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Jim Tiffin Jr

Project-Based Learning Through a Maker's Lens | Edutopia - 5 views

www.edutopia.org/...h-a-makers-lens-patrick-waters

PBL MakerEd Edutopia Project based learning article #LiquidNetworkSpill

shared by Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
Bo Adams liked it
  • A Maker is an individual who communicates, collaborates, tinkers, fixes, breaks, rebuilds, and constructs projects for the world around him or her.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      A nice list-style definition of a Maker.
  • A Maker, re-cast into a classroom, has a name that we all love: a learner.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      True, but (sadly) the converse is not always the case in some classrooms: A maker may always be a learner, but a learner is not always a maker.
  • A Maker, just like a true learner, values the process of making as much as the product.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      Equality of these two ideas, process and product, is a value held by a Maker.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Making, especially to educators and administrators unfamiliar with it, can seem to lack the academic rigor needed for a full-fledged place in an educational ecosystem.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      Only in educational settings where content knowledge is deemed the most important indicator of learning.
  • With practice, the students can frame the questions themselves.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      Essential when you are trying to develop agency in students.
  • Once completed, the project becomes less of a daily race to fulfill lesson plans and more of a quest to document your students' growing capabilities.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      This reflective documentation process should be something that both teacher AND student are doing. The student point-of-view should be written for the benefit of the student, not the teacher. The teacher should coach this process for the student so that the monitoring of growth is seen as a value for the student. The teacher documentation should also inform the student as to their growth, but the information can be used for more "teacherly" purposes as well, such preparing for future activities or intentional pairings of students in the early phases of the PBL unit.
  • model it yourself first
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
      Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
       
      Always let your students see you, the teacher, as a learner - first and foremost!
  • Jim Tiffin Jr on 28 Apr 16
     
    The messy, hands-on Maker classroom is perfect for a PBL unit when the teacher is willing to collaborate, tinker, fix, break, and rebuild alongside students. Some fundamental elements to consider in the designing of a maker-centered project, but not as absolutes. It is important to realize that any project taken on in a maker-centered classroom is, by definition, a PBL experience.
  • Bo Adams on 28 Apr 16
     
    Fabulous piece about the myriad connection among PBL and Maker. And your commentary is so helpful and provocative. Thank you!
Meghan Cureton

5 Mindsets to Bring Positive Change Across Society - 1 views

singularityhub.com/...5-mindsets-for-human-progress

#MustRead transformation mindset idiploma

shared by Meghan Cureton on 21 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Stimulating positive change at civilization level also requires certain mindsets and ways of thinking.
  • Here are five mindsets that will allow us to leave a positive mark on humanity. Curiosity and Critical Thinking
  • It is by channeling a child-like sense of awe about the world that we can truly imagine something even better. That can be coupled with questioning how we do things in today’s world instead of accepting them as they are.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Asking questions—and asking good ones—is the foundation of critical thinking.
  • It takes powerful curiosity, critical thinking, and imagination to envision radical alternatives to how we do things in today’s world and then be inspired to execute them.
  • Intelligent Optimism
  • being optimistic about the future based on reason and evidence.
  • How can our youth grow up believing they can have a positive impact on the world if the news is suggesting otherwise?
  • Risk-taking
  • being a strategic risk-taker is a valuable lifelong skill of its own.
  • embracing uncertainty, stepping out of one’s comfort zone, and doing something that fulfills your life or company’s grand mission
  • embracing failure and re-defining failed attempts as temporary setbacks
  • Moonshot Thinking
  • Moonshot thinking allows for radical, daring, and disruptive ideas as opposed to incremental improvements
  • Cosmic Perspective
  • Having a cosmic perspective shifts the ambitions and priorities we set for ourselves to those that matter from a grand perspective. As a species, we become more purpose-driven.
  • It’s all about having a positive impact on the world
  • It’s not just about creating a product or generating profits, but also about solving a problem and having a positive impact on human lives.
  • It’s about asking the right questions, being intelligently optimistic about the future, taking a risk with a moonshot, and maintaining a cosmic perspective.
Meghan Cureton

How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...e-child-step-one-back-off.html

creativity curiosity passion purpose pursuit

shared by Meghan Cureton on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Meghan Cureton on 08 Oct 17
     
    place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules," Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience. less about being a single-minded genius and more about being interested in many things
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
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

7 Questions Principals Should Ask When Hiring Future-Ready Teachers | MindShift | KQED ... - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...n-hiring-future-ready-teachers

RIHO hiring questions innovation School Change

shared by Meghan Cureton on 10 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • seven questions that he thinks should become standard in the interviewing and hiring process
  • Question #1: How do you teach students to become problem designers?
  • Question #4: What does your global network look like?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Question #3: What are your expectations for student to self-assess their work and publish it for a wider audience?
  • Question #2: How do you manage your own professional growth?
  • Question #5: How do you give students an opportunity to contribute purposeful work to others?
  • Question #6: How do you teach students to learn what you don’t know?
  • Question #7: How do you teach students to manage their own learning?
Bo Adams

The paradoxes of creative leadership | Innovation Management - 1 views

www.innovationmanagement.se/...radoxes-of-creative-leadership

leadership innovation management creativity #MustRead

shared by Bo Adams on 09 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Creative leadership is rich with paradoxes. Creative leaders are driven by their internal passion and purpose, yet they also have an externally oriented, explorative mindset. Creative leaders lead from the front by envisioning a better future, pointing the way and setting an aspiration, yet they achieve this by orchestrating a creative team, often leading from behind to bring out the best in others. In this article, we describe the competencies of a creative leader in detail, and invite you to look in the mirror and see how you score on those key competencies. We explore the topic of paradoxes found in creative leadership and leave you with some practical suggestions on how to grow as a creative leader.
  • We discovered that self-awareness is the cornerstone of leadership: great leaders are aware of what we call their ‘leadership gifts’ as well as their ‘learning edges’. And we found out that self-awareness helps leaders to build authenticity, as great leaders think and act from a place of truth within themselves.
  • At THNK, we distinguish between a management team and a creative team. A management team typically comprises seven or more members and is charged with running an existing business. By contrast, a creative team has ideally three members and is focused on seeking new solutions.
  • Bo Adams on 09 Jul 15
     
    Tweet from @akytle: The paradoxes of creative leadership http://t.co/EK2bbsmBkN So Blessed 2 play w/ cre8tve ldrs! #mvpschool @jbrettjacobsen @boadams1 HT @akytle
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.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • 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

Grades are for Onions, Beef, and Other Produce; Not Children - 1 views

medium.com/...duce-not-children-5fd4728ff7b3

shared by Meghan Cureton on 03 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • What good is gained in assigning a grade to a child’s work? The concept of 90–100% = A, 80–89% = B etc. is so entirely subjective and fraught with fallacy. Because a child can do every question on your arbitrarily chosen and constructed exam, and do so by anticipating what it is you are looking for with 100% accuracy does not mean they understand or can explain what the mathematics is about.
  • Why should our children be assigned something we also use for factory produced vegetables? Grading is an anachronistic hold-over from the Scientific Management era inserted into schooling during the 19th century.
  • Finnish kids have NO homework, but call me a believer in the idea that the Finns place less importance upon grading their children against each other. Formative assessment replacing heaps of summative assessments.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Finnish national curriculum has been addended to include a multi-disciplinary requirement in each year of schooling. This will require a completely different method of assessment, there is no way to assign a single letter or numeric grade to such a task.
  • Honestly, is ranking an important outcome of education? Do we need to know who was “best” or “worst” at reading the minds of their teachers and regurgitating what those teachers want?
  • My point in this is that we seem to have lost the learning purpose, the goal of growing humans into their best selves is not central to our endeavor.
  • education needs to drop its focus upon grades as being the product of 13 years of a child’s life. Bring to schooling the joy of learning as it will go farther than the negative consequences associated with grades.
Jim Tiffin Jr

Will Letter Grades Survive? | Edutopia - 3 views

www.edutopia.org/...will-letter-grades-survive

FromTwitter Assessment grading

shared by Jim Tiffin Jr on 07 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • kellybkelly on 07 Jan 18
     
    I love this quote!: "The grading system right now is demoralizing and is designed to produce winners and losers," said Looney. "The purpose of education is not to sort kids-it's to grow kids. Teachers need to coach and mentor, but with grades, teachers turn into judges. I think we can show the unique abilities of kids without stratifying them."
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