When Student Collaborative Work Is Fruitful and When It’s Not

Attract: How can I interest participants in the event before they even arrive?  What should they do, watch, consider or experience that will get them excited and mentally prepared for an event? Enter: What happens as participants enter a space?  How do I want them to feel as they  arrive?   Engage: While they are at the event, what are the experiences that will that lead to transformation?  How will participants engage with their learning and with each other? Exit: How do I want the participants to feel at the end of the event?  How do we end?  How do they physically and mentally exit the space?  What will the participants leave with? Extend: What is the long-term transformation that I want them to have?  How do I follow-up with the participants and build on the experience?  How can I extend the transformation beyond the experience itself?

If you lead a meeting, your job is to make sure that every decision made is crystal clear to everyone present before the meeting ends. The second lesson is that leaders must make sure that decisions made in meetings are communicated to, and ultimately implemented by, their organizations.

in the best companies, executive teams really are teams and that they make the hardest decisions together.

t the end of every executive meeting, to say ‘Have we made any decisions in the room today, and (if we have) how are we going to communicate them?’

One of the strengths of gamification is that it provides visible milestones of the student’s mastery of content in real time (when it is well designed). Too often in an instructional setting, the learner doesn’t know whether or not he or she really understands or can apply the knowledge they are learning. There is often no visible sign of mastery of the content or application of the content.

Design, Make, Remix, Hack, Create, Build, Program, Craft, Etc.

 ✓ We create learning environments that are carefully crafted, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity and engaging. ✓ We develop curriculum that has greater depth than breadth. ✓ We make sure our curriculum takes into account local culture and celebrates the uniqueness of our local community. ✓ We don’t isolate skills development but let students grow their skills as they engage with important content. ✓ We construct learning environments that foster questioning, creativity and innovation, such as the maker movement and project/problem based learning. ✓ We find the courage to have serious discussions about abolishing standardized testing, classroom marks and grading, and the use of “birth year” as our primary criterion for sorting students. ✓ We lobby our governments for funds to assure true equality in education for all children. ✓ We discontinue the ranking of teachers and schools.  ✓ We replace our egg-carton grades with flexible, personalized learning that takes into account when students are ready to engage in and acquire important skills. ✓ We make time for teacher collaboration a top priority.