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T.J. Edwards

What IS the difference between competencies and standards? | reDesign - 2 views

www.redesignu.org/een-competencies-and-standards

shared by T.J. Edwards on 23 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Competencies, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the application of skills, knowledge and dispositions rather than content knowledge.
  • Competency-based models approach content as the backdrop, while putting essential skills and dispositions front and center. In this way, content serves as the context for practicing and demonstrating “transferable” competencies that can be applied in different contexts.
  • In competency-based models, the entire system must change. Students advance upon mastery  when they are ready, not when an arbitrary academic calendar suggests that they should be.
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  • Optimally, competencies are broad enough that student pathways and demonstrations of proficiency can be vastly different, organized to encourage and nurture student passions and questions.
  • Competencies sit above standards in terms of grain size.
  • competencies tend to encompass an interrelated set of skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and/or capacities.
  • competencies are often constructed as groupings of related skills or attributes that are purposefully designed to be explicit, measurable, transferable, and empowering to students
  • Competencies define skills that are practiced and developed continuously. They are not “one and done,” like many standards, which are course-based and attached to specific grade levels or bands.
  • in truly competency-based systems, PLDs are not attached to specific grade levels
  • we believe strongly that we must guard against tying PLDs to age-based grades or cohorts.
  • PLDs are guideposts to mastery
  • When learning outcomes are defined in terms of the application of skills or the synthesis and creation of new knowledge, we’re then talking about a much more sophisticated assessment type
  • competence is about successful application of skills and knowledge to achieve a particular purpose, not simply to show basic levels of understanding
  • In a true competency-based system, students can’t fail. Instead, students receive concrete and specific feedback on their work, and are provided with opportunities for additional practice and support in order to develop and demonstrate growth in their competencies.
  • Mastery-based grading and promotion policies are radically different in competency-based systems because promotion is based on mastery of specific skills, not on completion of courses made up of arbitrary and highly varied bundles of content, skills, and concepts.
  • As competency-based education gains ground in formal K-12 schooling, there is a very real chance that the movement could lose the “spirit” of its intent and become yet another, albeit more refined, form of standards-based learning
  • In competency-based models, performance level descriptors (PLDs) clarify the developmental journey from novice-to-expert or to "mastery."
  • Quite differently, competency-based models reach back centuries, with early apprenticeship learning that created pathways for mastery and gainful employment. Think: Medieval craft guilds, masonry, baking, carpentry, shoemaking.
Meghan Cureton

Complicated Versus Complex: Solving the World's Most Difficult Challenges - UNREASONABLE - 1 views

unreasonable.is/complicated-versus-complex

complex problem-solving pbl solution-seeker

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • humility to admit that we don’t know many answers when we start
  • Scaling-up what works may have more to do with process expertise—figuring out what problems need to be solved in a given environment—than blueprints based on expert knowledge.
  • solution seekers looking to partner with local experts to solve local problems
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  • The hardest problems of the world—climate change, food security, youth employment—are complex and require data-driven experimentation and adaptation to solve.
  • Solutions may not always scale. But the processes by which we experiment, learn, and adapt can scale.
Meghan Cureton

Why Empathy Holds the Key to Transforming 21st Century Learning | MindShift | KQED News - 2 views

ww2.kqed.org/...sforming-21st-century-learning

#mvifishares empathy designthinking idiploma PBL transformation School Change

shared by Meghan Cureton on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
Bo Adams liked it
  • Empathy has the potential to open up students to deeper learning, drive clarity of thinking, and inspire engagement with the world—in other words, provide the emotional sustenance for outstanding human performance.
  • Empathy lies at the heart of 21st century skillfulness in teamwork, collaboration and communication in a diverse world.
  • The frontal lobes of the brain, at least as much as we know now, are the seat of planning, execution, problem solving and creativity—and when the frontal lobes are working well, so are we.
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  • Setting up a culture of care is very much an exercise in making empathy central to daily work.
  • Empathy is now identified as the first step in the design process, whether crafting new software for a user or creating form-factors that inherently please the consumer.
  • empathy is described as ‘step.’ But that easy designation belies a very deep process in which a designer must, for lack of a better term, ‘sink into the mind of another and take on their persona’. That is a deep descriptor of an ultimate form of empathy—and it may be a necessary component of an educational system increasingly tilted toward design and inquiry.
  • Ready or not, education is entering an age in which social learning is the new norm. Pure academics are giving way to increased opportunities for students to work together; teachers increasingly take on the role of co-learner and facilitator; listening, learning, and teaming are the new core skills. At the heart of this new skillfulness for everyone is the ability to forge deep connections lead to creative problem solving and positive pursuits. Taken all together, this makes empathy critical to schools. In fact, very soon we will need to invent a new taxonomy of learning that makes empathy the base of the learning pyramid.
Meghan Cureton

How to Design a School That Prioritizes Kindness and Caring | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

ww2.kqed.org/...rioritizes-kindness-and-caring

advisory kindness character

shared by Meghan Cureton on 10 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • You can’t just snap your fingers, and show a video, and it’s done,” she said. Rather, the school needed to adopt a philosophy of kindness that was “infused and woven through
  • initiatives had to seem to come from within, organically
  • They also do a “mix-it-up” exercise, borrowed from Borba’s book, that moves students around in advisory groups to blend grade levels. And to get teacher buy-in, select students attend occasional faculty meetings to share what excites them about their project and how their classmates are responding.
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  • Simple changes can have an outsized effect. Knowing the names of all the students in school, being generous with “hellos,” and encouraging teachers to greet every student by name in class, for example, are low-burden but powerful exercises,
  • “kindness strategies” are short and focused, rooted in relationships, carried out repeatedly, and related to actual events in school,
  • Two of the most fruitful exercises Carrollwood Day embraced, both borrowed from the Harvard project, were “Circle of Concern” and “Relationship Mapping.”
Meghan Cureton

ChangeLeaders Community - 0 views

www.changeleaders.community/...1372192

learning community

shared by Meghan Cureton on 29 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • How often do you see learners being ‘blamed’ for not understanding a challenging idea or concept, rather than that being a reflection on the teaching? To what extent is the learning architecture of our schools, the grading, grouping, and scheduling really allowing our students to learn most deeply and powerfully?
  • The reality is that today’s schools were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply —they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization.    
  • It comes down to reframing our understanding of schools as learning organizations.
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  • But how much evidence do you have that your colleagues also see themselves as learners, be they teachers, principals or superintendents? How open and transparent are they about their learning? About what and how they are learning? And what and how do they learn from their mistakes? Being vulnerable, transparent and open are now prerequisites for modern leaders who are true learners
  • And finally, what about you? What have you learned about your learning? How self-aware are you about how you learn? How do you learn best, and what are the conditions that make that possible for you?
Bo Adams

Equipping Young Leaders to Take on the 32 Most Important Issues of Our Time - Vander Ar... - 0 views

blogs.edweek.org/...ortant_issues_of_our_time.html

PBL Challenge_Based_Learning curriculum school model School Change #MustRead

shared by Bo Adams on 22 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • If we take citizenship preparation seriously, we should be encouraging young people to engage with the world’s most important issues by helping them frame projects around these goals. Here are six reasons:
  • Extended and integrated challenges are the best way to promote deeper learning and develop readiness for the automation economy. The goals include interesting and timely causes that many young people will find motivating. Making a contribution toward a goal they care about may be the best way to develop student agency. Goal focused projects get kids into the community and connected with local resources (see #PlaceBasedEd) It’s also a chance to shift the paradigm from “prepare for a career 10 years from now” to “make a difference right here, right now.” Taking on real challenges will promote creative and effective uses of technology from collaboration to production.
  • Integrate projects into existing courses. The Global Goals site has useful project resources for 16 of these goals. Plan an integrated unit between two courses. Most of the goals combine science, sociology, research, problem-solving and writing. Capstone projects in the last two years of high school are a good place to start. Each academy at Reynoldsburg High School in Ohio and Chavez Schools in Washington, D.C., engage in a capstone project. Students at Singapore American School are required to conduct a capstone project.
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  • To engage millions of students in local projects connected to global goals, it would be helpful to have: More content associated with each goal (GlobalGoals.org is a start); Templates for local projects; A microcredential system that could help pack projects full of valuable learning (i.e, science, math, communication and collaboration); Access to data sources, data tools and project tools (mentors would be really helpful); and A project gallery for completed contributions.
Bo Adams

What's Going on Inside the Brain Of A Curious Child? | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

ww2.kqed.org/...e-the-brain-of-a-curious-child

Brain-based neuroscience HowWeLearn curiosity

shared by Bo Adams on 30 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • when kids are curious, they’re much more likely to stay engaged.
  • ‘Curiosity really is one of the very intense and very basic impulses in humans. We should base education on this behavior.’
  • brain’s chemistry changes when we become curious, helping us better learn and retain information.
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  • “But even people with really good memory will remember only a small fraction of what happened two days ago.”
  • When the participants’ curiosity was piqued, the parts of their brains that regulate pleasure and reward lit up. Curious minds also showed increased activity in the hippocampus, which is involved in the creation of memories.
  • dopamine
  • curious brains are better at learning not only about the subject at hand, but also other stuff — even incidental, boring information.
  • She says her students love exploring the mysterious unknowns in science: What happens when a car crashes? Why does one car get more beat up than the other? Why do some people look more like their aunt than their mom? How do rainbows work?
  • Bo Adams on 30 Nov 17
     
    HT Kelly Kelly
Bo Adams

Education innovator advocates for transdisciplinary 'StudioLab' | Cornell University Co... - 1 views

as.cornell.edu/...ry-%E2%80%98studiolab%E2%80%99

designthinking transdisciplinary humanities communication media

shared by Bo Adams on 06 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • “Design thinking is a collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving approach to social innovation, organizational change, and product development that has been used in design, engineering, and education industries,” he says.
  • Bo Adams on 06 Dec 17
     
    "A 21st century learning approach requires more than rows of fixed seats, says Jon McKenzie. In a new transdisciplinary pedagogy that encourages active learning, McKenzie has combined the kinds of conceptual, aesthetic, and technical learning found in seminar, studio, and lab spaces into an approach he calls "StudioLab.""
Meghan Cureton

Want to Assess Noncognitive Competencies? Examine Student Work | GOA - 1 views

globalonlineacademy.org/...petencies-examine-student-work

CompetencyBased CBE mastery mindsets growthmindset noncognitive skills future transformation School Change assessment

shared by Meghan Cureton on 28 Oct 18 - No Cached
  • we should deeply examine student work, and this must include robust student self-assessment.
  • Unfortunately, many transcripts or report cards simply give course titles and grades. We should have transcripts and final reporting mechanisms that show the whole child, beyond their grades and their work in typical cognitive domains.
  • Using noncognitive competencies as assessment tools in courses and student projects is often something that teachers don’t have much expertise in. Many teachers have been hired for their content expertise and they are much more invested in, and/or have been trained in, the assessment and reporting of cognitive competencies.
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  • Ensure competencies are written in student-friendly language.Use single point rubrics.Encourage student reflection about their own work.Explore school models which encourage public exhibitions of student work and deep examination of student work, with students heavily involved and perhaps leading the assessment process.
Meghan Cureton

Time to Re-Think Design Thinking | Huffington Post - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...think-design-t_b_12455924.html

#mvifishares Mustread designthinking making real-world School Change innovation

shared by Meghan Cureton on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Simply put, design thinking is not enough. True success comes from building a complete design system, and no organization can build such a system on design thinking alone
  • design thinking only has value when combined with design doing and supported by a strong design culture
  • successful design thinking must also include an element of making – early experience prototypes are important to validate thinking and align teams.
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  • Proponents of design thinking often get caught up in the methodologies (“how to get there”) versus the actual destination.
  • design thinking is just the beginning — a catalyst.
Bo Adams

Using Design Principles to Build a Culture of Innovation | Edutopia - 1 views

www.edutopia.org/...iples-build-culture-innovation

designthinking perspective Prototyping

shared by Bo Adams on 07 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • two essential design practices: changing your point of view and prototyping
  • To get started with prototyping, come up with the smallest possible experiment to see if you’re on the right track and avoid the tyranny of the rollout.
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