Group items tagged

Colin, great to meet you yesterday. Here is that article on cell phones and what kids pay attention to that we were talking about. I wonder if you could get the research done by Disney?

Colin, I'm not sure what direction your research is heading, but the idea of balancing technology with Mindfulness and being Present is an interesting one that I don't know has been really touched on. Here is a recent article from the NY Times that relates... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/your-money/mindfulness-requires-practice-and-purpose.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 "...scans show mindfulness may change the way our brains function and help us improve attention..." Could be a way for students' brains to reset and refocus after using technology?

Colin, I would weigh in again on this topic by saying...can't wait to see all of your research! Enosburg may be a good test pool or a place that really will need your findings. As I have mentioned we are a 1-1 Ipad school grades 6 through 12. I also will be interested to see how the larger cultural conversation goes on this topic. I have noticed more cell phone jokes from comedians, more reference to texts in sitcoms and movies as well. AND, as you know, there is and will much more talk about digital addictions. Initial brain-scans connect the pattern to gambling addicts. Interesting stuff! See you soon-

How Singapore's education system is innovating and deliberately adopting practices to promote creativity. The result - extremely high PISA test scores.

Article based on The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators Focus on concluding three chapters, People, Processes, and Philosophies, which draw on and offers 15 takeaways for Principals and School-Leaders.

What You Can Do to Become Stronger Innovation Leaders in Your School: 1. Own as Principal the role of Innovator-in-Chief: You can't delegate innovation. 2. Make your practice of "active innovation" visible. 3. Create complementary teams in school leadership. 4 . Observe closely what other principals and schools are doing. 5. Arrange for employee swaps. 6. Ask "Why?" 7. Seek people who had invented something, held deep expertise in a particular knowledge area, and demonstrated a passion to change the world. 8. Remember that innovators want to work with and for other innovators. 9. Embed innovation as an explicit, consistent element of performance reviews. 10. Develop formal and informal processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges. 11. Network externally. 12. Practice Beta testing and Prototyping. 13. Build many small, diverse teams. 14. Communicate and reinforce that Innovation is everyone's job. 15. Make innovation an explicit core value of your school. 16. Give more time for innovation. 17. Create "a safe space for others to innovate. 18. Model your risk taking and your learning from failure.

The book is framed around the Five Core Skills of Innovators, a framework highly valuable for ourselves and our students: What are we doing to do more of and become better at *Associating, *Questioning, *Observing, *Networking, *Experimenting.

This Huff Post blog post by Karen Gross, President of Vermont Southern College, explores what's needed for the transition from high school to higher ed.

This was very interesting - and has huge implications for how schools move ahead.

They're Watching You at Work: What happens when Big Data meets human resources? The emerging practice of "people analytics" is already transforming how employers hire, fire, and promote.

"Academic environments are artificial environments," Laszlo Bock, Google's senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. "People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they're conditioned to succeed in that environment," which is often quite different from the workplace.

"...administered a battery of tests to a group of corporate presidents, he found that not one of them scored in the "acceptable" range for hiring. Such assessments, he concluded, measured not potential but simply conformity." I would build on this with the statement that current assessment and graduation requirements are great at measuring a student's ability to excel at conformity and irrelevant knowledge sets while doing little to encourage that student's individuality and personal skill sets. Current assessment and graduation requirements are great at measuring a student's ability to memorize what others think important, but not in assessing and fostering the important act of thinking for themselves. Current assessment and graduation requirements are great at measuring who a student is according to an antiquated framework defined within the walls of a school. But, scripted versions of success and knowledge don't allow for assessing and promoting student potential for a world where there are no boundaries or false constraints of whom he/she might become. JF

Another piece that puts the focus of Innovation on People rather than Programs. My personal belief is that #EdReform should start and end with empowering PD which is Personal and Purposeful. With that, what if schools modeled their PD on the Rowland Foundation's model of #EdReform? What would it look like if PD were not determined and delivered but instead supported and shared? What if PD were about providing resources and teaching teachers to be data collectors, researchers, developers of innovation? 2 year Action Research cycle? What if every teacher in a school spent a school year coming up with a hunch, collecting data, researching ideas around their hunch...then spent the second year testing it out/implementing it in the classroom, more data collection, presenting outcomes to their peers, and collecting feedback for reflection and refinement?

"What has proved to matter is...the building of knowledge and innovation skills, which are much harder and take longer to get in place and maintain. Leading-edge competency in one's area of practice is indispensable; practice at turning ideas into reality is a must." "...while learning is hard work, and the value is not quantifiable, it is the only way to remain valuable in an economy that thrives on innovation. The more you invest in your people's knowledge, the more innovation you can expect to reap."

This is an uplifting read, very relevant to the themes of our upcoming conference.

The Rigor/Relevance Framework is a tool to examine curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The Rigor/Relevance Framework is based on two dimensions of higher standards and student achievement.

This is great! Thanks Adam. I feel like so often schools have aspirations of quadrant D, but spend so much time focusing on quadrant A that they never reach those aspirations. This reminds me a lot of Stephen Covey's time management matrix...schools spend so much time in quadrant 1 being reactive (Putting out fires aka chasing standardized test scores.) that they never get to focus on being proactive (quadrant 2) and really think about what we want our students to learn in school.