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in American curriculums, a growing emphasis on standardized test scores as the primary measure of “successful” schools has crowded out what should be an essential criterion for well-educated students: a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others.

teachers, janitors and bus drivers are all trained to identify instances of bullying, and taught how to intervene.

people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation.

Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.

we need to move students up the education chain. They don’t always know what they need to know, but why don’t we start by finding out? Instead of giving tests to find out what they’ve learned, we should test to find out what they don’t know. Their wrong answers aren’t failures, they are needs and opportunities.

Google, he said, is looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills.

Each month, these seven teachers get together and watch video clips from their classrooms on computer monitors or television screens….A video club is a group of teachers who meet on a regular basis to view and discuss video segments from their classrooms. In a video club, the group establishes the goals, then tapes and selects the video segments for viewing. Ensuring productive learning experiences for teachers requires careful design and facilitation.