate to teachers?"

"I have to admit that, before a friend posted this video to my Facebook wall, I had never heard of repair cafés. I had no idea this was a trend, but I'm thrilled that it is. More on Repair: 6 Ways to Repair Broken Plastic Repair and Maintain Your Bike with These 6 Projects Zipper Repair for a Coat or Jacket I immediately thought of several appliances and motorized tools that I would love to repair, but I'm too clueless to troubleshoot and fix what may be wrong with them. If I could take them to one of these repair cafés and work with someone who knows what they're doing, I would get these devices fixed, learn more about them, and how to maintain and fix them in the future. I would also be supporting a local makery endeavour and the so-called "perennial philosophy" (trying to keep the material objects in your life alive for as long as possible). Pure win!"

"While many Canadian educators struggle to find the solution to students' declining math scores, there's one expert who says we may be looking at the problem the wrong way. Sir Ken Robinson - education guru, author and adviser - says relentless testing and the push for standardized scores are destroying students' imagination and talent. He argues that schools are stifling instead of nurturing kids' creativity. Sir Ken's 2006 TED talk, How Schools Kill Creativity, has had 47 million views and become one of the most popular talks in history. He was in Montreal this week for the Einstein Youth Forum, and sat down for an interview with The Globe and Mail."

"Imagine a parent telling a child, "I'm just not a reading person." Sounds odd, doesn't it? Now reread the same cartoon, substituting "math" for "reading." Suddenly it doesn't seem so absurd. But it should! As a society ever more reliant on technology and STEM-based careers, we must shatter the myth that math skill is inborn and reinforce that it is the result of intention and practice. It's common to hear well educated adults declare themselves "not a math person," sometimes proudly. Indeed, many people of all ages believe that mathematical ability is something you are either born with or not, rather than something to be mastered with focused effort. This belief is wrong. What's more, it's harmful to kids as they have their first experiences learning math; the attitude that "I can't learn math" quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a society ever more reliant on technology and STEM-based careers, we must shatter the myth that math skill is inborn and reinforce that it is the result of intention and practice. Reforming these perceptions needs to be a priority for teachers, parents, and creators of new learning tools that align to the way these digital-savvy students learn."

"Let's just put it out there. December is exhausting for teachers. The days are shorter. The weather grows colder and (at least here in Oregon) wetter. Students are anxious - whether it's a buzzing excitement for vacation or a sense of dread that some kids feel in homes that are unsafe during the holidays. And teachers are tired. They're tired of redirecting behaviors and tired of the mid-year pressure of the test and simply tired of the sheer energy it takes to be a teacher. It's no wonder that so many teachers begin playing holiday movies around this time of year. They want to create a sense of fun and escape and enjoyment, and a motion picture promises exactly that. Maybe that's okay. Maybe that's a part of creating a culture of joy. So, please don't read this post as a slam on teachers showing movies before the break. If this is a part of a positive classroom culture, keep doing it. This isn't meant to be a guilt trip or a rant or a "you're doing this wrong" post. This is meant to be a yes/and post offering other options."

"With the prospect of returning to face-to-face instruction or hybrid constructions, what can we learn that works in our digital spaces that can readily transfer to our in-person classrooms? How do teachers motivate students to share ideas and risk "being wrong" in the digital space or the public space of the in-person classroom? How can we catch that lightning in a bottle? Well, there is the chat function built into many of the digital tools we use. There is power in the chat that can be intentionally put to use now and in the future."

"No matter your position in education, you have gone through some form of professional development. In many cases, the act of being "developed" comes in a variety of standard types such as workshops, mandated PD days, presentations, conferences, book studies, or keynotes. Many of these are often the one and done variety or conducted in a drive-by manner. Now, don't get me wrong; some educators find value in the experiences I have outlined above and have gone on to change their respective practice for the better. However, I would say an equal amount have found little to no benefit. The bottom line is that all educators yearn for quality professional learning as opposed to development that leads to sustained improvements in teaching, learning, and leadership. The image below from Katie Martin sums up nicely what educators want out of professional learning.  "