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Bo Adams

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 0 views

  • But what are they betting on? AltSchool is a decidedly Bay Area experiment with an educational philosophy known as student-centered learning. The approach, which many schools have adopted, holds that kids should pursue their own interests, at their own pace. To that, however, AltSchool mixes in loads of technology to manage the chaos, and tops it all off with a staff of forward-thinking teachers set free to custom-teach to each student. The result, they fervently say, is a superior educational experience.
  • heir own weekly “playlists,” queues of individual and group activities tailored to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each kid.
  • This puts AltSchool at the intersection of two rapidly growing movements in education. Along one axis are the dozens of edtech startups building apps for schools; along the other are the dozens of progressive schools rallying around the increasingly popular concept of personalized education. The difference is: AltSchool is not just building apps or building schools. It’s doing both. In that way, AltSchools are more than just schools. They’re mini-research and development labs, where both teachers and engineers are diligently developing the formula for a 21st century education, all in hopes of applying that formula not only to other AltSchools, but to private, public, and charter schools across the country.
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  • obsession with constant feedback
  • Ventilla likes to call AltSchool’s approach to teaching “Montessori 2.0.” The Montessori method emphasizes letting kids learn primarily through independent projects rather than direct instruction.
  • AltSchool has built a digital platform, called My.Altschool
  • “We think assessment can be much less invasive and much more accurate when you’re collecting data from many sources.”
  • The team is also working on a recommendation engine for teachers, not unlike those used by companies like Amazon and Netflix. This tool would take into account everything that My.Altschool knows about a student—from her playlist history to how she learns best to what her strengths and weaknesses are—to recommend activities. “It’d be great if the system could figure out that Johnny’s an auditory learner, who loves castles, and that he’s struggling with estimating,” Bhatia says, adding that an early version of that tool will likely be available this year.
  • Once these tools have been validated within the AltSchool environment, Ventilla’s goal is to bundle them up into what he calls an “operating system for a 21st century education” and license them to the education system at large.
  •  
    HT @MikeyCanup
T.J. Edwards

Redmond High School's Build-It-Yourself Education - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Bullock and his kitchen-table colleagues wanted to build a program that was loose enough to encourage each student to work in their own way to best suit their own learning. This means that students have great liberty to choose the classes they want, even to show up at class or not, to find a groove of learning they’re comfortable with, and to have their success be measured in terms of proficiency or mastery for the content and skills.
  • weekly podcasts
  • not attending class can have consequences.
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  • There are also safety nets built into the system, including January and June terms, which offer a chance to make up uncompleted work, but also offer the opportunity to pursue some of the many electives the school offers. These range from wilderness preparedness and “remote first aid,” to the science of breadmaking.
  • Teachers at RPA have a tremendous amount of flexibility to design their courses. For example, an ex-policeman teaches history through the lens of his passion, which is the evolution of mobs and gangs in the U.S.; his class is called “mobology.”
  • I commented that this kind of teaching sounded like it involved more individual attention than could be done in traditional public schools. He replied, with a small chuckle, if it would be possible to say it took about 10,000 percent more individual attention.
T.J. Edwards

When Everyone Is Doing Design Thinking, Is It Still a Competitive Advantage? - 1 views

  • Design thinking has come a long way since I wrote about it here in 2008. The most valuable company in the world places design at the center of everything it does. Designers are on the founding team of countless disruptive startups. Domains such as healthcare, education, and government have begun to prototype, iterate, and build more nimbly with a human-centered focus. Now that design thinking is everywhere, it’s tempting to simply declare it dead—to ordain something new in its place. It’s a methodology always in pursuit of unforeseen innovation, so reinventing itself might seem like the smart way forward. But in practice, design thinking is a set of tools that can grow old with us.
  • And I’d argue that in order to create sustained competitive advantage, businesses must be not just practitioners, but masters of the art.
  • Umpqua
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      A favorite DT story. It is a central chapter in Glimmer by Warren Berger.
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  • UK’s Design Policy Unit
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      This is an incredible document. UK's comprehensive Tech+Design curriculum work has been a favorite of mine to follow. This doc, though, shows a larger scale transformation using design. Worth considering for MVx
  • Company evangelists handed out Moleskines with tips on “how to be better-makers,” and an internal tool (built on IDEO’s OI Engine) helps teams master design thinking through open-platform challenges.
  • Design thinking even shows up in the questions asked during reviews, when employees are evaluated on how successfully they’re building its principles into everyday work.
  • Getting to that kind of mastery is our challenge for the next decade. How might organizations build deep design thinking skills and creative leadership at all levels?
  • host of resources
    • T.J. Edwards
       
      Can MVIFI be added to this list? A void/need to be filled?
  • That’s not an inborn ability, it’s a skill—OK, a mastery—learned over many years of doing
Meghan Cureton

NAIS - A Standards-Based Assessment Model Can Help Build More Diverse and Equitable Com... - 0 views

  • For students to take critical feedback constructively, they have to believe that it is possible for them to improve.
  • school’s assessment and feedback philosophy can encourage a sense of belonging as well as promote a culture that embraces all students as capable of growing and improving as thinkers, learners, and doers. To build on the authentic social justice work being done in our schools and to make real progress in our efforts to create inclusive and equitable communities, we must adopt and employ assessment practices that support this work.
  • The Intersection of SBA and Cultural Responsiveness
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  • Hammond argues that teachers are culturally responsive when we help students to be “active participants in tracking their own growth.”
  • Provide actionable feedback
  • Hope is a critical ingredient for positive relationships needed for culturally responsive teaching. SBA, with clearly communicated goals, actionable feedback, and opportunities for reassessment, helps teachers to be “merchants of hope in their role as allies in the learning partnership.”
  • We have chosen efficiency over efficacy; the education system decided to assess what is easy, not what matters. If we want our learners to have the intra- and interpersonal skills to navigate, negotiate, and solve relevant and pressing problems, we must teach, assess, and report on these skills.
  • Educators have the power to immediately change the way they assess to support a culturally responsive model.
Meghan Cureton

You Don't Find Your Purpose - You Build It - 3 views

  • Put differently, purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find. Almost any work can possess remarkable purpose.
  • For almost everyone, there’s no one thing we can find. It’s not purpose but purposes we are looking for — the multiple sources of meaning that help us find value in our work and lives
  • Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose takes the pressure off of finding a single thing to give our lives meaning.
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  • Just as we all find meaning in multiple places, the sources of that meaning can and do change over time.
  • How do you find your purpose? That’s the wrong question to ask. We should be looking to endow everything we do with purpose, to allow for the multiple sources of meaning that will naturally develop in our lives, and to be comfortable with those changing over time. Unpacking what we mean by “purpose” can allow us to better understand its presence and role in our lives.
Bo Adams

Design thinking in the corporate DNA - Medium - 1 views

  • A common trap for us is to take something in its infancy and try to scale it big. Build it. Launch it. Move on. Well, it doesn’t work like that. Remember how long it took before you mastered design thinking? This isn’t something that you have people try once and then expect them to get it. It takes about six to 10 experiential, immersive, contextually relevant experiences before someone finally “gets” it and can make it their own. Eight years later, we’re still building this skill into our employees, one experience at a time.
    • Bo Adams
       
      Yep. I highlighted an entire paragraph. Why? Because this lesson is CRITICAL for schools and educational transformation within and among schools. We don't do enough "laps" with foundational things because people tend to say, "We've done that...I already do that..."
  • best advice I got from an SVP at the company was to stop wasting my time trying to find metrics to prove that Design for Delight was worth doing.
  • find the folks that are ready, willing, and happy to give it away.
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  • So, while you’re bringing design thinking capabilities into your company and empowering folks, don’t forget to use it on yourself, too.
  • The experience was so effective in helping the leaders understand how they get in the way that many went back to their teams to apologize and started removing barriers immediately. So, assume you can poke at those sacred cows.
  •  
    HT @MeghanCureton
Jim Tiffin Jr

Building A Tinkering Mindset In Young Students Through Making | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • the physical space for tinkering matters much less than the mental space that you create for young makers.
  • To be effective tinkerers, students need to achieve a state of mind in which they are primed to play and make joyful discoveries.
  • telling a group of little kids that it’s okay to make mistakes is not an effective way to deliver your message. The droning voice of the teachers in the Peanuts cartoons springs to mind! To get kids to internalize your message and truly take it to heart, you have to show them in a wide variety of ways what you really mean.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Like the pHail Boards and the FailUp Zone.
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  • Barney Saltzberg’s Beautiful Oops. This short book features mistakes repackaged as something awesome! For example, a torn piece of paper becomes the smile on an alligator. Young children respond to the simplicity of the “mistakes” and the delightful revelation of the reworked mistake into something beautiful and surprising.
  • Modeling that it really is okay to make mistakes is vital.
  • I let students see me flustered and then (hopefully) recovering. I invite them to help me diagnose what went wrong, which they LOVE.
  • Taking public risks and making public mistakes not only helps normalize mistake making, it inspires enthusiasm for collectively problem-solving and collaborating.
  • Posting quotations about or pictures of mistakes can go a long way toward reminding kids that you’re serious about the value of mistakes.
  • Failure and discovery are so closely linked, so connected and interrelated, that it is very hard to distinguish between them, especially when failure leads directly to discovery and vice versa.
  • To help students understand the messy process of creation, I ask students to track their progress during any project (much more about this in chapter 6). Tracking a project’s progress helps illuminate the many mistakes along the way.
  • Peer-to-peer sharing also opens the door for collaboration and collective problem-solving when a student is unsure of how to move past an obstacle.
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    Article summarizing ways to encourages students to think of mistakes as learning opportunities.
Trey Boden

The 4 Phases Of Developing Your Creative Voice - 99u - 0 views

  • Your voice is how you’re recognized by others.
  • Your voice is the confluence of inspiration, dedicated practice, and strategic risk.
  • 1. Discovery Phase
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  • In this phase, it’s important to identify the small, obtainable skills that could become the building blocks of growth.
  • 2. Emulation Phase
  • Which “mentor works” of my heroes should I immerse myself in, and emulate, in order to build my skills?
  • 3. Divergence Phase
  • when you begin to take everything you’ve learned, and bend and break the rules you learned during emulation.
  • 4. Crisis Phase
  • Perhaps everyone around you is perfectly fine with your performance, but deep down you know that you’re no longer striving to sharpen your craft, and you’ve grown stagnant.
  • We will cycle through these general phases many times over the course of our lives and careers, but for the greatest artists the process of growth never ends.
Bo Adams

The Art of Getting Opponents to "We" - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Significantly, participants all came to align behind a single vision statement — and now they are actively communicating and advancing that vision nationwide through their organizations and networks. They host meetings with educational networks, superintendents, principals, teachers and philanthropists, reach out to libraries, museums and after-school programs, and identify and connect pioneers in learner-centered education.
  • Convergence staff and facilitators work to create a “safe space,” maintaining a strict neutrality and ensuring that everyone feels heard, says Fersh. It’s important that participants “feel they’re not in a place that’s already cooked or leaning toward any solutions.”
  • Convergence staff members look continually for opportunities to forge connections among participants. They begin meetings with “connecting” questions — for example: “When did you know that education was of great importance to you?” — that are designed to reveal people’s values and experiences, rather than highlight their disagreements. The objective is not to sweep differences under the rug, but to build rapport that a group needs to grapple effectively with its differences.
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  • Another key is to identify a frame that energizes everybody, but is not so broad that it is meaningless. “For us the gold standard is that the dialogue has to lead to action,” said Fersh. To do that, he said, there are intermediate goals: “Can you get people to the table and sustain their presence? Can you find agreements that are worth fighting for? And can you keep people together to keep working over time to make sure something happens?”
  • In the end, she said, people converged on the notion that they had to do far more than tinker around the edges of a broken system held over from a bygone industrial age. “There was a lot of conversation that the current system is ill designed to create 21st century outcomes for students,” said Young. “But there wasn’t alignment around what a new system could look like. People really wanted to be part of that conversation.”
Jim Tiffin Jr

Go play! It's the key to developing executive function - Hanna Perkins Center for Child... - 0 views

  • “executive function,” the ability to self-regulate, the measurement of which turns out to be a better indicator of success in school than the results of an IQ test. Kids with good self-regulation skills are better able to control their emotions, resist impulsive behavior, and become self-disciplined and self-controlled.
  • how do we reconcile today’s anxious parents and the highly structured environment with our children’s need for unstructured, self-regulated play?
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Key part of this highlight: unstructured and self-regulated
  • The primary requirement for unsupervised play is uninterrupted stretches of time
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  • Even the youngest children are quite capable of entertaining, even educating, themselves.
  • encourage complex imaginative play by offering simple props and play ideas, but then withdraw so the children can plan their own scenarios and act them out.
  • your child is spending precious time at the activity that children need most and love best: playing independently and imaginatively
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    Though this post is written for parents, there are actions and ideas here that teachers can act upon.  The importance of play and its benefits are becoming more and more apparent - plus research is supporting it. Note to self: More research on executive function, and ways of building it in schools, needs to be done. HT: Jackie Gerstein
Bo Adams

Is There a "Future of Work"? - 0 views

  • the speed and scale are going to shock those in education charged with preparing our children for it.
  • Like so many other things that we think of in the future tense, (climate change, surveillance, etc.) the changes in work have already arrived, we just don’t seem to realize it
  • we need to start thinking differently about what it means to be “career ready” (as well as, I suppose, “college ready.”)
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  • Why doesn’t education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?”
  • So, wouldn’t we be better off shifting the emphasis on the work of our teachers away from content and grades and curriculum to mentoring, apprenticeships, making, and discussion?
  • Finally, what role does leadership play in staying abreast of these types of shifts, articulating them to school and community, and in building capacity for those groups to engage in relevant, meaningful conversations around what changes may need to happen?
  • leaders better be building school cultures that learn, constantly.
  •  
    HT @WillRich45
Bo Adams

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times - 1 views

  • many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ­— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based.
  • teams are now the fundamental unit of organization.
  • influence not only how people work but also how they work together.
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  • Google’s People Operations department
  • there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’
  • At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’
  • As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’
  • Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather
  • Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.
  • looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’
  • After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams.
  • The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.
  • As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’
  • Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.
  • psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’
  • Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’
  • ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
  • Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.
  • other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability.
  • it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related.
  • The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond.
  • If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’
  • to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency.
  • By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel.
  • In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.
  • ‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
Nicole Martin

The Physics of Change - Education Reimagined - Education Reimagined - 0 views

  • institutional inertia seems relatively simple: institutions, organizations, and people tend to remain at rest (i.e. satisfied with the status quo) or in uniform motion (i.e. slightly tweaking the status quo over time), unless that state is changed by an external force (i.e. transformation).
  • “Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace,”
    • Nicole Martin
       
      Great book- recommended by Shayna years ago as well.
  • the gravitational pull of the status quo is so incredibly strong, that escaping it can be a monumental task.
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  • Do you know teachers who claim to be doing PBL but are really doing the same teacher-centered instruction they always have, only with a project (think trifold) thrown in at the end of the year?
  • we fail to notice the ways of thinking and norms that structure the world in which we operate. As a result, we then cannot see the cultural and structural shift needed for these innovative ideas to reach their true potential.
  • the data presented showing that less than 1% of U.S. schools were actually operating in the learner-centered paradigm left me even more convinced that inertia is still winning and the only way to make any realistic change is by being much, much smarter in our approach to positive disruption.
  • earner agency; socially embedded; personalized, relevant, and contextualized; open-walled; and competency-based.
  • three change levers 1) increasing public will, 2) refining public policy, and 3) building proofs of concept—can be a powerful tool to help grow the 1% of learner-centered environments to a potential tipping point, where learner-centered environments are the prevailing approach to education in this country.
  • When more education stakeholders are able to see how learner-centered environments are having positive impacts on children, they are better able to build on this success in their own local context.
Bo Adams

IBM's Got a Plan to Bring Design Thinking to Big Business | WIRED - 1 views

  • “We wanted to shift that culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes,” Hill says.
  • IBM today published its very own set of design thinking guidelines—a selection of best design practices the company hopes other big businesses will look to as they seek to remain relevant and profitable in a rapidly evolving corporate landscape.
  • corporate trend in design thinking
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  • even though design thinking champions nonlinear thought processes, big companies often find themselves mired in the methodology’s suggested phases (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). Ultimately this defeats the purpose, which is partly to build agility into the product-creation process.
  • The company’s version of design thinking centers around something it calls “the loop.” Visualized, the loop is an infinity symbol punctuated with four dots—the yellow dot representing the user, the green dots representing the various actions of “observe,” “reflect,” and “make.” Explained simply, the loop represents the entire product-creation process, beginning with user-centered research all the way through prototyping (“everything is a prototype!” says Hill), to building and launching a product.
  • loop becomes a loop when you realize that the iterative process is never actually done; perhaps the loop’s most important requirement is reflecting on what’s been created and constantly improving it.
  •  
    HT Kat Mattimoe
Nicole Martin

10 Principles for Building a High-Quality System Of Assessments - Deeper Lear... - 2 views

  • No single assessment or piece of student work can provide the robust information needed to inform teaching, learning, and supports,
Meghan Cureton

Q: What's the Right Dosage of PBL?        A: Not Once Per Year | Blog | Proje... - 2 views

  • Does adopting PBL mean we should use it all the time and teach everything via projects? If not, then how many projects should teachers do per semester or year?
  • Project Based Teaching Practices are actually just good teaching, period, and many of the practices can be used in the classroom when students are in between projects.
  • “Just make two high-quality projects per year for every student be the goal.” In a K-12 system, that means each student would experience 26 projects at a minimum—which sounds like a lot! But that’s only the start. Perhaps students in middle and high school, at first, would experience two projects per year in one subject area—if, say, only social studies teachers begin to use PBL. But assuming PBL spreads across the school, students would do projects in other subject areas, or do interdisciplinary projects, and eventually experience many more than 26 projects if they stayed in one K-12 PBL-infused system.
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  • But assuming projects are between 3-6 weeks long, I’d like to see a minimum of two projects per year in every K-12 classroom, in all subject areas—so that all students, no matter who they are, can gain the benefits of high quality PBL.
  • Even better, make it one project per quarter—four per year. And while you’re at it, sprinkle in a few mini-projects to help build a PBL culture or tackle a relatively confined topic or task.
  • Why is the PBL dosage important?
  • Students cannot build 21st century success skills if they only get occasional opportunities to practice and internalize them.
  • Students will become more confident, independent learners—even identifying and tackling problems authentic to themselves, their communities, and the wider world.
  • be part of a culture that celebrates risk-taking and innovation.
  • If only a few scattered teachers use PBL in a school or district, or only a few students experience it and thus limit demand, then the system’s basic structures, policies, and culture will remain the same. But if a critical mass is reached, schools and districts will need to rethink the use of time, teacher workloads, community relationships, assessment systems, decision-making processes, and much more. Here’s to reaching the PBL tipping point!
Meghan Cureton

Building High Performance Teams Using 'S.C.O.R.E' Framework | CEE Global - Centre for E... - 1 views

  •  
    HT @gregbamford
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