“Creativity isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the connective thread across every part of the school system—from what students do to how adults lead. Below are five commitments that aren’t siloed strategies, but mutually reinforcing actions that help creativity grow. It must be structurally embedded in curriculum, assessment, adult roles, and resource allocation.”
“District officials refer to the curriculum’s approach as “whole truth history.” A unit on the American Revolution has students read both the Declaration of Independence and a letter from Seneca tribal chiefs describing how victory in the Revolutionary War let the American government seize their land.”
“There are growing signs that artificial intelligence poses a real threat to a substantial number of the jobs that normally serve as the first step for each new generation of young workers… Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder. In tech, advanced coding tools are creeping into the tasks of writing simple […]
“Just as students who plan to go to college can get a head start through Advanced Placement programs, high schools, colleges and employers should work together to provide the relevant coursework to engage students in promising career opportunities.”
“Not long ago, I posed a thought experiment: What if we designed a school with the explicit goal of producing dependent learners? …In this hypothetical school: Autonomy is minimized. Students follow rigid schedules and adult-created rules. Learning is passive. Direct instruction dominates while curiosity and risk-taking are discouraged. Assessments reward single correct answers, not divergent […]
“Alabama state law previously required students to take at least four years each of English, math, science and social studies to graduate from high school. The state is now calling that track the “Option A” diploma. The new “Option B” workforce diploma allows students to replace two math and two science classes with a sequence […]
““Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, empathy — these are the skill sets people will need to cultivate in the future to be more effective,” Mr. FoFana said. “And, of course, learning how to manage the A.I. tools.””
“The curriculum didn’t engage the kids, several acknowledged. But again, they were not blaming the teachers who were teaching the required curriculum. They blamed the system, their system. “It doesn’t offer kids meaningful choices,” one superintended said. “The world has changed, kids have changed, and the curriculum hasn’t. Most of what’s taught in their academic […]
“It was an incredible victory for American schools. Fewer struggling math students meant more opportunities to complete advanced coursework, qualify for good jobs, and earn higher wages. Unbeknownst to us at the time, 2013 turned out to be the high water mark. Achievement stopped improving. First, it stagnated. Then, toward the end of 2010s, it […]
“One data point educators find heartening: The vast majority of students—94 percent—want at least some media literacy instruction in schools. In fact, more than half of teens surveyed—57 percent—believe that schools should “definitely” be required to teach media literacy.”
“The survey paints an unusually detailed portrait of how the nation’s history is being taught during an era of intense political polarization. It reached 3,000 middle and high school teachers across nine states: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.”
“This article attempts to reframe education’s purpose away from the recent market-based assumptions of neoliberalism and toward a renewed civic purpose for education in a changing society. We try to make the case for why public schools still matter to democratic preparation, what kinds of shifts are needed to equip young people to be full […]
“Evolutionary zoology provides a framework to understand the emergence of human competencies such as creativity, curiosity, resilience and pro-social, even ethical, behaviors. Organic life forms of diverse species exhibit behaviors and traits that share common threads with these human capacities developed throughout the eras, and ongoing research provides insights into the evolutionary foundations of these […]
“While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability […]
“In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 out of 26 students earned college credit, surpassing state and global averages. The majority of them, said Ouimet, wrote about “There There.””
“But the complaint also pinpoints what Pennridge schools teach — and what they prevent students from learning — as a violation of civil rights. The curriculum changes, removal of DEI resources, and other steps to restrict student education on discrimination and its history “created an environment where race- and sex-based harassment can flourish,” the filing […]
“As part of the curriculum redesign—which district leaders credit with more than doubling the number of schools that receive recognition from the state for high achievement—Maxlow in 2021 helped create a student-internship program. High school students can apply for a job to help conduct annual reviews of the district’s curriculum and classroom activities. The approximately […]
“Four eighth-grade English language arts teachers, initially most concerned about their students’ disinterest in reading, stopped assigning any particular book and instead gave students wide access to books written for young adults, let them choose what to read (or not), and gave them time to read and openly discuss the books. We studied these classrooms […]
“The course will launch for credit next fall, and is currently being taught as a pilot program in 700 schools across 40 states… African American studies is an interdisciplinary field, melding history with the study of contemporary politics, culture and law.”
“When people engage in conversations about identity, diversity, and justice with someone who has opposing views, we encourage them to practice the four strategies we’ve described: Locate the conversation on the controversy scale… Find uncommon commonalities.. Show your work on the remaining disagreements to demonstrate that you’ve thought carefully about the subject… Manage your expectations.”
“In a groundbreaking step, the campus announced Thursday that it will drop admission requirements for calculus, physics and chemistry courses for students who don’t have access to them and offer alternative paths to prove mastery of the material… One of Caltech’s alternative paths is taking Khan Academy‘s free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher […]
“The most common way of discussing current and controversial topics is the classroom debate. While I enjoy good debates, they might not be accomplishing what we want them to, and unless we take the time to build foundational skills and dispositions they might actually be getting in our way… There are other effective dialogic models […]
“Our conversation crisis has manifested in eye-watering political polarity. This bitter partisanship is not new, but fresh research has documented how it interferes with learning on college campuses and ultimately, decreases young adults’ faith in the power of communicating across differences. Their jadedness — and lack of ability and willingness to use conversation as a mechanism for compromise — […]
“In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve […]
“An experimental psychologist by training, Logue designed an experiment. She compared remedial math classes to the alternative of letting ill-prepared students proceed straight to a college course accompanied by extra help. The early results of her randomized control trial were so extraordinary that her study influenced not only CUNY in 2016 but also California lawmakers […]
“Instead of trying to “win” every argument you find yourself in, you could have more success if you look at arguments as opportunities to learn and grow… The setup was simple: Participants had to debate hot-button topics in an online chatroom. One group was instructed to adopt a competitive mentality in order to “win” the […]
“If the system has to be fixed, and we can’t fix the system by adding to it, then the logical place to start is with subtraction. We need to look closely at our schools and figure out everything that we don’t need to be doing anymore. We need to find as many things as possible that we […]
“Some say competitive debate is a flawed model for healthy discourse, whether for domestic disputes or political disagreements. In an essay in The Dublin Review, the novelist Sally Rooney, a former champion debater, characterized formal debate as overly aggressive and possibly immoral. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument […]
“We’ve got no problem fawning over people who are good at solving well-defined problems. They get to be called “professor” and “doctor….” People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don’t get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test they can take that will […]
“Consistent exposure to music, like learning to play a musical instrument, or taking voice lessons, strengthens a particular set of academic and social-emotional skills that are essential to learning. In ways that are unmatched by other pursuits, like athletics for instance, learning music powerfully reinforces language skills, builds and improves reading ability, and strengthens memory […]
“Traditionally, teachers use discussion as a means to an end – a learning activity that achieves content objectives, like untangling the events leading up to a world war or tracking character growth through a novel. But in today’s world, discussion skills need to be a learning objective. Conversation Labs would approach Discussion as a Discipline: a set of […]
“There is broad support among parents for teaching SEL-related skills in schools, although the term “social and emotional learning” is relatively unpopular… Based on those results, Tyner distills four policy implications, including recommending that SEL proponents focus on specifics rather than nebulous concepts. Faced with specifics such as schools teaching sensitivity to different cultures, parents […]
“Spatial ability, defined by a capacity for mentally generating, rotating, and transforming visual images, is one of the three specific cognitive abilities most important for developing expertise in learning and work settings.”
“To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize.”
“Is Math appropriate to teach leadership, or is critical thinking more likely? Beyond Communication and Creativity respectively, what should Language and Arts focus on? After three years of research, CCR publishes its ground-breaking recommendations in a new report, which describes which disciplines are most conducive to teach given competencies. Among the findings: The importance of the […]
“Every discipline has a key role to play for development of Competency expertise and transfer. If all disciplines focus on teaching their top Competencies, benefits will exist at the curricular, course, and learner level. Curricula will be integrated with relevant Competencies which will in turn increase content relevance and depth of understanding of what it […]
“Currently nearing the end of its second school year, this high school is the end product of a group of brave, forward-thinking educators who saw what education could be, and instead of trying to work within the system, asked themselves, “Why don’t we just build it?””
“To help school communities think through what’s the purpose of schooling, a little history can help, as the dominant policy rationale for public schools’ purpose in society has changed over time. “
“If students know that teachers value and believe in them, no matter what they have gone through over the past year, educators can create a classroom environment where high expectations are the norm. When students feel empowered, they care more and work harder. Next time you hear the phrase learning loss, think about whether we really […]
“When someone seems closed-minded, my instinct is to argue the polar opposite of their position. But when I go on the attack, my opponents either shut down or fight back harder. On more than one occasion, I’ve been called a “logic bully.” When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to […]
“Generalists are not experts—but they are skilled at accessing the work of experts. They know how to look at an issue from multiple angles, sift good information from less good information, corroborate and compare what they find.”
“These books decry the generational chauvinism that assumes that today’s educational system is superior to all that came before, that the kind of courses and pedagogies we offer are the best imaginable, and that our current curriculum — which combines excessive requirements without a clearly defined sense of what a graduate should know or do […]
“Students are deferring college in numbers larger than ever before. This is an extraordinary opportunity to discover a language, history, and culture that is entirely new. Find ancient civilizations and IKEA, rigorous academics and relaxing excursions, desert landscapes and a lush campus covered in green quadrangles. All this and professionally-recognized university counseling for college repositioning. […]
Three week, online courses, professional development for teachers. Dive into language, history, and culture of the Middle East for your summer professional development. The King’s Academy Summer Institute is designed to share the rich culture and language of Jordan and the larger Middle East with teachers and adult learners around the world. The program offers online learners […]
“Sixty-five percent of teachers in a new nationwide poll favor starting next year with ‘regularly scheduled instruction” over other options, such as revisiting concepts from the end of this semester, extending next school year or offering students the chance to repeat a grade… The results show administrators — who made up about 12% of the 5,555 respondents […]
“The researchers compared siblings who attended different high schools, and the ones who attended schools that were better at boosting soft skills had better outcomes.”
“I found myself darting around the room having to explain what the word “inevitable” meant. The question of inevitability in history is a fascinating one that middle schoolers of all levels can discuss. But it sure helps to understand what the word “inevitable” means in order to have it. As I heard from another teacher, […]
“If we want people to perform well, concision is king: the fewer the criteria, the easier it is to reinforce, practice, monitor—and thus ensure—that those criteria are fully met. When organizations establish only a tiny set of crystal-clear criteria, both performance—and job satisfaction—skyrocket. The same goes for schools. There are both historic and contemporary precedents […]
“She and her team found that arts integration instruction led to long-term retention of science concepts at least as successfully as conventional science teaching. Arts integration was particularly helpful for students with the lowest reading scores. Studies like this one have led to a resurgence of interest in arts integration, a pedagogy that uses art as […]
“In the workshops students worked on math problems together, considering together what it would take to achieve at the highest levels on different problems. The academic improvement that resulted from the workshops was significant. Within two years, the failure rate of African American students had dropped to zero, and the African American and Latino students […]
“Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 […]
“What if the medicine we have been prescribing is only making matters worse, particularly for poor children? What if the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to drill kids on discrete skills but to teach them, as early as possible, the very things we’ve marginalized—including history, science, and other content that could build […]
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivises or even demands hyperspecialisation. While it is true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases – as technology spins […]
“Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone… In 20 years, we’ll know a lot more about the costs and benefits […]
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, and even demands, hyper-specialization. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases — as technology spins the world […]
“Deeper learning is defined as a set of competencies that include content mastery, critical thinking, collaboration, and effective communication. Mehta and Fine define it as the place where “mastery, identity, and creativity” meet. Students who have engaged in deeper learning have strong expertise in a field, learn to identify themselves as practitioners of the discipline, and […]
“We need to see the reading comprehension problem for what it primarily is — a knowledge problem. There is no way around the need for children to gain broad general knowledge in order to gain broad general proficiency in reading.”
“This pattern extends beyond music and sports. Students who have to specialize earlier in their education — picking a pre-med or law track while still in high school — have higher earnings than their generalist peers at first, according to one economist’s research in several countries. But the later-specializing peers soon caught up… The early […]
There are five core computational thinking skills… These are collecting data, analyzing data, decomposing, finding patterns and using abstract thinking.”
“The Arts + Social Impact Explorer is designed as a gateway to research, projects, and support organizations. The goal is to enable people to extract key information at a quick glance, helping users visualize how the arts permeate community life while providing leaders what they need to make visible impact.”
“We must revisit the largely held perception of school as a primarily academic institution that offers learning opportunities at a fixed time in a fixed setting… Expanding access to out-of-school activities propels our young learners to higher graduation rates, improved academic achievement and higher wages. Out-of-school spaces also offer fertile ground for developing critical thinking, […]
Free mass public education empowered nearly everyone with the historically scarce skills of reading and numeracy. But in an economy defined by artificial intelligence and robotics, people will need much more than literacy and numeracy.”
We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an […]
“The study also illuminates the importance of six collegiate experiences, including how supportive relationships and relevant, engaging learning experiences are linked to long-term outcomes such as higher workplace engagement and wellbeing for college alumni nationwide. The proportion of currently enrolled students who strongly agree that they are confident they will graduate with the skills and knowledge they […]
K-12 education should prioritize teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork across subject areas. Teaching students to become analytical thinkers, problem solvers, and good team members will allow them to remain competitive in the job market even as the nature of work changes.”
“Beginning in the 1960s activists filed federal suits again school systems that tracked minority students… Reformers, leaning on studies done by researchers, worried about school groupings reinforcing inequalities in society by excluding low income students from advanced courses and thereby entry into college. These policymakers (and parents) pressed states and districts to open up Advanced […]
“Vermont’s experiment in experiential learning goes back a number of years, but it took off in 2013, when the legislature passed a law that lets students meet state graduation standards through work-based experiences.”
“Even though these characteristics relate in predictable ways to education, these relationships hold true even when accounting for level of education. Further, there is relatively modest overlap among the groups, meaning that each of these groups is distinct. For example, just 32% of those with high political awareness also have a lot of trust in […]
“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 […]
“The bottom line is that policymakers and advocates who have pushed for more testing in part as a way to narrow the gap between rich and poor have undermined their own efforts. They have created a system that incentivizes teachers to withhold the very thing that could accomplish both objectives: knowledge. All students suffer under […]
“Across the country, citizen-led efforts are underway that attempt to bridge the divides created or unearthed by the… presidential election. These efforts are admirable. Done wrong, however, these efforts have the potential to compound our political problems rather than ameliorate them. Profound philosophical divides with deep historical roots exist across the country about the role […]
“No matter what worldview or way of knowing someone holds dear, they always believe that they are engaging in critical thinking when they’re developing a sense of right and wrong… Much of what they conclude may be rooted in the way of knowing more than any specific source of information. That’s true for all of […]
These kids aren’t prodigiously gifted. They’ve just had the gift of the kind of education we no longer value.”
A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes […]
From 2005 to 2015, the share of US schools offering major Western languages like Spanish and German fell. Chinese has overtaken Latin. And the “other” category—comprising Arabic, Japanese, and plenty of others—nearly caught up to French.”
Such experience, it is argued, will help students by giving them a leg up in their careers and making them more useful people. And although that may often prove true in the short term, I am convinced it is not reliably the case when we consider a longer time frame — particularly for students in […]
The confusion over the purpose of the humanities has nothing to do with their relevance. The humanities are no more or less relevant now than they ever were. It is not the humanities that we have lost faith in, but the economic, political, and social order that they have been made to serve.”
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the […]
Part of the problem, Loladze was finding, lay in the research world itself. Answering the question required an understanding of plant physiology, agriculture and nutrition―as well as a healthy dollop of math.”
The curriculum changes, hammered out in just three months by the college’s faculty, will abolish traditional academic departments and instead align professors in three groups, one focusing on engineering, science, and technology, another on the environment and sustainability, and the third on creativity and the arts.”
The brilliance of what happened in Louisiana is they didn’t make a single choice for any school district in the state. They simply provided good information, training, and incentives.”
The quest for knowledge is best driven by intense curiosity rather than utility. It requires not only structure but also passion. And as Flexner pointed out, what seems useless today frequently turns out to be exactly what one needs tomorrow. Education is the same. Of course education provides career skills, but like research, it is […]
A thick institution is not one that people use instrumentally, to get a degree or to earn a salary. A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul.”
Just as children are drilled on the scientific method — turn observations into a hypothesis, design a control group, do an experiment to test your theory — the basics of working with computers is being cast as a teachable blueprint.”
What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature. Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three, as we found in a recent study… And that was in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.”
My sons are avid soccer players, so I spend a lot of time watching the “beautiful game.” The thing that makes it beautiful is not leadership, though an excellent coach is essential. Nor is it the swoosh of the ball in the goal, though winning is noisily celebrated. It is instead the intricate ballet of […]
The following lists for each of the major content areas, although not comprehensive, can act as starting points through which communities of teachers can begin to think in terms of disciplinary literacy.”
Apollo is a semester-long, four-hour block of classes—English, social studies, and art—all blended together and co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Throughout the semester, students are responsible for designing and completing four major projects, each of which is aligned with standards in all three subject areas. Students set their own goals for […]
To holistically prepare this new generation for life in an open society, what’s needed is a new model for high-school civics; one that integrates American history and government, critical thinking, media literacy, and digital literacy. The goal of such education should not be merely to instill understanding of our online civic landscape, but how to […]
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation… In the long term, the implications of […]
In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation… We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news […]
This utilitarian narrowness plagues the American pedagogical conversation, and our persistent promotion of so-called 21st-century skills has made the problem worse… Instead of interrogating the assumption that the demands of the marketplace should drive educational practice, we have rushed to impose new economic models — global, 21st-century ones — on our classrooms. Many educational progressives […]
Extracurriculars, our work suggests, tend to differ from core classes in a number of important ways. They are voluntary rather than mandatory; they often involve work that is undertaken collectively rather than individually; they feature opportunities for peer leadership and peer-to-peer learning; they involve dimensions of playfulness; and they are aligned to activities that are […]
It is one thing to be presented with a set of skills and strategies to make us more discerning and critical. It is another, more important thing, to care about the truth at all, to care more about the truth than about being right. In short, the business of teaching media literacy or critical thinking […]
“If it becomes law, the computer-coding measure — which would take effect in the 2018-19 school year — would be the first of its kind in the country… But critics of the proposal worry it could dilute students’ cultural education and place a burden on public schools that already lack adequate technology resources.”
By the early 1970s, the significance of these non-economic returns to higher education was recognised across the OECD, highlighting the futility of ‘manpower planning’. As the OECD put it, students had their own ideas of what to study. This student demand was a natural expression of contemporary ideas of democratisation, widening participation, and the emerging […]
Last year, Britain became the first G7 country to introduce compulsory computer science on the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16. By the age of seven, all children will now be expected to be capable of writing and debugging a simple program… Coding lessons in school will not turn every child into […]
“I think about [my kids’] digital futures in precisely the same way that I believe all schools should think about educating our children: equip young people with technological agency; make sure they know how to apply their critical thinking, entrepreneurial, creative, and social skills by wielding digital tools. To do so, all kids will need […]
“The foundational reason for why we find it so difficult to rebuild school curricula around the needs of the modern world is that we lack an organizing framework that can help prioritise educational competencies, and systematically structure the conversation around what individuals should learn at various stages of their development. Four-dimensional education provides a clear […]
If the benefit of schooling comes from the content learned, then it’s important to get a better understanding of what content will be most valuable to students later on in their lives. The answers may seem intuitive, but they’re also subjective and complex. A student may not use plane geometry, solid geometry, or trigonometry, but […]
With annual symposiums, mentorship programs and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern-day startup incubators–geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging […]
The graduating classes of these coding schools support the trend. They will graduate about 16,000 students this year, more than double the 6,740 graduates last year, according to a survey published by Course Report in June. The 2015 total would be about one-third of the estimated number of computer science graduates from American universities.”
It’s 33 degrees out. He’s sitting in water. And he’s going to figure out whether that becomes uncomfortable or not, [Eliza Minnucci, the teacher] says. I don’t need to make a rule for him. He’s going to figure that out. This is a place where he can learn to take care of himself.” Minnucci worries […]
This is no gimmick. The medical school at U.C.L.A. has adopted perceptual modules as part of its standard curriculum, to train skills like reading electrocardiograms, identifying rashes (there are many varieties, which all look the same to the untrained eye) and interpreting tissue samples from biopsies. The idea is that you can learn to quickly […]
This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. The entrepreneurial learner is constantly looking for new ways, new resources, new peers and potential mentors to learn new things.”
As the economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged. For example, in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences and meets people, but some people invite six people to lunch […]
The answer is not to abandon testing, but to measure the things we most value, and find good ways to do that… After all, in the past 50 years economists and psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle and dynamic as the mechanisms that explain when and why we give in to impulse, […]
Across the board, more respondents said communication skills were most important, followed by reading, math, teamwork, writing and logic. Science fell somewhere in the middle, with more than half of Americans saying it was important. [See article for further breakdown]”
Many in government and business publicly question the value of [a liberal arts] education. Yet employers in every sector continue to scoop up my students because of their ability to apply cross-disciplinary thinking to an incredibly complex world. They like my chemistry grads because not only can they find their way around a laboratory, but […]
An educational focus on asking productive questions and defining meaningful problems isn’t just an academic skill. It is an important disposition across life, work and citizenship.”
Art is not a second thought at the Integrated Arts Academy (IAA). Instead, artistic learning goals are held up as equals to academic standards and teachers work hard to design lessons that highlight content through art. “If you pick a subject area like science, social studies, math or literacy and you integrate it with an […]
Attendance at “gap fairs” more than doubled in the United States between 2010 and 2013, and enrollment in gap-year programs grew 27 percent from 2012 to 2013 alone, according to Ethan Knight, executive director of the American Gap Association. Many college websites, including Harvard’s and Yale’s, now encourage prospective freshman to consider a gap year; […]
“The bootcamp certification – its prestige, its worth – will be an interesting thing to gauge in the coming years. Outside of the tech sector (perhaps), it’s not clear that having a certificate in a particular field is actually that helpful… But the benefit to students is hardly the point here, is it. The benefit […]
“The results across our two experiments were remarkably consistent: These cultural experiences improve students’… desire to become cultural consumers in the future. Exposure to the arts also affects the values of young people, making them more tolerant and empathetic… Arts experiences boost critical thinking, teaching students to take the time to be more careful and […]
“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once, especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices… Several randomized studies of participants, who showed the same levels of cognitive function and neural processing at the start, found that those who were exposed to a period of music learning showed enhancement in multiple […]
“China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But… it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism.”
“Students are tested not by their mastery of the material but by their skill, a far more subjective area of evaluation. “Readers” must make judgments about competence and inventiveness as they work their way through some 48,000 portfolios of student artwork. That’s more than double the number submitted a decade earlier… But the growth does […]
“For years, vocational high schools have been seen as a lesser form of schooling – tracking some kids off to work while others were encouraged to go on to college and pursue higher income professions. But things are changing. At one of those schools – Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts – students can […]
“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading… Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into […]
“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning… But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support… If graduates strongly […]
“Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games, but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs… Bard… saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year.”
“Last school year, 13 juniors and seniors in the 6000-student Andover, Mass., school system enrolled in edX courses and received extracurricular credit—but no grades—upon completion of a pass-fail class. The district’s goal was to provide its students with a more rigorous and extensive list of course offerings… All but two students at Andover High completed […]
Graduates who… had a professor or professors ‘who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.’
“The moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand… In other words, the moment we quit trying to […]
“Students aren’t waiting for the system to catch up. At Walnut Creek’s Northgate, students not only petitioned for a coding class, but also formed a science-technology-math-engineering club, then built a pipeline of future coders by engaging elementary and special education classes in fun projects.”
“A summer program with no course credit, no set curriculum to cover, no competing class schedule and no penalty for failure frees students to experiment, said Alan J. Snyder, a vice president and associate provost at Lehigh. Eventually, the university plans to offer the program year-round, with many more students involved.”
“The school chose to continue the program, which runs for one semester each year and involves nine to 12 students who receive credit and a pass/fail. ‘It was really risky, because we didn’t know how colleges would interpret this on a transcript,’ Powell says. ‘But so far we’ve had only an overwhelmingly positive response,’ including […]
It was little more than a century ago that literacy became universal in Western Europe and the United States. If computational skills are on the same trajectory, how much are we hurting our economy—and our democracy—by not moving faster to make them universal?”
“Critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science.”
“Graduates who said they had a mentor who encouraged my hopes and dreams, professors who cared about me and at least one prof who made me excited about learning are three times more likely to be thriving and twice as likely to be engaged at work.”
“1. Human-computer teams are the best teams. 2. The person working the smart machine doesn’t have to be an expert in the task at hand. 3. Below some critical level of skill, adding a man to the machine will make the team less effective than the machine working alone. 4. Knowing one’s limits is more […]
“Because these were high school kids with, for the first time, a real business relying on them, this portion of the class shook them so badly they couldn’t move from their seats–literally…. Feeling the pressure, after 3 wasted days, one student on one team finally convinced her team they needed to get out of the […]
“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
“The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract and linger in the mind.”
“High-impact practices like service learning, research with faculty members, and capstone projects that are a cornerstone of residential learning and have been shown to improve student learning, none of those practices are incorporated into MOOCs right now. To transform higher education for the next generation, we need to better blend game-changing innovations with one another, […]
“Not everybody likes Chaucer enough to spend 15 weeks on him, and that’s OK.”
“This constant, sophisticated dialogue between past and present would become a defining feature of Western Civilization.”
“Mathematical proofs, for all their rigorous logic, came to look more like narratives…”
“I’ve already identified three big shifts I’d make right away…”
“When students are ability grouped into separate classes and given an identical curriculum, there is no appreciable effect on achievement. But when the curriculum is adjusted to correspond to ability level, it appears that student achievement is boosted, especially of high ability students receiving an accelerated curriculum. Heterogeneous grouping has not been adopted by enough […]