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Bo Adams

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

  • 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.
  •  
    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

Natasha Jen: Design Thinking is Bullshit on Vimeo - 1 views

  •  
    Not sure I agree with Natasha on her "crit" of design thinking. Not sure her retorts to some of the examples hold water. Would love to hear your takeaways from this video, Bo. I like her endpoint, about designers surrounding themselves with evidence of their work and their high standards, but not much else.
Bo Adams

Yes, Design Thinking Is Bullshit…And We Should Promote It Anyway - 2 views

  •  
    This guy's got it. Lee-Sean Huang FTW. Should have read this before watching the video from Natasha. Either way, I'm glad I did end up reading it. I really love how he went deeper with his research into the stories... dare I say he did a little "Five Whys" work? Or would that just be a buzzword? :-)
Nicole Martin

10 Principles for Building a High-Quality System Of Assessments - Deeper Learning - 2 views

  • No single assessment or piece of student work can provide the robust information needed to inform teaching, learning, and supports,
Meghan Cureton

Are You a Curator or a Dumper? | Cult of Pedagogy - 2 views

  • whatever you do, chances are you have information to share with other people, and developing your curation skills—both in terms of how much you offer and how you deliver it—is going make that sharing a lot more effective.
  • When we dump a lot of information on a person at once, we are working against their brain. Cognitive load theory suggests that the brain can only take in so much at once. When we’re presented with a whole bunch of information, our brains have to ignore some in order to process the rest. Eventually, if too much keeps coming at us, we reach the point of cognitive overload, where we get more than we can handle. At that point, a lot of people just shut down, and even simple information can’t get in.
  • But the rest of us would do better off with the help of curators. That’s what a good museum does for us: It takes piles and piles of artifacts and selects only a few to represent an idea, a moment, an event, or a phenomenon.
Bo Adams

NAIS - 10 Ways to Teach Outdoor Education and a Sense of Wonder - 2 views

  • Love for the outdoors comes from learning through play, exploration, guidance, fun, and wondering.
  • Learn the natural and human history of the place you are working in order to be open and aware of teachable moments—and to gain your own sense of being. A sense of wonder is the greatest gift you can give children.
  • There are two parts to having a well-developed sense of wonder. One part is the ability to see the wonder in the world (the “wow,” the “amazing,” the “how is that possible?”). It also is the ability to wonder, to ask questions, to know there is more to know.
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  • Don’t just tell children how knowledge was figured out. Have them figure things out for themselves through the activities and lessons you plan.
  • Human-caused problems have human solutions. Small actions multiplied by millions both cause and solve problems.
  • Outdoor education is less about the content and more about the experience. Almost always choose action over talking.
Bo Adams

Why Are We Still Personalizing Learning If It's Not Personal? | EdSurge News - 0 views

  • As an ideal, personalized learning aims to provide instructional experiences tailored to each learner’s preferences and interests, and at a pace appropriate to their needs.
  • That can result in teachers putting tablets in front of kids, letting the technology do the work, and meanwhile calling it “personalized learning” when it’s anything but that.
  • What we fail to realize is that individualization actually has diminishing returns. As individualization increases, so does the potential for isolation. In classrooms where the primary mode of personalization is hyper-individualized, technology-driven curriculum, we find our children siphoned off into silos, taking away valuable points of convergence.
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  • We assume that the more individualized a child’s education is, the more personalized it is. But that’s simply not true.
  • In order for learning to be personal, it must be meaningful and transferable. And meaningful, transferable learning only comes when human connection is at the center of what we do. When we over-individualize learning—especially when we do so using technology—we isolate our children. We put them in silos and take away opportunities for them to connect with one another in order to learn.
  • Does the technology help to minimize complexity?
  • Does the technology help to maximize the individual power and potential of all learners in the room?
  • Will the technology help us to do something previously unimaginable?
  • Will the technology preserve or enhance human connection in the classroom?
Meghan Cureton

"Will this be on the test?" - The Startup - Medium - 1 views

  • Students are on this bus because they want to be.
  • Experiences are at the heart of change. We change when we do something, when we interact with the world.
  • The backbone is a hand-built, peer-to-peer learning environment, not a series of lectures.
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  • It turns out that the best way to cause change is for people to actually change someone or something else. We learn what we do, not what we’re told.
  • All of the final work product is in public. A lot like real life.
  • deep syllabus of materials (some required, some optional,
  • Cohort-based, with groups of five to twenty people engaged constantly with each other (we use Slack as a surprisingly powerful peer-to-peer setting for experiential learning)
  • Every student reviews and then comments on several of the other students’ assignments.
  • takes the five or ten comments received and turns them into a reflective script, detailing actual change, actual growth.
  • Everything iterates, again and again.
  • every admitted student shares the same mindset of seeking true growth. Self-selection plus curated admissions means that the support network is strong. Enrollment—in the outcome and the process—is the secret of effective education.
  • our students are getting generous and direct feedback for the first time
  • If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience — you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them.
Meghan Cureton

The World Might Be Better Off Without College for Everyone - 0 views

  • From kindergarten on, students spend thousands of hours studying subjects irrelevant to the modern labor market. Why do English classes focus on literature and poetry instead of business and technical writing? Why do advanced-math classes bother with proofs almost no student can follow? When will the typical student use history? Trigonometry? Art? Music? Physics? Latin? The class clown who snarks “What does this have to do with real life?” is onto something.
  • The disconnect between college curricula and the job market has a banal explanation: Educators teach what they know
  • Lest I be misinterpreted, I emphatically affirm that education confers some marketable skills, namely literacy and numeracy. Nonetheless, I believe that signaling accounts for at least half of college’s financial reward, and probably more.
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  • The labor market doesn’t pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them.
  • Those who believe that college is about learning how to learn should expect students who study science to absorb the scientific method, then habitually use it to analyze the world. This scarcely occurs.
  • Students know less at the end of summer than they did at the beginning. But summer learning loss is only a special case of the problem of fade-out: Human beings have trouble retaining knowledge they rarely use
  • The conventional view—that education pays because students learn—assumes that the typical student acquires, and retains, a lot of knowledge. She doesn’t.
  • If all goes well, students learn what they study and practice.
  • Actually, that’s optimistic. Educational psychologists have discovered that much of our knowledge is “inert.” Students who excel on exams frequently fail to apply their knowledge to the real world.
  • we must ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in—an educated one or an ignorant one?
  • As credentials proliferate, so do failed efforts to acquire them.
  • But ignorance of the future is no reason to prepare students for occupations they almost surely won’t have—and if we know anything about the future of work, we know that the demand for authors, historians, political scientists, physicists, and mathematicians will stay low.
Meghan Cureton

Stop Teaching Classes And Start Teaching Children - 0 views

  • Too often bits and pieces are tacked onto curriculum as yet another perfectly-reasonable-sounding-thing to teach.
  • There is nothing wrong with changes in priority. In fact, this is a signal of awareness and reflection and vitality. But when education—as it tends to do—continues to take a content and skills-focused view of what to teach rather than how students learn, it’s always going to be a maddening game of what gets added in, and what gets taken out, with the loudest or most emotionally compelling voices usually winning.
  • Skills are things students can “do”—procedural knowledge that yields the ability to do something. This could be revising an essay, solving a math problem, or decoding words to read. Content can be thought of as a second kind of knowledge—a declarative knowledge that often makes up the face of a content area. In math, this might be the formula to calculate the area of a circle. In composition, it could be a writing strategy to form sound and compelling paragraphs. In history, it may refer to the geographic advantages of one country in a conflict versus another. Should schools focus on content and skills, or should they focus on habits and thinking?
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  • So then, hundreds of standards. Hundreds! This places extraordinary pressure on educators—those who develop standards, those who create curriculum from those standards, those who create lessons from that curriculum, and on and on—to make numerous—and critical—adjustments to curriculum, assessment, and instruction on the fly.
  • Why not try a different approach–one that not only decenters curriculum, but reimagines it completely?
  • Building A Curriculum Based On People
  • n the past, we’ve sought to add-to and revise. Add these classes and drop these. This isn’t as important as this. To make knowledge an index that reflects the latest thinking that reflects our most recent insecurities and collective misunderstandings. This doesn’t seem like the smartest path to sustainable innovation in learning.
  • Give me a curriculum based on people–based on their habits and thinking patterns in their native places. One that helps them see the utility of knowledge and the patterns of familial and social action. One that helps them ask, “What’s worth knowing, and what should I do with what I know?” Then let’s work backwards from that.
T.J. Edwards

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

  • 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.
Bo Adams

Why Students Should Take the Lead in Parent-Teacher Conferences | MindShift | KQED News - 1 views

  • at schools built on Deeper Learning principles, the meetings are often turned into student-led conferences, with students presenting their schoolwork, while their teachers, having helped them prepare, sit across the table, or even off to the side
  • students are responsible for their own success.
  • this is the student’s moment to share his or her reflections on achievements and challenges
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  • encourages students to reflect on the connection between the effort they have made and the quality of their work
  • asks them to choose three examples that help them tell their parents a deeper story: one that shows they have recognized both a personal strength and an area in which they are struggling
  •  
    HT Emily Trenney
Meghan Cureton

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

  • 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.
Bo Adams

How School Leaders Can Attend to the Emotional Side of Change | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • for many people, change — at least at first — isn’t about growth or capacity building or learning; it’s about loss.
  • One of the most difficult things about leading change in schools, according to Evans, is that there often aren’t clear structures to deal with conflict or disagreement.
  • difference between congeniality and collegiality
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  • Evans acknowledges that creating a school culture that encourages productive conflict, the hashing out of ideas and differing opinions, is particularly hard because the qualities that make someone a great teacher — nurturing, extending beyond themselves, pulling out the best in people — are not typically the characteristics of someone who is skilled at adult conflict
  • “Almost all of us would rather work with someone who disagrees with us, but who is clear, than with someone who seems to agree with us, but isn’t clear,”
Meghan Cureton

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Bo Adams

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

  • 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?
  •  
    HT Kelly Kelly
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