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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.
Meghan Cureton

Creating an Ecology of Wonder | Edutopia - 0 views

  • I believe that our most precious natural resources are imagination and wonder
  • Wonder leaves us with a sense of fascination about mysteries yet unsolved or questions yet unanswered.
  • Art reveals patterns and connections that would otherwise remain unnoticed.
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  • In a learning ecology that focuses on wonder, an artful approach can be introduced in any subject area
  • Create Assessments That Reward Good Questions, Not Just Good Answers
  • Develop Different Ways for Measuring Success
Nicole Martin

Why Curiosity Matters - 1 views

shared by Nicole Martin on 14 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • And socially curious employees are better than others at resolving conflicts with colleagues, more likely to receive social support, and more effective at building connections, trust, and commitment on their teams. People or groups high in both dimensions are more innovative and creative.
  • joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, and social curiosity—improve work outcomes.
  • joyous exploration has the strongest link with the experience of intense positive emotions. Stress tolerance has the strongest link with satisfying the need to feel competent, autonomous, and that one belongs. Social curiosity has the strongest link with being a kind, generous, modest person.
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  • deprivation sensitivity—recognizing a gap in knowledge the filling of which offers relief. This type of curiosity doesn’t necessarily feel good, but people who experience it work relentlessly to solve problems.
  • joyous exploration—being consumed with wonder about the fascinating features of the world. This is a pleasurable state; people in it seem to possess a joie de vivre.
  • social curiosity—talking, listening, and observing others to learn what they are thinking and doing. Human beings are inherently social animals, and the most effective and efficient way to determine whether someone is friend or foe is to gain information. Some may even snoop, eavesdrop, or gossip to do so.
  • stress tolerance—a willingness to accept and even harness the anxiety associated with novelty. People lacking this ability see information gaps, experience wonder, and are interested in others but are unlikely to step forward and explore.
  • thrill seeking—being willing to take physical, social, and financial risks to acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences. For people with this capacity, the anxiety of confronting novelty is something to be amplified, not reduced.
  • we all seek the sweet spot between two deeply uncomfortable states: understimulation (coping with tasks, people, or situations that lack sufficient novelty, complexity, uncertainty, or conflict) and overstimulation.
  • people become curious upon realizing that they lack desired knowledge; this creates an aversive feeling of uncertainty, which compels them to uncover the missing information.
  • nstead of asking, “How curious are you?” we can ask, “How are you curious?”
  • But maintaining a sense of wonder is crucial to creativity and innovation. The most effective leaders look for ways to nurture their employees’ curiosity to fuel learning and discovery.
  • How can organizations help people make the leap from curious to competent?
  • by providing the right types of stretch assignments and job rotations.
  • complexity and breadth of the opportunities they’d been given,
  • It enhances intelligence
  • It increases perseverance, or grit
  • And curiosity propels us toward deeper engagement, superior performance, and more-meaningful goals
  • The ProblemLeaders say they value employees who question or explore things, but research shows that they largely suppress curiosity, out of fear that it will increase risk and undermine efficiency.Why This MattersCuriosity improves engagement and collaboration. Curious people make better choices, improve their company’s performance, and help their company adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures.The RemedyLeaders should encourage curiosity in themselves and others by making small changes to the design of their organization and the ways they manage their employees. Five strategies can guide them.
  • leaders can encourage curiosity
  • when our curiosity is triggered, we are less likely to fall prey to confirmation bias (looking for information that supports our beliefs rather than for evidence suggesting we are wrong) and to stereotyping people (making broad judgments, such as that women or minorities don’t make good leaders). Curiosity has these positive effects because it leads us to generate alternatives.
  • My own research confirms that encouraging people to be curious generates workplace improvements.
  • What is one topic or activity you are curious about today? What is one thing you usually take for granted that you want to ask about? Please make sure you ask a few ‘Why questions’ as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”
  • “What is one topic or activity you’ll engage in today? What is one thing you usually work on or do that you’ll also complete today? Please make sure you think about this as you engage in your work throughout the day. Please set aside a few minutes to identify how you’ll approach your work today with these questions in mind.”
  • When we are curious, we view tough situations more creatively. Studies have found that curiosity is associated with less defensive reactions to stress and less aggressive reactions to provocation.
  • curiosity encourages members of a group to put themselves in one another’s shoes and take an interest in one another’s ideas rather than focus only on their own perspective. That causes them to work together more effectively and smoothly: Conflicts are less heated, and groups achieve better results.
  • he groups whose curiosity had been heightened performed better than the control groups because they shared information more openly and listened more carefully.
  • Hire for curiosity.
  • “Have you ever found yourself unable to stop learning something you’ve never encountered before? Why? What kept you persistent?”
  • most people perform at their best not because they’re specialists but because their deep skill is accompanied by an intellectual curiosity that leads them to ask questions, explore, and collaborate.
  • “What is the one thing I should do to make things better for you?”
  • hen we demonstrate curiosity about others by asking questions, people like us more and view us as more competent, and the heightened trust makes our relationships more interesting and intimate.
  • But focusing on learning is generally more beneficial to us and our organizations,
  • A body of research demonstrates that framing work around learning goals (developing competence, acquiring skills, mastering new situations, and so on) rather than performance goals (hitting targets, proving our competence, impressing others) boosts motivation. And when motivated by learning goals, we acquire more-diverse skills, do better at work, get higher grades in college, do better on problem-solving tasks, and receive higher ratings after training. Unfortunately, organizations often prioritize performance goals.
  • rewarding people not only for their performance but for the learning needed to get there.
  • Leaders can also stress the value of learning by reacting positively to ideas that may be mediocre in themselves but could be springboards to better ones.
  • Organizations can foster curiosity by giving employees time and resources to explore their interests.
  • Employees can also broaden their interests by broadening their networks. Curious people often end up being star performers thanks to their diverse networks,
  • Leaders can also boost employees’ curiosity by carefully designing their teams.
  • What if…?” and “How might we…?”
  • To encourage curiosity, leaders should also teach employees how to ask good questions.
  • Organizing “Why?” days, when employees are encouraged to ask that question if facing a challenge, can go a long way toward fostering curiosity.
  • 5 Whys
  •  
    HT Nicole Martin
Meghan Cureton

How Do You Teach to the Standards When Doing Project-Based Learning? - 4 views

  • People often debate about whether we should be process-driven or product-driven in project-based learning. But I think there’s a third option. We can be learning-driven. In other words, we should start with the question, “What do we want students to learn?” and let that drive the process and the product.
  • PBL is not a license to ditch the standards or take a break from real learning.
  • #1: Inquiry-DrivenInquiry-driven PBL begins with a state of curiosity and wonder. It might be as simple as the sentence stem “I wonder why _________” or “I wonder how _________.” Students then have the opportunity to research, ideate, and create.
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  • #4: Problem-DrivenProblem-driven PBL begins with a specific problem or challenge that students must solve. An example is our maker challenges that present a specific scenario that leads students into research, problem-solving, ideation, and a final product that solves the initial challenge.
  • #3: Product-DrivenPBL experts often say, “Students should focus on the process and not the product.” But there’s also a time and a place for projects that challenge students to focus on developing a quality product. In these projects, the product has tighter parameters but the process is more flexible.
  • #2: Interest-DrivenAnother approach is the interest-driven PBL process.
  • #5: Empathy-Driven (Design Thinking)Empathy-driven PBL can have elements of the previous four PBL approaches.
Meghan Cureton

Center for Civic Innovation - 1 views

  •  
    In MVIFI infancy, I wonder if connecting w/an org like this could help us expand reach and possibility. Events look neat, too. This model could also provide inspiration as we grow (new education arm launching this year according to their website).
Jim Tiffin Jr

3 Things We Should Stop Doing in Professional Development - 0 views

  •  
    Wondering what some of these ideas might look like at a fuse or an edcamp or any other school PL day...
T.J. Edwards

Learning Matters More Than Education - 2 views

  •  
    I wonder if Bo Adams would agree that it's about learning ;)
Meghan Cureton

4 Ways to Lead and Create a "Culture of Innovation" From Any Position - The Principal of Change - 0 views

  • best learning can happen when we are uncomfortable,
  •  Observe, look, challenge, and wonder about the things on the walls and the learning in the school like it was your first day, every day.
  • Impact one other teacher in your school, and you impact probably a minimum of twenty students (that year only).
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  • Building innovative organizations will take all of us working together. This is not about a “top down” or “bottom up” approach as much as it is about “all hands on deck.” And it is possible.
Jim Tiffin Jr

"Venture capital" with @MViDiploma #MVPSchool #MVIFI (with images, tweets) · boadams1 · Storify - 0 views

  • building serious capacity
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Wondering if the word "serious" needs to be included here. Your thought Mr. Adams? :-) #havefun #insidejoke
Jim Tiffin Jr

When Grading Harms Student Learning | Edutopia - 0 views

  • Is grading the focus, or is learning the focus?
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Simple, straightforward reminder of what assessment is for.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      A simple, straightforward reminder of what assessment is for.
  • Zeros do not reflect student learning. They reflect compliance.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Exactly.
  • a deduction in points. Not only didn't this correct the behavior, but it also meant that behavioral issues were clouding the overall grade report. Instead of reflecting that students had learned, the grade served as an inaccurate reflection of the learning goal.
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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.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      I completely agree with this point. But admittedly, I still am not sure how it would work in practice... I totally realize that the grades we give as teachers are completely under the school's control - we can go back and change grades even after the course has ended if we need to. But at the core of my question is, "What is the leverage (if that is the right word) that we can use to help students learn that responsibility?" Sports and pulling privileges come to mind, but what else is there. I wonder what other teachers have used for this situation? 
  • Practice assignments and homework can be assessed, but they shouldn't be graded.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      An excellent distinction!
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      An excellent distinction!
  • 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.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Guilty :-(
  • 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.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      +1!
Bo Adams

Stop telling us it's not about the points | thebloggerina - 1 views

  • If I focused on just learning all of the material instead of playing for points, I would fail.
  • If I learn now, I’m denied a bright future of learning later.
  • Even though I have good grades, my academic confidence is very low.
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  • As far as I know, the people judging our transcript will always win.
  • Instead, I would introduce a system of portfolios to let schools judge your real work and see you as a person, not as an average of numbers and letters.
  • If I had to put a date on when points became my main priority, I would say it was my first day of high school.
  • You could be wondering “Why doesn’t she want to focus on simply learning?” My answer is very easy. No one has time for that. Just as my day is split into 7 periods, so is my time after school. There is only so much I can do and only so much that I can handle.
  • If I learn now, I’m denied a bright future of learning later.
  • When I hear the frustration of my teachers about the desperation students have for points, I feel two things: guilt and a longing to be able to say that I don’t live on points and I fully submerge myself in my subjects. But that possibility seems untouchable, a million miles away.
  •  
    #stuvoice
  •  
    HT @MeghanCureton
Bo Adams

How Teachers Are Changing Grading Practices With an Eye on Equity | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

  • experiences students have in each teacher’s class can be vastly different
    • Bo Adams
       
      I am so curious how the US faculty discussion of this article will go. This paragraph made me pause because I wonder if teachers actually care that much that their grading policies are different than another teacher's policies. Do they look at it from a student's perspective? Or from a learning coherence perspective?
  • Grades, then, become a behavior management tool, a motivational tool, and sometimes an indication of mastery too.
  • common practice of averaging grades
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  • retakes
  • extra credit
  • enter the best score
  • behavioral things
  • group work
  • 0-100 scale
  • “zero”
  • 0-4 scale,
Jim Tiffin Jr

Your Team Is Brainstorming All Wrong - 2 views

  • demonstrate that groups that use Osborn’s rules of brainstorming come up with fewer ideas (and fewer good ideas) than the individuals would have developed alone.
  • There are several reasons for this productivity loss, as academics call it. For one, when people work together, their ideas tend to converge. As soon as one person throws out an idea, it affects the memory of everyone in the group and makes them think a bit more similarly about the problem than they did before. In contrast, when people work alone, they tend to diverge in their thinking, because everyone takes a slightly different path to thinking about the problem.
  • Early in creative acts it’s important to diverge, that is, to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail.
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  • Many techniques use a structure like this. For example, in the 6-3-5 method, six people sit around a table and write down three ideas. They pass their stack of ideas to the person on their right, who builds on them. This passing is done five times, until everyone has had the chance to build on each of the ideas. Afterward, the group can get together to evaluate the ideas generated.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      The 6-3-5 technique summarized.
  • allow individual work during divergent phases of creativity and group work during convergent phases.
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Here is the key to the most productive brainstorming techniques.
  • t is often important to spend time agreeing on the problem to be solved. A whole round of divergence and convergence on the problem statement can be done before giving people a chance to suggest solutions. 
    • Jim Tiffin Jr
       
      Wonder if there is a place for this in our HMW work?
  • It’s important that groups have time to explore enough ideas that they can consider more than just the first few possibilities that people generate.
  • Many brainstorming sessions involve people talking about solutions. That biases people toward solutions that are easy to talk about. It may also lead to solutions that are abstract and may never work in practice.
  • a combination of drawing and writing is ideal for generating creative solutions to problems
  • First, it’s hard for people to describe spatial relationships, so any solution that requires a spatial layout is better described with pictures than with words. Second, a large amount of the brain is devoted to visual processing, so sketching and interpreting drawings increases the involvement of those brain regions in idea generation. Third, it is often difficult to describe processes purely in words, so diagrams are helpful.
  • To develop stronger ideas, you need to manage the conversation so that the team doesn’t converge on a solution before everyone hears what others are thinking.
  •  
    "Early in creative acts it's important to diverge, that is to think about what you are doing in as many ways as possible. Later, you want to converge on a small number of paths to follow in more detail."
Meghan Cureton

Why I Don't Grade | Jesse Stommel - 2 views

  • grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education.
  • Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another.
  • Certainly, metacognition, and the ability to self-assess, must be developed, but I see it as one of the most important skills we can teach in any educational environment.
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  • You should consider this course a “busy-work-free zone.” If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions.
  • I find it strange that teachers and institutions would pre-determine outcomes before students even arrive upon the scene.
  • As educators, we have helped build (or are complicit in) a system that creates a great deal of pressure around grades. We shouldn't blame (or worse, degrade) students for the failures of that system.
  • Authentic feedback (and evaluation) means honoring subjectivity and requires that we show up as our full selves, both teachers and learners, to the work of education. Grades can't be “normed” if we recognize the complexity of learners and learning contexts. Bias can't be accounted for unless we acknowledge it.
  • Because I put myself outside of the grading loop, I can focus all my efforts on feedback and encouragement — on teaching, not grading.” Which leads me to wonder whether “graded participation” is actually an oxymoron. We can't participate authentically, can't dialogue, without first disrupting the power dynamics of grading.
  • “Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself.”
  • “There is an extreme mismatch between what we value and how we count.”
  • a mixture of things assessed and a mixture of kinds of assessment, because the work of being a doctor (or engineer, sociologist, teacher, etc.) is sufficiently complex that any one system of measurement or indicator of supposed mastery will necessarily fail.
  • “When the how’s of assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the shadows.” Grades are not something we should have ever allowed to be naturalized. Assessment should be, by its nature, an open question.
Meghan Cureton

Stop Telling your Kids that School Will Prepare them for Life - 0 views

  • In what job, for instance, would 20 to 30 workers have to sit in neat rows listening to their foreman or manager drone on for 40 minutes at a time before getting to work? In what industry does that work end up in heaps of unread papers — or worse — papers marked in some color to indicate failure, intended only to cause shame and worry before they are forgotten.
  • But I often wonder how many brilliant minds have been wasted because they didn’t conform during the critical years of adolescent education.
  • Still, with all of the advances in society, our conception of what an education system should be remains what is was when we were kids. And when our parents were kids.A system where introverts are often praised and extroverts are managed.And it looks nothing like real life.
Nicole Martin

The Power of Hidden Teams - 0 views

  • the most powerful factor was simply whether or not respondents reported doing most of their work on a team. Those who did were more than twice as likely to be fully engaged as those who said they did most of their work alone. The local, ground-level experience of work — the people they worked with and their interactions with them — trumped everything else.
  • The team is the reality of your experience at work.
  • The quality of this team experience is the quality of your work experience.
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  • by finally being able to see dynamic, ephemeral, local teams, we would better fight the real war for talent: not just attracting the best people, but getting from them the best that they, uniquely, have to offer.
  • the biggest differentiator between high- and low-performing teams: trust in the team leader.
  • we discovered that strong agreement with two statements from our survey, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me” and “I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work,” corresponds with a high level of trust in the team leader. This suggests that despite the fluidity of today’s working world, the best team leaders can help each team member feel both understood and focused. Know me for my best, and then focus my work around that: These are the fundamental needs of every team member, and the foundation of any high-performing team.
  • frequent attention to the work of each team member is what we might call the anchor ritual of team leadership. These organizations have all instituted a simple weekly conversation between team leaders and each of their team members and have been able to measure increases in engagement as a function of the frequency of these check-ins.
  • The fundamental lesson of the research is that work happens on teams, whether they are overlapping, dynamic, spontaneous or designed, long-lived or short-lived. The real world of work is messy. We must push into the richness of real teams doing real work, and we must ask new questions: Do large successful teams have the same habits and rhythms as small successful teams? In how many ways do teams start? Do the best ways for team members to share information vary according to the type of team they’re on? Are some ways demonstrably better than others, in terms of their impact on team engagement? Do virtual teams adopt a cadence different from that of colocated teams?
  • frequency of conversations is critical
  • The research reveals that for people to be engaged, the span of control must allow each team leader to check-in, one on one, with each team member every week of the year. Any relayering, delayering, or org redesign that prevents such frequent attention will ultimately lead to disengagement, burnout, and turnover.
  • to engage your people, you should avoid mandating that they show up at the office every day, and also that all the time you spend helping your remote workers join, get to know the other members of, and feel supported by their teams will pay off in the form of more-engaged workers. Engagement is about who you work with, not where.
  • Employees should have more control over their work and a greater chance to do work they love. They should have the best of both worlds: one predictable, stable role with a “home team” (more often than not, the static team depicted on the org chart) and one “side hustle” — a series of opportunities to join dynamic teams inside the same organization. Their greatest value to any of these teams may well be the particular, wonderful, and weird set of strengths they possess.
  • Thus we should select, train, reward, and promote leaders not on the basis of an abstract list of generic leadership competencies but, rather, on their appetite for team leadership and their demonstrable track record as team leaders.
  • What are your priorities this week, and How can I help?
  • For team leaders, the emphasis needs to shift from the generic to the specific. We need to be clear that the job of a team leader is simply, and challengingly, this: to create, day in and day out, an experience on the team that allows each person to offer his or her unique best, and then to meld those contributions into something no individual could do alone. We need to anchor this job in rituals and measures, all designed to help magnify what the best teams do: the weekly check-in; frequent discussion with each person and with the team as a whole about where people can employ their strengths; and use of the eight items in our methodology to gauge progress, not for the purpose of accountability but, rather, for illumination and course correction.
  • nd here, finally, we see the core purpose of teams: They are the best method we humans have ever devised to make each person’s uniqueness useful. We know that the frequent use of strengths leads to high performance, and we know that strengths vary from person to person. High-functioning teams are essential to a high-functioning organization because they create more opportunities for each person to use his or her strengths by enabling the tasks at hand to be divided according to the strengths on offer. Teams make weirdness useful. They are a mechanism for integrating the needs of the individual and the needs of the organization. If we can get them right, we solve a lot of problems. Ultimately, then, to help our people become fully engaged, we need to help our team leaders see that they are our weirdness orchestrators, our quirk capturers — that theirs is the most important job in our companies, and that only they can do it.
  • The eight statements (taken verbatim from the ADPRI study) capture the emotional and attitudinal precursors to engagement and the productive employee behaviors that flow as a result. I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. My teammates have my back. I know I will be recognized for excellent work. I have great confidence in my company’s future. In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
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