Graded 21st Century

 Promotion and modelling of risk-taking.

It is not only that our leaders have jumped in and shared their learning, but they have flattened the organization and learned from others as well.  I will see many of our superintendents attend events such as “Innovation Week” to see what is happening in our schools, so that they can either share their learning with others, or act as connectors.  It would be easy to “lead from above”, but it is more important to get involved and “lead by example”.  This is something I have seen often from our administrators at every level.

Collaboration is talked a lot about in schools as an “essential trait”, but there are many people that thrive off the notion of competition.  To me, it is not one or the other, but a combination of both that really push our organization forward.  “Competitive-Collaboration” is something that I believe will really push us to the next level.

nstead of classrooms, PlayMaker School has a suite of spaces that are interconnected physically and visually. There’s an ideation lab, a maker space, and an immersive gaming and learning zone where the students can try out the games they create and the software they develop.

When you put math and science teachers together, they can cross-collaborate on lesson plans. If they’re teaching trigonometry or wave properties in math, they know they have to pull in the physics faculty also.” Schools that embrace STEM end up retraining. “They have to stretch their conception of what’s being taught.”

They were inspired by facilities that “let spontaneous collisions happen,”

Organizations maximize innovation if they embrace distributed leadership that truly amplifies opportunities for anyone in the organization to imagine, prototype, and build on new ideas. 

nnovative schools focus on teaching each individual user, not on the process of content transfer.  Differentiated learning, truly adapting the learning experience to the needs of the student-user, leveraged through the differentiated resources of the teacher-user, will be the tsunami of educational change in the next decade.

uccessfully innovating organizations make numerous bets, many of which are small, and some of which shoot for the moon.

Yearbooks: From tributes to video profiles, from sports highlights to skits and concert footage, the ways that AR can enhance a school yearbook are limitless.

Faculty Photo Wall: Set up a display of faculty photos near the school entrance. Visitors can scan the image of any instructor and see that figure come to life, telling more about him- or herself.

Coding, likewise, involves understanding and working within structures.

Memorizing rules and vocabulary strengthens mental muscles and improves overall memory. That's why multilingual people are better at remembering lists or sequences. Coding similarly involves very specific rules and vocabulary.

Likewise, programming necessitates being able to focus on what works while eliminating bugs. Foreign language instruction today emphasizes practical communication -- what students can do with the language. Similarly, coding is practical, empowering and critical to the daily life of everyone living in the 21st century.

Despite the considerable differences among all those institutions, one idea binds them together: the understanding that reflection and practice together are the best pedagogy. As Andrew Delbanco puts it in College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be: "Learning is a collaborative rather than a solitary process.

Computers will enhance learning, but they will never replace the profoundly personal dimension in deep learning.

We know that the best learning involves practices—lots of them. We know that effective learning is best achieved through the engagement of other deeply attentive human beings. The learning might occur in a traditional classroom, but it might happen in a different space: a lab, a mountain stream, an international campus, a cafeteria, a residence hall, a basketball court.

Ask naïve questions, invert perceptions, combine incompatible ideas, remix metaphors and pursue paradox. 

yet I think that if you take these as a point of departure, as I sometimes do, you'll find that you get outside of yourself in terms of your routines, your education and your common sense.  And you start to look at the world in different ways that may lead you to ideas that you never knew that you had.