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The apparent struggles of the floundering group have what Kapur calls a “hidden efficacy”: they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions.

they’re able to transfer the knowledge they’ve gathered more effectively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else’s expertise.

“design for productive failure” by building it into the learning process.

There’s a very narrow band of writing that is assessed in schools, and a lot is at stake on that narrow field. So the question is how do we balance helping young people do well in assessment contexts with the other stuff that might actually take them fuarther in the world?

You mentioned earlier about teachers needing to have digital lives—why is that important to connected learning? We don’t want to just say to educators, “You do these fives steps and you’ll have active, enquiring learners.” That’s forgetting that the teacher is also a learner. We think if we have active, enquiring, connected, engaged adults, they’ll transfer that culture or learning and inquiry to young people.

How do we link what we’re learning about the creative opportunities in new digital environments to how people engage and learn in their communities and in society at large?

Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?

The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the “Bamboo Ceiling”—an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership. The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation

It’s racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It’s simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and “pumping the iron of math” is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.

Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics. LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured that they will be able to “keep your values, while acquiring new skills,” along the way to becoming “culturally competent leaders.”

The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. “There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,” he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for “bitter labor.” “There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.” By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. “White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they’re only going to do the really important work. You’re a quarterback. It’s a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you’re supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you’re finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.” This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement.

If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it’s probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-­takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else’s behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009.

though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

Reflective teachers help students understand that the students will now look back rather than move forward. They will take a break from what they have been doing, step away from their work, and ask themselves, "What have I (or we) learned from doing this activity?"

The teacher helps each student monitor individual progress, construct meaning from the content learned and from the process of learning it,

Teachers who promote reflective classrooms ensure that students are fully engaged in the process of making meaning.

in written and oral form

To be reflective means to mentally wander through where we have been and to try to make some sense out of it.

and journals

Habits of Mind

ask students to reread their journals, comparing what they knew at the beginning of a learning sequence with what they know now. Ask them to select significant learnings, envision how they could apply these learnings to future situations

the quality of students' reflections changes as children develop their reading and writing skills. When kindergartners were asked to reflect orally, they gave rich descriptions of their work. But as they developed their writing ability and were encouraged to write their own reflections, the reflections became less descriptive. This change puzzled the teachers until they realized that students are more concerned about spelling, punctuation, and other aspects of editing when they first learn to write. Because students do not have a great deal of fluency with their writing, they are more limited in what they describe. In contrast, when meeting with the teacher, the kindergartners elaborated on what they wrote about their work. And once students became more fluent with their writing skills, they were able to represent their reflective thoughts more easily.

stereotypical comments such as "This was fun!" or "I chose this piece of work because it is my best." Teachers realized that they needed to spend time teaching students how to reflect. They asked students, "What does a reflection look like when it really tells you something about the experience?"

Reflection was not a time for testimonials about how good or bad the experience was. Instead, reflection was the time to consider what was learned from the experience.

Students might collect work throughout the year as part of a portfolio process. Every quarter they can review the work in their collection folders and choose one or two pieces to enter into their portfolio. When they make those choices, they can take the opportunity to reflect on the reasons for their choices and to set goals for their next quarter's work.

superficial to in-depth reflections. Indicators of in-depth reflections include making specific reference to the learning event, providing examples and elaboration, making connections to other learning, and discussing modifications based on insights from this experience.

One type of photography in which setting is very important is travel photography.

Using landmarks, monuments, or famous natural elements in a photograph is a core technique for evoking a sense of place.

The photographer selects the focal point not only by focusing the camera but also through other techniques.

shutter speed to bring only one element into focus immediately elevates that to the most important part of the image.

one element in the photograph is strongly backlit, it may seem to glow and thus draw the viewer’s attention.

What is the photographer’s thought process as she composes, frames, shoots and selects an image? Listen as photographer Lisa Maizlish narrates the decisions she made in photographing the students featured on the PBS reality show American High.

viewers have to decide how to interpret a photograph’s context

information about the people, events, setting, and so on are made explicit by the photographer — there are distinct visual clues that tell us who the people are, what they are doing, and where and when the photograph was taken.

implicit — implied but not clearly communicated by the photographer, or left to be inferred by the viewer.

identities of the people

unclear

their purpose may be unknown

time and place may be difficult or impossible to discern.

Viewers may not even realize that they are making those assumptions

Just as successful written communication requires that the writer and reader speak the same language, successful visual communication requires that the photographer and viewer share a common "visual language" of signs, clues, and assumptions.

Were your assumptions correct? Can you always trust your first instinct? (And even having read the caption, how much do we really know about these girls and their lives?)

a different culture might ask why this round brown object is

we have to be careful that we have enough cultural background in common with the photographer to correctly interpret what we see.

The photograph by itself tells us very little about what’s going on; we probably could have invented any number of captions, and you’d have believed us!