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The contagion of Alabama’s shame became apparent in April, during the oral argument before the Supreme Court on Arizona’s immigration legislation, the test case for several similar state laws aimed primarily at Hispanics. All have been substantially blocked by federal courts, except Alabama’s, most of which went into effect last fall, catastrophically achieving the goal Arizona calls “attrition through enforcement” — also known as “self-deportation.”

I realized how dismayingly reliable Alabama remained as the country’s moral X-ray, exposing the broken places.

If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?

This content area provides a context in which children can explore the connections between self, family, community and the world at large.  Each area of emphasis within Human Studies and Global Citizenship plays a critical role in deepening children’s understanding of how their world works. Exploration by teachers, children, and families extends into the study of how people can most successfully communicate, collaborate, and connect within the context of the community.  As with other curriculum areas, teachers look for and create opportunities for relating this content to real life. Exploring identity, relationships and the ways we interact and communicate integrates social development, empathy, and the pursuit of understanding one another throughout the daily life of the school. Children expand these opportunities by reflecting upon the characteristics and experiences, past and present, of diverse cultures and populations of the world.  As the children mature, this area of the core curriculum supports their ability to grasp increasingly abstract concepts and complex ideas about human beings and the world at large.

I resolve to embrace a sense of vuja dé. We’ve all experienced déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that—looking at a familiar situation (an industry you’ve worked in for decades, problems you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. The challenge for all of us is that too often, we let what we know limit what we can imagine. This is the year to face that challenge head-on.

The most creative leaders aspire to learn from people and organizations far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change.

In your opinion, what is the most effective way to teach compassion? Or is it even teachable? I would agree the first step is to expose people to the truth which they otherwise would not know. However, is it enough? How do we get people to go beyond sentiments? And when they do act, how can they realize that they should not only help victims, but also look into the cause of that injustice, and try to eliminate that cause? What should be the core elements of a humane education? What can end the sufferings and atrocities of this world? Coming from a nation that was troubled by civil wars and foreign invasions for thousands of years, these are the questions I constantly ask myself. I would appreciate it if you could shed light on them with your insight.

I also think that the best way to build compassion is to get students to encounter suffering directly in ways that make it real. That means getting students out of the classroom to prisons or poor neighborhoods, or at least into encounters with real people who put a human face on various problems. This is one reason why I’m a huge fan of getting students to travel abroad

Steven B. Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From about the revolutionary power of social media such as Twitter to advance ideas and innovation in a myriad of fields, and it has been fascinating to see this concept in action in the swift spread over the past six months of the practice of flipping classrooms,  which is also known as reverse instruction or learning, and is closely related to (or often synonymous with) teacher vodcasting.

  At the same time, what is now an opportunity is also becoming an urgency: if students don’t need to come to class to get informational content delivery, if they can get it easily on their own, we need to transform how we use our classroom time such that it continues to be relevant and valuable.

I decided to use [reverse instruction] to teach my students the basic concepts of neurons.  For homework, I posted to our wiki a Khan Academy video, as well as, a couple of TED talks from leading neurologists to explain some of the purposes neurons have and cutting edge research that’s being done in the field.  In total, maybe about 25 minutes of work.