Group items tagged

This works well when you want a new way to distribute coupons, but it’s problematic when we try to impose technological solutions on problems that aren’t technological in nature.

For all the talk about turning students into creative problem solvers and 21st century critical thinkers, the truth is that our current system still very much revolves around the institutionalized mediocrity of standardized testing.

We can talk all we want about moving beyond testing, but it’s still the only thing that people are immediately incentivized to care about.

Help students shift from being passive receivers to active readers, evaluators, thinkers, and innovators. Explore the potential of emerging cross-genre, multi-platform, transmedia resources as tools for

close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension.

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately.

If reading closely is the most effective way to achieve deep comprehension, then that's how we should teach students to read.

Knowledgeable networkers are very good at what they do, and at the same time, do not pretend to know it all. They consider the entire puzzle, not just their own area of expertise. They’re integrative thinkers with broad interests and connections. They see how puzzle pieces fit together without needing to know everything about each piece

They have instant access to multiple knowledge workers via a phone call, email, Twitter post, or LinkedIn InMail. They can bring experts and expertise into a team, a department, or organization to fulfill a specific need or help seize an opportunity.

The knowledgeable networker can also seek out, find, assimilate, and translate useful information into workable solutions.

talked of all the rich research we have to help our students grow smarter as readers, writers, and thinkers

three-letter word we take for granted

Asking good questions and encouraging students to build on one another’s thinking gives students voice and enables them to become more critical thinkers in mathematics.

students move into pairs to write their ideas, solutions, and strategies. A variety of materials, such as linking cubes and two-colour counters, are available for students to choose from when constructing mathematical models, making conjectures, and connecting their ideas.

“The idea that learning happens via training is questionable and we knew that going in and we supported that with our findings,” she said.

The study also identified six types of learners: purposive planners, explorers, visionaries, problem solvers, reluctant learners and pinballs. The January 2010 issue of Impact published by the Ivey Business School defines the categories as follows:

“Visionaries are people who find out about new technologies and think about what these could do for them personally and in their organizations. Visionaries are sometimes explorers. They tend to be lateral thinkers, and look at technology from a very strategic perspective.”

We must begin by exciting the imaginations of our young people.

my second point: more personalized learnin

Finally, with digital we can bring the world’s greatest thinkers to every student, anywhere in the world, at a very low cost.

First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.

Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)

Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.

Yes, group activity can provide the impetus for better framing of problems, which can lead to original solutions. But creativity is the "end result of many forms of intelligence coming together, and intelligence born out of collaboration and out of networks," to quote one of my co-workers, Robert Fabricant. When we collaborate with different kinds of thinkers, sometimes from different cultures and backgrounds, we individually struggle with ingrained behaviors that reduce our likelihood of manifesting creativity.

Instead of holding an hour-long meeting with a facilitator at the whiteboard, pen poised to capture ideas called out, what would happen if every person in the room were provided five minutes to generate ideas individually?

How does innovation occur?  Through an inefficient process of ideation, exploration, and experimentation.

we create new value by combining seemingly unrelated things or ideas in new ways, transferring something from one environment to another, or finding new insights in patterns or aberrations. Innovative ideas rarely emerge from an “aha!” moment. Instead, they usually arise from thinking differently than we normally think and from learning.

we are highly efficient, fast, reflexive thinkers who seek to confirm what we already know.