“When it comes to developing strategy in a rapidly changing world, it’s no longer enough to just make a plan and stick to it; organizations instead need to learn to set a direction and make adaptations to it.”
“At one time, America’s most celebrated citizens trained entirely outside of college, such as Abraham Lincoln, who studied to be a lawyer with the help of local attorney offices. But, as college became the default path to top professions in the 20th century, apprenticeships fell out of favor with America’s upwardly mobile culture. In order to understand a way forward, I think it helps to understand that it’s possible for a country to have a system of apprenticeships for all types of careers and also investigate the historical reasons why American high skill professions shifted away from apprenticeships in the first place.”
Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the powerful and the powerless. And these ways of thinking are destroying us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We will not Little Red Riding hood our way through life. We will unite our pack, storm the valley together and change the whole bloody system.”
“The trend toward impact measurement is mostly positive, but the push to demonstrate impact has also wasted resources, compromised monitoring efforts in favor of impact evaluation, and contributed to a rise in poor and even misleading methods of demonstrating impact.”
“Innovation-speak is meant to compensate for a dearth of actual innovation.”
[Michael Eric Dyson, Michelle Goldberg, Stephen Fry, Jordan Peterson] “Is political correctness an enemy of free speech, open debate and the free exchange of ideas? Or, by confronting head-on the dominant power relationships and social norms that exclude marginalised groups are we creating a more equitable and just society?”
“When a school reaches a stable level of about 30 percent middle-class students, the lower-income students achieve at higher levels and the privileged students do no worse.”
In our orientation, we treat our new teachers the way we would like them to treat our students. Our district's vision for learning is modeled after John Hattie's (2009, 2012) meta-analysis of influences on student achievement, and each of Hattie's best practices is incorporated into our new teacher induction. Following are Hattie's conditions for learning and how we use them to help our new teachers understand our mission to create a student-centered classroom.”
“Our brain has evolved to communicate face-to-face, the more we go away from that specific channel, the less efficient we are.”
“My beginner’s foray has taught me more than I could have guessed, illuminating my own mind and introducing me to a new level of mental discipline, not to mention a world of humility. The collaborative spirit at code culture’s heart turns out to be inspiring and exemplary… More powerful than any of this is a feeling of enfranchisement that comes through beginning to comprehend the fascinating but profoundly alien principles by which software works. By accident more than design, coders now comprise a Fifth Estate and as 21st-century citizens we need to be able to interrogate them as deeply as we interrogate politicians, marketers, the players of Wall Street and the media.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson