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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.

Traditional direct instruction focuses on content knowledge, while maker-centered learning orients around the learner's context.

Perhaps some memorization of key facts is necessary, but we must set our sights beyond box checking and move toward connection with peers, toward empathy, problem solving, and working through frustrations in pursuit of a deeper, richer understanding of both content and self.

Making innately provides evidence of learning.

Too often, we have overloaded our individual and organizational circuits beyond capacity, leaving little to no room or energy for new learning to exist and take root.

In any change or shift process, especially when new learning is involved,  balancing the ‘cognitive load’ provides people the space and energy to invest in evolving their mental models and expanding their current cognitive limits.

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.

“Telepressure is a workplace problem, not a worker problem. We learn how to respond to email through our colleagues’ behavior, and it’s a consequence of the social dynamics within a work environment,”

In this world of stress and pressure, how do school leaders become enablers of work-life balance? Most research points to starting with how we as leaders model that balance.

“If we are to serve as stewards of productivity and engagement, we must pursue excellent performance as leaders in all four domains — work, home, community, and self — not trading off one for another but finding mutual value among them.”

One of the mandatory classes places students in studio classes where they are given a client and a prompt to solve an open-ended problem using human-centered design.

The current client is Café Momentum, a nonprofit restaurant that trains and hires juvenile offenders. The problem students have to solve is that many of the young men who work at Café Momentum are unable to get a lease or live in unaffordable housing because of their age.

Students can take two elective courses in almost any subject as long as they can justify why they are taking the classes. She also emphasized that MADI is for anyone.

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.

Flipped conferences could keep more of the traditional model than unconferences do. You could ask educational influencers with something important to teach the conference audience to speak. But instead of doing their teaching and presenting at the conference itself, they can work out an assignment for the attendees to complete in advance – a slide share, video of a speech, or a collection of reading materials – and then spend the actual conference time discussing, or workshopping, the ideas from the assignment.

“We have not correctly legitimized a culture of childhood,” says Lella Gandini, a longtime Reggio teacher, “and the consequences are seen in all our social, economic, and political choices and investments.”

To counter this, Reggio’s schools are relentlessly child-centered — not to achieve notable results in literacy and numeracy, but to achieve notable qualities of identity formation and to ensure that all children know how to belong to a community.

The teachers follow the children, not plans.”

T o make space for learner voice and to promote learner agency, teachers must set up learning environments that stimulate active learner engagement with meaningful and progressively challenging tasks that stimulate their thinking and enable them to develop competence over time. Unlike subject content, competence cannot be transmitted to learners. Rather, competence is progressively developed by learners through appropriate facilitation.

Table 1. The Role of Learners in Competence-Based Curricula

A “growth mindset” (Dweck, 2006). essential for developing intrinsic motivation.

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.

A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.

A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.

A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.