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Meghan Cureton

Six Fixes for Proficiency-Based Learning « Competency Works - 0 views

www.competencyworks.org/...for-proficiency-based-learning

assessment competency CompetencyBased transformation standards learning

shared by Meghan Cureton on 31 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Proficiency-based learning, at its core, is about redesigning the learning and teaching system of America. Instead of basing learning on how much time a student spends, it bases learning on what students can demonstrate—exactly the same as every other system students will encounter in the world outside of school.
  • In addition, schools should continue to share information pertaining to course grades and start to share information regarding student attainment of specific standards, including course-crossing skills such as problem solving, creativity, and analysis. While we would recommend that the course grades continue to use A-F or 0-100 scales, shifting to a 1-4 scale on the standards probably provides better insight for everyone involved. In this way, parents, students, and educators will know how students are doing within the structures of a class and how students are doing in regard to specific standards. This both/and approach will provide more information that can then be used to promote better learning.
  • Keep cohorts of kids together as they progress through their learning. Teachers can vary the learning strategies for various cohorts of students, supporting some students to dig deeper into various standards while others realize initial achievement—and then bringing everyone back together again to start the next unit of learning. Further, as research on learning has demonstrated, learning is a social endeavor, not meant to be undertaken alone. A cohort model supports this research.
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  • Hold students accountable to key and important standards, designating a small handful of “graduation standards” while using the other standards in the Common Core or various state standards to develop curriculum, guide instruction, and build classroom assessments. This strategy focuses learning on key and endurable concepts, skills, and themes; ensures that instructional support is targeted at the most important learning; and pushes students to think about and analyze ideas deeply rather than memorize an unwieldly number of discrete facts.
  • Educators need to clearly define top levels of performance and provide explicit expectations and opportunities for students to achieve these levels of learning. While we should not expect students to “exceed” standards in all cases, educators should require students to do so in areas of particular interest and aptitude for students.
  • Schools must establish both incentives and consequences for critical work habits such as time management and meeting deadlines. Rather than ignore these, they must teach, model, assess, and report them separately and eliminate the practice of controlling behavior by reducing grades. We have seen numerous effective strategies where late work requires coming in after school, not attending co-curricular activities, or mandatory guided study halls, to name a few examples.
Bo Adams

The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning | Brainscape Blog - 3 views

www.brainscape.com/...throughs-science-of-learning-2

learningsciences Mind-Brain-Education MV-How-We-Learn #MustRead

shared by Bo Adams on 28 Feb 18 - No Cached
Chip Houston liked it
  • The brain is equipped to tackle a pretty hefty load of information and sensory input, but there is a point at which the brain becomes overwhelmed, an effect scientists call cognitive overload. While our brains do appreciate new and novel information (as we’ll discuss later), when there is too much of it we become overwhelmed. Our minds simply can’t divide our attention between all the different elements.
  • the brain’s wiring can change at any age and it can grow new neurons and adapt to new situations — though the rate at which this happens does slow with age. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity, and it has had major ramifications in our understanding of how the brain works and how we can use that understanding to improve learning outcomes.
  • The ability to learn, retain, and use information isn’t just based on our raw IQ. Over the past few decades it has become increasingly clear that how we feel — our overall emotional state — can have a major impact on how well we can learn new things.
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  • Research is revealing why, as the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system has the ability to open up or shut off access to learning and memory. When under stress or anxiety, the brain blocks access to higher processing and stops forming new connections, making it difficult or impossible to learn.
  • research shows that failure is essential.
  • Information in the brain that isn’t used is often lost, as neural pathways weaken over time.
  • Researchers have found that novelty causes the dopamine system in the brain to become activated, sending the chemical throughout the brain.
  • Students may have preferences for how they learn, but when put to the test, students were found to have equivalent levels of learning regardless of how information is presented.
  • cater to the emotional and social needs of students and improves their ability to learn, is more important than styles
  • Neuroscience research suggests that the best way to learn something new isn’t to focus on mistakes, but instead to concentrate on how to do a task correctly. Focusing on the error only reinforces the existing incorrect neural pathway, and will increase the chance that the mistake will be made again. A new pathway has to be built, which means abandoning the old one and letting go of that mistake.
  • students who don’t get intellectual stimulation over the summer are much more likely to forget important skills in reading and math when they return to class.
  • Peer collaboration offers students access to a diverse array of experiences and requires the use of nearly all the body’s senses, which in turn creates greater activation throughout the brain and enhances long-term memory. Group work, especially when it capitalizes on the strengths of its members, may be more beneficial than many realize.
  • Aside from being able to see and hear patterns, the human mind has a number of innate abilities (the ability to learn a language, for instance) that when capitalized on in the right way, can help make learning any concept, even one that is abstract, much easier. Combining these innate abilities with structured practice, repetition, and training can help make new ideas and concepts “stick” and make more sense.
  • Learning can change brain structure.
  • Bo Adams on 01 Mar 18
     
    HT @MeghanCureton
Meghan Cureton

The Case Against Grades (##) - Alfie Kohn - 2 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...case-grades

Learning assessment grading research grades

shared by Meghan Cureton on 24 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades.  In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.
  • As I’ve reported elsewhere (Kohn, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c), when students from elementary school to college who are led to focus on grades are compared with those who aren’t, the results support three robust conclusions:
  • Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
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  • Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task.
  • Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. 
  • For example, a grade-oriented environment is associated with increased levels of cheating (Anderman and Murdock, 2007), grades (whether or not accompanied by comments) promote a fear of failure even in high-achieving students (Pulfrey et al., 2011), and the elimination of grades (in favor of a pass/fail system) produces substantial benefits with no apparent disadvantages in medical school (White and Fantone, 2010).
  • Extrinsic motivation, which includes a desire to get better grades, is not only different from, but often undermines, intrinsic motivation, a desire to learn for its own sake (Kohn 1999a). 
  • Achievement:  Two educational psychologists pointed out that “an overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence” (Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p. 7). 
  • There is certainly value in assessing the quality of learning and teaching, but that doesn’t mean it’s always necessary, or even possible, to measure those things — that is, to turn them into numbers.  Indeed, “measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning” (McNeil, 1986, p. xviii)
  • It’s not enough to replace letters or numbers with labels (“exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” and so on).  If you’re sorting students into four or five piles, you’re still grading them.  Rubrics typically include numbers as well as labels, which is only one of several reasons they merit our skepticism (Wilson, 2006; Kohn, 2006).
  • Portfolios, for example, can be constructive if they replace grades rather than being used to yield them.  They offer a way to thoughtfully gather a variety of meaningful examples of learning for the students to review.  But what’s the point, “if instruction is dominated by worksheets so that every portfolio looks the same”? (Neill et al. 1995, p. 4).
  • Once we’re compelled to focus only on what can be reduced to numbers, such as how many grammatical errors are present in a composition or how many mathematical algorithms have been committed to memory, thinking has been severely compromised.  And that is exactly what happens when we try to fit learning into a four- or five- or (heaven help us) 100-point scale.
  • It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line.  There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006).  In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
  • It’s not enough to add narrative reports.  “When comments and grades coexist, the comments are written to justify the grade” (Wilson, 2009, p. 60).  Teachers report that students, for their part, often just turn to the grade and ignore the comment, but “when there’s only a comment, they read it,”
  • It’s not enough to use “standards-based” grading.
  • Sometimes it’s only after grading has ended that we realize just how harmful it’s been.
  • To address one common fear, the graduates of grade-free high schools are indeed accepted by selective private colleges and large public universities — on the basis of narrative reports and detailed descriptions of the curriculum (as well as recommendations, essays, and interviews), which collectively offer a fuller picture of the applicant than does a grade-point average.  Moreover, these schools point out that their students are often more motivated and proficient learners, thus better prepared for college, than their counterparts at traditional schools who have been preoccupied with grades.
  • Even when administrators aren’t ready to abandon traditional report cards, individual teachers can help to rescue learning in their own classrooms with a two-pronged strategy to “neuter grades,” as one teacher described it.  First, they can stop putting letter or number grades on individual assignments and instead offer only qualitative feedback.
  • Second, although teachers may be required to submit a final grade, there’s no requirement for them to decide unilaterally what that grade will be.  Thus, students can be invited to participate in that process either as a negotiation (such that the teacher has the final say) or by simply permitting students to grade themselves.
  • Without grades, “I think my relationships with students are better,” Drier says.  “Their writing improves more quickly and the things they learn stay with them longer.
  • Drier’s final grades are based on students’ written self-assessments, which, in turn, are based on their review of items in their portfolios. 
  • A key element of authentic assessment for these and other teachers is the opportunity for students to help design the assessment and reflect on its purposes — individually and as a class. 
  • Grades don’t prepare children for the “real world” — unless one has in mind a world where interest in learning and quality of thinking are unimportant.  Nor are grades a necessary part of schooling, any more than paddling or taking extended dictation could be described that way.  Still, it takes courage to do right by kids in an era when the quantitative matters more than the qualitative, when meeting (someone else’s) standards counts for more than exploring ideas, and when anything “rigorous” is automatically assumed to be valuable.  We have to be willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, which in this case means asking not how to improve grades but how to jettison them once and for all.
  • Meghan Cureton on 24 Apr 18
     
    HT @tedwards
Meghan Cureton

Do historians miss the ideals of assessment, as some have suggested? - 1 views

www.insidehighered.com/...assessment-some-have-suggested

Grading grades higher education mindset assessment PBL learning

shared by Meghan Cureton on 22 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Grading Smarter, Not Harder
  • Their recent finding that many students don’t learn critical thinking in undergraduate history courses -- a challenge to history’s sales pitch that its graduates are finely tuned critical thinkers.
  • A panel of professors here urged a sizable crowd of colleagues to embrace not just grades but formative, ongoing assessment to gauge student learning or lack thereof in real(er) time.
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  • LASER, an acronym for Love history, Acquire and analyze information, Solve difficult problems, Envision new explanations, and Reveal what you know. Sourcing work, which Calder called a “threshold concept” in history, means asking students to evaluate the reliability of various historical texts. Who made it? When? Why? What value does it hold for historians, if any?
  • letter grades “do little to differentiate the level of student effort or the quality of student work or student growth over the course of a semester or program,”
  • to the idea of “transparency,” which they all agreed begins with articulating clear student learning goals -- for themselves and their classes.
  • Whatever the activity or assessment, Mintz said it needs to be aligned with a particular learning objective. Research suggests that the most effective activities and assessments when it comes to student learning are considered “authentic,” or those that mirror professional practice and address some meaningful question,
  • Project and performance-based assessments are much more likely to provide a “valid measure of student proficiencies and higher-order thinking skills than are multiple choice or short-answer questions,” Mintz continued. And evaluation needs to be based on a detailed rubric, he said, suggesting that students may help create these rubrics.
  • But “a paradigm shift is occurring in higher education,” Mintz said. “We all know this. We’re sifting from teaching to learning, shifting from a sink-or-swim mentality to a mentality where we have obligation to bring all students to minimum viable level of competency.” That is regardless of institution type, he said.
  • think of themselves as "learning architects" whose meaningful "forward-looking" assessment will be a "true learning opportunity" for students.
  • Meghan Cureton on 22 Jan 19
     
    HT @cmtbasecamp
Meghan Cureton

02_future_competences_and_the_future_of_curriculum_30oct.v2.pdf - 1 views

shared by Meghan Cureton on 17 Jul 18 - No Cached
T.J. Edwards liked it
  • An analysis of current contributions show that although there are substantial variations, most agree that competence is far more complex than skill, and that it comprises knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes.
  • The most recurring examples include: – Creativity, communication, critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity, metacognition; – Digital, technology, and ICTs skills; – Basic, media, information, financial, scientific literacies and numeracy, – Cross-cultural skills, leadership, global awareness; – Initiative, self-direction, perseverance, responsibility, accountability, adaptability; and – Knowledge of disciplines, STEM mindset.
  • Key challenges
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  • Many contributors agree that a competence is a complex construct, comprising knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, etc. But in the actual listing of the competences, they mix competences with their constituent elements.
  • Lack of evident interaction across elements of competences:
  • Lack of a common starting point:
  • Varied taxonomies:
  • Lack of a common language and common concepts
  • Unclear standards and developmental progression:
  • Lack of consensus on the structure of curricula:
  • While there is consensus on the need to transition to competence-based curricula, views on the structure of curricula remain divergent between the maintenance of traditional subjects and learning areas interwoven with competences, and the more radical view that curricula should be restructured around competences.
  • Feasibility of implementation:
  • Managing the transition:
  • Weak or unshared tracking of impact:
  • However, the world still lacks a global normative instrument that can be used as a global reference point for curricula transformation.
  • Competence is herein defined as the developmental capacity to interactively mobilize and ethically use information, data, knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and technology to engage effectively and act across diverse 21 st century contexts to attain individual, collective, and global good.
  • Distinguishing Attributes of a Competence-based Curriculum
  • A competence-based curriculum is grounded in the understanding of the demands of the learners’ context.
  • In contrast to competence-based curricula, subject-based curricula are mostly grounded in an understanding of the subject matter content or the disciplines. They generally prepare learners to know the subject matters and to gain a deep understanding of advancements in the field. They don’t necessarily emphasize immediate use of acquired knowledge. The application is often deferred to real life situations that learners may confront later in life, forcing them to apply what they had learned. Because of insensitivity to context, it is often easy to have the same curriculum across different contexts, mostly borrowed from what are considered to be advanced contexts. The risk of irrelevance of the curriculum is also higher.
  • A key consideration is how best to facilitate curriculum specialists to gain an in-depth understanding of the learners’ current and future contexts, and how to identify competences, which should be reflected in curricula.
  • Learner centeredness:
  • Competence-based curricula emphasize the ability to use what is learned. Acquisition is important but not sufficient.
  • Emphasis on outcomes or impact:
  • A key consideration is how to support educators to reach for the deeper impact of learning, and how to assess it.
  • Emphasis on trans-disciplinarity:
  • Especially at the post-primary level, a key consideration is how to enable educators to master their specific disciplines, and at the same time, to have adequate knowledge of other disciplines enough to make transdisciplinary linkages. Another challenge is how to design curricula in a way that makes linkages across subjects and learning areas.
  • Competence-based curricula are structured around competences and not around subjects, and progression relates to the competence rather than subject matter difficulty.
  • As the last word, competence-based curricula are not against subject matter content. Effective application of content across disciplines actually requires a high level of mastery of the content.
  • seven macro competences that are considered relevant across contexts. These are: (i) Lifelong learning; (ii) Self-agency; (iii) Interactively using diverse tools and resources; (iv) Interacting with others; (v) Interacting with the world; (vi) Multi-literateness; and (vii) Trans-disciplinarity. Because of their universality, macro competences are quite stable. They allow for curricula stability across transformations and reforms. They are the bigger picture and the overarching "why" of a curriculum.
  • Knowing how to learn is the most critical future competence.
  • The 21 st century requires people to be self-actualized agents.
  • Responsible use of tools and resources is also at the heart of responsible consumption and sustainable lifestyles, which contribute to sustainable development.
  • It demands collaboration to resolve complex problems and create integrated solutions across contexts.
  • This competence enables people to be local and global.
  • Different contexts will demand different types and levels of literacies.
  • Increasing complexity requires ever more sophisticated solutions that integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines and from domains of knowledge.
  • This framework therefore balances the need for dynamic change in curricula with the equal need for stability.
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.
T.J. Edwards

Competency based learning key characteristic: Outcomes-based - Blackboard Blog - 0 views

blog.blackboard.com/-characteristic-outcomes-based

CBE assessment

shared by T.J. Edwards on 15 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • The old concepts of quizzes, mid-term exams and final exams change from methods of judgment to an assessment system designed to help learners construct knowledge through a learn-practice-assess pathway.
  • Achieve short-term and long-term academic performance improvements focused on outcomes rather than inputs
  • Student learning outcomes are generally at the same level of granularity as competencies, and sometimes the terms are used interchangeably. A competency is a specific skill, knowledge, or ability that is both observable and measurable
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  • Institutional outcomes
  • Program outcomes
  • Student learning outcomes
  • For example, a team project that requires analyzing the business impacts of population shifts demonstrates realistic problem solving, and the assessment could even be embedded in a work context. This type of assessment requires more thorough demonstration of competencies than an objective assessment, which is typically delivered as a test with pre-determined right and wrong answers. Authentic assessment also provides learner-centric benefits such as collaboration with peers and genuinely valuable evidence of learning that can be used in a professional profile.
  • For example, an assessment could be aligned to competencies, occupational skills, program outcomes, and accreditation standards. The same assessment can award a badge for mastery achievement, show students the occupational skills they’ve demonstrated, and also roll up into evidence collection for accreditation and program improvement purposes
  • can optionally be shown to students
  • Consistent use of rubrics enables learner choice, since learners could be working on different assessments to master the same competencies
  • And when competency based education programs differentiate instructional roles, such that faculty subject matter experts might not be evaluating assessments, specialized assessors can all apply the same definitions of competencies by using the same rubrics.
Meghan Cureton

3 Ways to Unlock the Wisdom of Colleagues | Edutopia - 0 views

www.edutopia.org/...-ways-unlock-wisdom-colleagues

Learning learningwalks InstructionalRounds collaboration

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • when teachers have regular, structured opportunities to learn together, good ideas are more likely to travel from one classroom to the next.
  • Collaboration takes time and planning. If classroom observation becomes part of a school’s strategy, administrators have to make time during the regular school day for shared professional learning among the staff. School leaders should also have to have clear objectives for the program of observation, and protocols to keep discussion on track and to ensure that the time isn’t wasted.
  • A spirit of continuous learning permeates the school, which encourages all teachers
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  • “Sometimes the best things going on are happening in your own building, and you might miss them because you’re doing your own thing,”
  • teachers meet regularly outside of class time to examine their students’ coursework as a team.
  • “The reason we look at student work is to help teachers become better teachers,”
  • “are better able to guide and facilitate a deeper level of student learning.”
  • community of learners who use planned, peer-to-peer feedback to help raise student outcomes throughout the school.
  • Each three-hour teacher lab focuses on a specific instructional topic that teachers choose to explore together, such as student engagement strategies.
  • To encourage more teacher collaboration in your school, you’ll want to consider: Time: Where will you find time within the regular school day for teachers to step outside their own classrooms and learn together? Structure: How might a protocol or specific observation prompt help to focus the learning experience? Who will play a lead role in facilitating the teacher experience and encouraging reflection? How will you capture takeaways? The National School Reform Faculty publishes a number of protocols for professional learning, such as this one for looking at student work. Follow-up: How are teachers applying what they learn together? How do students benefit as a result of teacher collaboration?
Meghan Cureton

What's Worth Learning in School? | Ed Magazine - 0 views

www.gse.harvard.edu/...whats-worth-learning-school

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • What’s worth learning in school?
  • “Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.” As a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”
  • “Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.
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  • The achievement gap asks if students are achieving X. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the relevance gap, which asks if X is going to matter to the lives students are likely to lead.
  • And then there’s what Perkins calls “the Holy Grail” of learning in school: becoming an expert. The typical math curriculum is a good example of how we want learners to move toward expertise in a subject, with little regard for usefulness. Arithmetic leads to algebra, including many “hardly used twists and turns” of advanced algebra, then to geometry and calculus, “an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses,”
  • Perkins is very clear that expertise in a specific field is not bad; in fact, he encourages it and assumes it will happen at the college or university level. But he advocates that in today’s world, younger students need to first master the fundamentals of key learning and then decide where they want to specialize.
  • Instead, he does know that the encyclopedic approach to learning that happens in most schools that focuses primarily on achievement and expertise doesn’t make sense.
  • And to do that, Perkins says we need to rethink what’s worth learning and what’s worth letting go of — in a radical way.
  • “As the train started up and Gandhi tossed down his second sandal, he showed wisdom about what to keep and what to let go of,” Perkins says. “Those are both central questions for education as we choose for today’s learners the sandals they need for tomorrow’s journey.”
Bo Adams

The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...of-big-data-and-analytics.html

data analytics bigdata assessment #MustRead #mvifishares school model school3.0

shared by Bo Adams on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • data scientists would then search the waters for patterns in each student's engagement level, moods, use of classroom resources, social habits, language and vocabulary use, attention span, academic performance, and more.
  • would be fed to teachers, parents, and students via AltSchool's digital learning platform and mobile app, which are currently being tested
  • AltSchool's 50-plus engineers, data scientists, and developers are designing tools that could be available to other schools by the 2018-19 school year.
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  • AltSchool is almost certain to provoke a backlash from parents and privacy advocates who see in its plans the potential for an Orwellian surveillance nightmare, as well as potentially unethical experimentation on children.
  • The term "big data" is generally used to describe data sets so large they must be analyzed by computers. Usually, the purpose is to find patterns and connections relating to human behavior and how complex systems function.
  • Analytics generally refers to the process of collecting such data, conducting those analyses, generating corresponding insights, and using that new information to make (what proponents hope will be) smarter decisions.
  • replacing the top-down, slow-moving bureaucratic structures that currently shape public education with a "networked model" in which students, teachers, and schools are connected directly by information and thus capable of learning and adapting more quickly.
  • 'Montessori 2.0': a kind of supercharged version of the progressive, project-based learning often found in elite private schools and privileged enclaves within traditional school systems.
  • Bo Adams on 16 Jan 16
     
    Eventually, Ventilla envisions AltSchool technology facilitating an exponential increase in the amount of information collected on students in school, all in service of expanding the hands-on, project-based model of learning in place at the six private school campuses the company currently operates in Silicon Valley and New York City.
Meghan Cureton

Mastery Credits? Mastery Transcript? « Competency Works - 0 views

www.competencyworks.org/...ery-credits-mastery-transcript

shared by Meghan Cureton on 04 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • the reductionist approach that wraps a student into one number – the GPA – is deeply problematic
  • MTC wants to create a system of credits and transcripts that represents the whole child, or whole teenager in the case of high schools
  • Credentials needs to have systems in place to provide confidence that they really do represent demonstrated knowledge and skills.
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  • they are drawing on the ideas of digital badging so that anyone can see the skill and who credentialed, and then look at an artifact to quickly assess if the level of performance is indeed what the college or employer is seeking.
  • There is actually a fourth principle: do not indicate how much time it takes someone to fulfill that credit.
  • structure the transcript around knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Credits, based on demonstrated mastery, are the building blocks for communicating how students are progressing toward the graduation competencies.
  • Perhaps they advance beyond grade level in some or all of the academic domains. Some schools have jettisoned honors courses and established the score of 4 to indicate honors level work.
  • Students need to have intrinsic motivation and value themselves for who they are and not their GPA. We want to develop students with a sense of purpose and excitement for creating their future.
  • What Happens When We Remove the Word Prepare?
  • Don’t Worry about College Admissions! He said that college admissions officers can figure out how to make the decisions they need to make. What is important is…that we do what is best for students and for helping them learn.
Bo Adams

The Trailblazers - How Students Are Learning To Make Impact Design Better - Impact Desi... - 2 views

impactdesignhub.org/...g-to-make-impact-design-better

design design for social impact design thinking impact #MustRead higher ed degrees

shared by Bo Adams on 23 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Impact Design Hub spoke with Sara Cornish and Josh Treuhaft, two graduates from the inaugural class of the School of Visual Arts’ Design for Social Innovation (DSI) program, a two-year, cross-disciplinary MFA program, which aims to teach students to address social challenges through systems-level design thinking and offers one of the first graduate degrees in this field.
  • Yeah, and I think there was an understanding that we were not only joining the program, but also helping to build it, which was really exciting. I remember that the interviews were so filled with anticipation. They told us, “This is going to be amazing. You’re going to be part of something that’s an absolute first. You’re going to help trailblaze the field.”
  • it was never explicitly about learning the way to design for social innovation. It was more about teaching a variety of different thought models, processes, and tools that you can use for various types of work relating to social impact. Ultimately, the program is about systems thinking and how things are connected to each other.
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  • Framing and strategizing and mapping is great, but at the end of the day, actually putting things in the world and seeing what they do is really important.
  • If you treat your thesis and your projects as real opportunities that could lead to some sort of impact or change and take it all seriously, you’d be amazed at what you can accomplish.
  • Bo Adams on 23 Dec 15
     
    So the question becomes: how do we get better at using design to create impact? An answer that has been gaining traction is education.
Bo Adams

How Good Is Good Enough? - Educational Leadership - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...Good-Is-Good-Enough%C2%A2.aspx

mastery assessment learning MTC #mustread

shared by Bo Adams on 18 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Mastery is effective transfer of learning in authentic and worthy performance. Students have mastered a subject when they are fluent, even creative, in using their knowledge, skills, and understanding in key performance challenges and contexts at the heart of that subject, as measured against valid and high standards
  • Wooden described his overall method like this: "I tried to teach according to the whole–part method. I would show them the whole thing to begin with. Then I'm going to break it down into the parts and work on the individual parts and then eventually bring them together"
  • The constant process of bringing the parts back together in complex performance is what's routinely missing from many so-called mastery learning programs.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Regardless of what particular solution we come up with for linking local grades to wider-world standards, this must be our motto: No surprises; complete transparency as to where the student stands in terms of performance.
  • This is the crux of the matter: how to set school-level standards (and give grades, scores, or judgments in relation to them) in terms of valid external standards. If local tests are less rigorous than state and national tests, and if teachers' scoring and grading of student work reflect only local norms and not wider-world standards, then the school is not standards-based.
T.J. Edwards

PBL, STEAM, & CTE: Validation through Triangulation | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE - 0 views

www.bie.org/...lidation_through_triangulation

#mvifishares pbl steam cte project based learning

shared by T.J. Edwards on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • identifying ways that STEAM, CTE, and PBL have a unique three-way symbiotic relationship
  • So, with CTE, one or more of the STE(A)M subjects naturally is embedded within it, especially when applied to key knowledge, understanding, & success skills. Sound familiar? That’s the focus at the center of Gold Standard PBL! So what about the Essential Project Design Elements of PBL as applying STE(A)M within CTE?
  • what if an Engineering and Architecture Pathway student was asked to use CAD to design a home using passive solar construction techniques, much like the Anasazi did before electricity and indoor plumbing?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Integrating CTE and STE(A)M in this manner raises the bar to the rigorous level of PBL.
  • Then I realized that all of the CTE industry sectors have these same standards, so they apply to STE(A)M and PBL in the same manner as the example above from Architecture and Engineering.
  • T.J. Edwards on 09 Sep 16
     
    Makes me happy that Career Tech is mentioned as a vehicle for more rigorous PBL and STEAM and not as a program for "underachievers"
Meghan Cureton

How Exercise May Help the Memory Grow Stronger - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-memory-grow-stronger.html

brain learning exercise movement

shared by Meghan Cureton on 21 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Exercise may help the brain to build durable memories, through good times and bad.
  • In general, the stronger the messages between neurons, the sturdier and more permanent the memories they hold.
  • It was immediately clear that three days of chronic stress had reduced the effectiveness of the synapses in the stressed-out, sedentary animals, compared to those from the control mice. Their intracellular connections were much weaker.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The unstressed runners, on the other hand, now had the strongest, busiest synapses, suggesting that their ability to learn and remember would be higher than in the other animals.
  • Perhaps most interesting, the animals that had run and also experienced chronic stress had synapses that resembled those from the normal, unstressed control group.
  • It is not yet clear, though, she says, how exercise changed the animals’ synapses at a molecular level.
Bo Adams

New Normal Leader - Radar Journal - 0 views

www.radarjournal.com/new-normal-leader

leader radar leadership newnormal #MustRead #MVIFIshares change

shared by Bo Adams on 15 May 16 - No Cached
  • Keeping pace with the hockey stick curve of exponential change requires being deliberate about evolving as a leader.
  • Too many leaders — both at the top and across organizations — are taking a linear perspective that focuses on small incremental gains, often achieved by squeezing harder on what they already know. The problem is that, in a world of exponential change, a linear path is an exit ramp.
  • RADAR believes that “new normal” captures the emerging truth that change and volatility will continue to accelerate and intensify. Equally important, we believe many leaders have been led to think that new normal means things will level out again, and that there will once again be stable times they can get their arms around.
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  • Transforming from normal to new normal leadership is the single most important variable in sustainable success.
  • transforming how you lead is difficult because leadership has become, more than ever, a team sport. A leadership team’s ability to become more adaptive requires not just individual change, but collective and coordinated change.
  • Something makes us think that greater speed should require more intense focus on the road immediately in front of us. In reality, it is exactly the opposite.
  • The most powerful and dramatic shift you can make toward new normal leadership is to reset your and your team’s perspective, to follow the racer’s rule of thumb and look out of the top 1/3 of the windshield. Like in racing, focusing farther ahead is the key not only to speed, but also to both seeing greater possibility and avoiding potentiallydeadly disruptions.
  • What stands out most about how this team works is the time commitment they make to developing and maintaining up-and-out perspective.
  • “Perspective is worth 80IQ points.”
  • However, managing speed requires more than perspective. Leaders also need to develop alignment.
  • In organizations, alignment is what makes foresight an accelerant.
  • Resetting perspective is the most powerful evolutionary step you and your team can make toward new normal leadership.
  • With strategy, sensemaking pushes leaders back into the role of explorer rather than just decider.
  • With leadership development, sensemaking forces leaders to teach high potentials how to learn, rather than what they know.
  • Sensemaking — especially when approached as a team with a goal of producing aligned foresight — gives an organization one of the most remarkable assets imaginable: clarity of possibility.
T.J. Edwards

Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let's ban elementary homework - S... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...r_lets_ban_elementary_homework

school School Change

shared by T.J. Edwards on 17 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • For elementary-aged children, research suggests that studying in class gets superior learning results, while extra schoolwork at home is just . . . extra work
  • By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit, but only in moderation.
  • Homework supporters say homework teaches responsibility, reinforces lessons taught in school, and creates a home-school link with parents. However, involved parents can see what’s coming home in a child’s backpack and initiate sharing about school work–they don’t need to monitor their child’s progress with assigned homework.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What works better than traditional homework at the elementary level is simply reading at home.
T.J. Edwards

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

hbr.org/...-still-a-competitive-advantage

leadership designthinking #mvifishares

shared by T.J. Edwards on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • 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
      T.J. Edwards on 02 Mar 17
       
      A favorite DT story. It is a central chapter in Glimmer by Warren Berger.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • UK’s Design Policy Unit
    • T.J. Edwards
      T.J. Edwards on 02 Mar 17
       
      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
      T.J. Edwards on 02 Mar 17
       
      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
Bo Adams

The Myth Of The Innovation Lab - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...the-myth-of-the-innovation-lab

innovation lab

shared by Bo Adams on 17 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • "innovation theater."
  • happens when teams in innovation labs use lean startup tools without really understanding how they work. They take the canvases, sticky notes, whiteboards and bean bags, and they start thinking that they are all set for doing innovation. The teams then focus their attention on making cool products, without thinking about the business models that underlie those products.
  • problem of success
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • causes the most frustration among people who work inside innovation labs. These are hard working diligent people who understand how to apply lean startup methods and tools the right way. They often succeed in creating great products with good business models. However, when they are ready to take these products to scale they face resistance from their parent company.
  • The lesson learned is to not let the creation of an innovation lab lull you to sleep. You are not in a safe space. The parent company does not love you as much as you think it does. There is still a lot of work to do to get buy-in and support from leaders and key stakeholders.
  • idea that the leaders who funded the lab understand its purpose and support innovation
  • opening of the innovation lab itself often represents innovation theater - played out at the leadership level within the company
  • first symptom of this is the lack of a clear innovation strategy
  • Bo Adams on 17 Apr 18
     
    HT TJ Edwards
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