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Students should learn the responsibility of turning in work on time, but not at the cost of a grade that doesn't actually represent learning.

Practice assignments and homework can be assessed, but they shouldn't be graded.

Many of our assignments are "practice," assigned for students to build fluency and practice a content or skill. Students are often "coming to know" rather than truly knowing.

we should formatively assess our students and give everyone access to the "photo album" of learning rather than a single "snapshot."

Teaching and learning should take precedence over grading and entering grades into grade books. If educators are spending an inordinate amount of time grading rather than teaching and assessing students, then something needs to change.

We've all been in a situation where grading piles up, and so we put the class on a task to make time for grading.

Our work as educators is providing hope to our students. If I use zeros, points off for late work, and the like as tools for compliance, I don't create hope. Instead, I create fear of failure and anxiety in learning. If we truly want our classrooms to be places for hope, then our grading practices must align with that mission.

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.

Do you know teachers who claim to be doing PBL but are really doing the same teacher-centered instruction they always have, only with a project (think trifold) thrown in at the end of the year?

we fail to notice the ways of thinking and norms that structure the world in which we operate. As a result, we then cannot see the cultural and structural shift needed for these innovative ideas to reach their true potential.

the data presented showing that less than 1% of U.S. schools were actually operating in the learner-centered paradigm left me even more convinced that inertia is still winning and the only way to make any realistic change is by being much, much smarter in our approach to positive disruption.

earner agency; socially embedded; personalized, relevant, and contextualized; open-walled; and competency-based.

three change levers 1) increasing public will, 2) refining public policy, and 3) building proofs of concept—can be a powerful tool to help grow the 1% of learner-centered environments to a potential tipping point, where learner-centered environments are the prevailing approach to education in this country.

When more education stakeholders are able to see how learner-centered environments are having positive impacts on children, they are better able to build on this success in their own local context.

Maker Empowerment (v2): A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems, along with the inclination and capacity to shape one’s world through building, tinkering, re/designing, or hacking.

one of the main purposes of the Agency by Design project, which is to understand how maker activities can develop students’ sense of agency or self-efficacy.

maker empowerment is a dispositional concept. That is, rather than simply naming a set of technical skills, it aims to describe a mindset, along with a habitual way of engaging with the world.

the research I’ve just described wasn’t conducted with the disposition toward maker empowerment in mind. So we don’t know if the findings about sensitivity transfer.

Through a series of rather elaborate experiments, we were able to show that the contribution of these three elements—ability, inclination, sensitivity—could indeed be individually distinguished in patterns of thinking and that a shortfall in any of the three elements would block cognitive performance.

It turns out that the biggest bottleneck in behavior—in other words, the shortfall that most frequently prevents inclination, ability, and sensitivity from coalescing into sustained cognitive activity—is a shortfall of sensitivity. In other words, at least in terms of critical and creative thinking, young people don’t follow through with these habits of mind not because they can’t (ability), and not because they don’t want to (inclination), but mainly because they don’t notice opportunities to do so.

This doesn’t mean that young people’s inner detection mechanisms are woefully flawed. Rather, sensitivity has everything to do with the saliency of cues in the environment. If an environment doesn’t have strong cues toward certain patterns of behavior—or actually contains counter-cues—it can be pretty hard for those patterns of behavior to be cued up.

the maker movement can empower people to shift from being passive consumers of their world to being active producers or collaborators.

As the maker movement continues to infiltrate mainstream education, a dispositional analysis of maker empowerment might serve as a similarly useful tool.

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.

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.