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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.

institutional inertia seems relatively simple: institutions, organizations, and people tend to remain at rest (i.e. satisfied with the status quo) or in uniform motion (i.e. slightly tweaking the status quo over time), unless that state is changed by an external force (i.e. transformation).

“Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace,”

the gravitational pull of the status quo is so incredibly strong, that escaping it can be a monumental task.

“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.”

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.

defines design thinking as “a process for creative problem solving” with a “human-centered approach to innovation.”

Throughout these explorations, the children began to understand that the ‘classroom as a Design Studio’ was a place where ideas, creativity, technique and skills can be used to make beautiful, interesting and useful products.

The children’s idea that they should create their own museum in order to share their products affirms their strong identities as designers. As a learning community, the children have created interconnected systems full of makers with a range of products and knowledge about process which they are eager to share with others. The children are currently in the process of planning their own Kindergarten Design Museum.

We supported the desire of the children to have creative freedom to design in abundance and were also mindful of the ecological responsibility to use materials responsibly.

The learning classroom is active, collaborative, and full of real, thoughtful, academic-discipline-informed discussion with students working together to solve challenging problems

But when the teachers see it, really get it, there is no going back. It is what they are after for their students and classes: problem-based, project-based, inquiry-based, discussion-based-all student-centered deep learning.

And to pursue learning for their students, teachers must be pedagogical scientists. Every day, in every class, teachers must conduct research and experiments into the most compelling learning experiences for their students. In these experiments is unavoidably innovation.

Although a foundational shift from a traditional classroom, a learner-centered approach does not eliminate the teacher.

A learner-centered environment facilitates a more collaborative way for students to learn.

at the end of the day it’s not about what was taught but what was learned.

He and a team of teachers set out to try to reconfigure how this big high school could structurally put student relationships with teachers at the center, and value mastery of content above all else.

‘If we don’t match our minutes to our mission, [teachers are] not going to shift.’

biggest obstacles to instructional changes of the sort Smith and his team were trying to engineer was the school schedule itself.

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

We all need to be needed.

Virtually all the world’s major religions teach that diligent work in the service of others is our highest nature and thus lies at the center of a happy life.

Americans who prioritize doing good for others are almost twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives.

Engineering has been getting a lot of attention because of its real-world applications and clear job prospects, but learning to think like an engineer could be useful no matter what students decide to pursue for work

all ninth-graders

I felt like I didn’t know how to make enough stuff,”

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?