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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39316\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/02/how-inquiry-can-enable-students-to-become-modern-day-de-tocquevilles/de_tocqueville/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-39316\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-39316\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/02/de_Tocqueville.gif\" alt=\"Alexis de Tocqueville\" width=\"640\" height=\"960\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alexis de Tocqueville\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Some teachers are skeptical about “student-driven learning,” suspecting that it's really just another chance for unfocused social time. It can often be hard to see behind the jargon the careful planning and teacher support necessary to ensure that students not only stay focused, but also produce high-level work. Educators often wonder how students can all be working on different projects but acquiring the same skills. It may seem challenging to keep track of 30 kids investigating 30 different issues, but when inquiry-based teaching is done well, that chaotic swirl of ideas and needs is based on a strong foundation of planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia is known for its dedication to inquiry, practiced through project-based learning with public school students. As a magnet school, SLA does have an application process, but many students are not coming from schools where they experienced inquiry learning before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An example of this approach can be seen in Joshua Block’s senior social studies class. Recently, his students put democracy through the wringer, investigating American democracy not as a static system developed hundreds of years ago by the founding fathers but as a living, breathing expression of citizenship today.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The students are so much more connected to their work and passionate about it that they're actually doing work that's higher quality than they've ever done before.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>To do this, Block first introduced students to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker who visited the United States in the mid-1800s and wrote about his observations of American democracy. With de Tocqueville’s primary text as a guide, Block asked his students to research and argue three perspectives on American democracy that aren't common knowledge and that resonate with them personally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students chose diverse projects, including social movements like Black Lives Matter, the effect of stereotyping, whether the American Dream exists, how the food industry affects people’s lives, the intersection of poverty and education, even juvenile incarceration. They analyzed their topics in a paper, made a multimedia presentation related to the topic, and designed and built a personal website to display their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just the typical, watered-down way of looking at race in America, but a combination of their own experience, their reading and interviews with people in their communities,” Block said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He believes the project is successful because students have so much choice within the broad parameters he sets. That doesn’t mean they can pick an easy argument and be done quickly. Block’s job as a teacher in this environment is to continually push the student to think from new perspectives, to find more sources and to use them more skillfully to bolster the argument. To do this, he asks lots of questions that spark them to push in new directions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[vimeo 116799343 w=500 h=281]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/116799343\">Stereotypes and American Democracy\u003c/a> from \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/user14101507\">Marlyn Mooney\u003c/a> on \u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The students are so much more connected to their work and passionate about it that they’re actually doing work that’s higher quality than they’ve ever done before,” Block said. He attributes part of this to the fact that students are presenting their ideas both through writing and a creative multimedia project of their choice. The projects live on a \u003ca href=\"http://democracyinamerica2015.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">public facing website\u003c/a>. The authentic, worldwide audience -- coupled with students’ passion for their topics -- means that they are hoping to sway public opinion with their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt really strongly about all of the topics I’m talking about, mostly about poverty and education,” said \u003ca href=\"http://lcohen97.wix.com/lizafrommarshallst#!chapter-2/c19uf\" target=\"_blank\">Liza Cohen\u003c/a>. She investigated various aspects of socioeconomic disparities in educational opportunities. The experience has her fired up to go to college, where she sees it as her civic responsibility to get herself educated and work on these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>STANDARDS AND SUPPORT BEHIND THE SCENES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While students had lots of choice in what to research and the kinds of textual evidence they would use to support their arguments, Block doesn’t give them an assignment like this and expect them to come back two months later with perfect projects. Instead, he has built in deadlines, peer review and class work time, so he knows where students are at throughout the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"FFpflT5kRNzjfdRj8FJCqk7azqBK4dnI\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m just assisting them to create this thing that we’ve all agreed is an important thing to do,” Block said. “It’s like we’re on a shared mission together to produce the best product possible.” When students turn in rough drafts, Block sits down with them and asks what they know they need to improve on. Then he’ll give them feedback he sees. At other points, students review one another’s work. Block says that often students give the same critique he would have offered. Students said seeing one another’s work helped them see where their own was lacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We had to edit other people’s papers and give feedback, and you read it and realize it's amazing,” said \u003ca href=\"http://mooneygov.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Marlyn Mooney\u003c/a>. She loved learning about the topics her classmates were working on and continuing the conversation around big ideas beyond class. One part of her project investigated the food industry and some of its unhealthy practices. The issue has become a personal passion for her that she shares with her friends, perhaps more than they would like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block says in a class period he will spend about five minutes reminding students about upcoming due dates and things to keep in mind as they work. The other 60 minutes he spends moving through the classroom, asking questions to push students farther in their thinking, checking in on students' progress and giving feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[vimeo 107001402 w=500 h=281]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/107001402\">Democracy and Education\u003c/a> from \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/user14128750\">Amani Bey\u003c/a> on \u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to give feedback as much as possible while it’s in process and give students a chance to work on skills they are still developing,” Block said. He sees it as a mentoring relationship, and is certain that if he gave just one deadline the quality of work would be dramatically lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It takes a lot of trust and confidence,” Block said, acknowledging that most teachers didn’t grow up with this kind of education. “If people miss some of the steps, then it’s not successful and they think it’s a waste,” he said. But it takes time to grow as a teacher in this system, which is why Block believes teacher mentorship is so important. He and his colleagues are continually tweaking projects to reflect lessons learned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>STUDENTS TAKE PRIDE IN THEIR WORK\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m most proud that I thoughtfully completed this entire project, and I walked away knowing 10 times more than I did before and feeling 10 times more involved than I did before,” Cohen said. “I feel like mentally, emotionally and physically, I got something out of the project.” She says that beats any grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I can articulate how I feel in a very solid sense and that other people will listen,” said Ron Harper. “I finally realized I have a voice and I can use it. And that feels good.” He focused on juvenile incarceration, as well as the power of social movements like Black Lives Matter. Harper says the research he did on his own made him sad, but that he was motivated to keep reading because he cared about the topics he chose.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'I think it's important to give students freedom on writing and reading, because it's hard to enjoy a subject you’re forced to research.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Other students expressed their appreciation for a project that let them examine society and their place in it. Many students struggled to condense all their research into cohesive, clear arguments, but they often expressed pride both in their writing and in their multimedia representations of issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a reflection submitted to Block once the project was finished, \u003ca href=\"http://lawanddisorder.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Molly Olshin \u003c/a>wrote: “Research, media, and writing is not that difficult when you have the freedom to write on the subject you want. I think it's important to give students freedom on writing and reading, because it's hard to enjoy a subject you’re forced to research, especially if you don't [like] the subject.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another student, Darya Nemati wrote: “I obviously learned way more about the three topics I was investigating, but I think I also was able to dig deeper and learn about myself as a learner. I was able to investigate topics that were outside of my comfort zone and with each chapter I was able to delve just a little deeper into my research and analysis. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students weren’t shy about talking about their challenges as well. \u003ca href=\"http://moderndaydebey.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Amani Bey \u003c/a>wrote: “I struggled with slimming my idea down and at the same time writing a bunch about it. I think it made me stronger. To be able to write on an extremely particular claim and to expand on it and all its nuances have made me a great thinker.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>BLOCK'S TAKEAWAYS ON INQUIRY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>“This is not an assignment where there’s one right answer and where I have a specific vision of what the final product will look like,” Block said. “I give them the framework and students fill in the gaps. They do it through their own curiosity and creation.” That is a key takeaway for teachers interested in teaching with inquiry. If students are really allowed to bring themselves to their work, their final products won’t all come out in the same form. But that doesn't mean they can’t all be evaluated using the same rubric and set of standards.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Block thinks about what standards he wants the project to hit first and then builds backward from that point. In this project, students are meeting literacy and research standards through extensive individual research, lots of writing, crafting arguments, interpreting texts from both primary and secondary sources, and using that evidence to support their claims. Whether the student is looking at racism in America or the plight of undocumented people, those standards are embedded.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Inquiry is based around the act of questioning. As the teacher, that means asking common questions like, “what is the main argument of your piece,” but it also means asking questions about students’ ideas and sources that push them to look behind what can often be a one-dimensional viewpoint.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Structure long-term projects with deadlines (research document with quotes, rough draft, final draft, multimedia project), lots of formative feedback both from peers and from the teacher, self-evaluations and reflection pieces so that students can look back at what they took away from the work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Model good work throughout the process. That could mean holding up a student's clear introductory paragraph or reading a de Tocqueville observation together as a class. “I’m breaking down the distinction between professional work and student work,” Block said. He wants students to feel that their voices are just as important as those they read in books. Reminding them that their work is part of a large conversation around these issues helps them see why their work deserves the time and effort they’re putting into it.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Teaching this way is exhausting, but also incredibly rewarding. “It’s very grueling, but it’s also incredibly stimulating,” Block said, “I’m excited about their ideas and their work.”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block says it’s amazing to see what young people create when they are given freedom to choose. He’s also always impressed at how the questions of democracy leak out of the classroom and into everyday conversations. Students come in and talk to him about what they've been reading or he'll hear them discussing popular songs in new ways. Investigating democracy has taught them to look at their own world in new ways.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Observations of early America by Alexis de Tocqueville helped articulate the nation's values. With the guidance of an inquiry based teacher, students create their own interpretations of democracy in America. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39316\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/02/how-inquiry-can-enable-students-to-become-modern-day-de-tocquevilles/de_tocqueville/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-39316\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-39316\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/02/de_Tocqueville.gif\" alt=\"Alexis de Tocqueville\" width=\"640\" height=\"960\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Alexis de Tocqueville\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Some teachers are skeptical about “student-driven learning,” suspecting that it's really just another chance for unfocused social time. It can often be hard to see behind the jargon the careful planning and teacher support necessary to ensure that students not only stay focused, but also produce high-level work. Educators often wonder how students can all be working on different projects but acquiring the same skills. It may seem challenging to keep track of 30 kids investigating 30 different issues, but when inquiry-based teaching is done well, that chaotic swirl of ideas and needs is based on a strong foundation of planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia is known for its dedication to inquiry, practiced through project-based learning with public school students. As a magnet school, SLA does have an application process, but many students are not coming from schools where they experienced inquiry learning before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An example of this approach can be seen in Joshua Block’s senior social studies class. Recently, his students put democracy through the wringer, investigating American democracy not as a static system developed hundreds of years ago by the founding fathers but as a living, breathing expression of citizenship today.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'The students are so much more connected to their work and passionate about it that they're actually doing work that's higher quality than they've ever done before.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>To do this, Block first introduced students to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker who visited the United States in the mid-1800s and wrote about his observations of American democracy. With de Tocqueville’s primary text as a guide, Block asked his students to research and argue three perspectives on American democracy that aren't common knowledge and that resonate with them personally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students chose diverse projects, including social movements like Black Lives Matter, the effect of stereotyping, whether the American Dream exists, how the food industry affects people’s lives, the intersection of poverty and education, even juvenile incarceration. They analyzed their topics in a paper, made a multimedia presentation related to the topic, and designed and built a personal website to display their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just the typical, watered-down way of looking at race in America, but a combination of their own experience, their reading and interviews with people in their communities,” Block said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He believes the project is successful because students have so much choice within the broad parameters he sets. That doesn’t mean they can pick an easy argument and be done quickly. Block’s job as a teacher in this environment is to continually push the student to think from new perspectives, to find more sources and to use them more skillfully to bolster the argument. To do this, he asks lots of questions that spark them to push in new directions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/116799343\">Stereotypes and American Democracy\u003c/a> from \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/user14101507\">Marlyn Mooney\u003c/a> on \u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The students are so much more connected to their work and passionate about it that they’re actually doing work that’s higher quality than they’ve ever done before,” Block said. He attributes part of this to the fact that students are presenting their ideas both through writing and a creative multimedia project of their choice. The projects live on a \u003ca href=\"http://democracyinamerica2015.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">public facing website\u003c/a>. The authentic, worldwide audience -- coupled with students’ passion for their topics -- means that they are hoping to sway public opinion with their work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I felt really strongly about all of the topics I’m talking about, mostly about poverty and education,” said \u003ca href=\"http://lcohen97.wix.com/lizafrommarshallst#!chapter-2/c19uf\" target=\"_blank\">Liza Cohen\u003c/a>. She investigated various aspects of socioeconomic disparities in educational opportunities. The experience has her fired up to go to college, where she sees it as her civic responsibility to get herself educated and work on these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>STANDARDS AND SUPPORT BEHIND THE SCENES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While students had lots of choice in what to research and the kinds of textual evidence they would use to support their arguments, Block doesn’t give them an assignment like this and expect them to come back two months later with perfect projects. Instead, he has built in deadlines, peer review and class work time, so he knows where students are at throughout the process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m just assisting them to create this thing that we’ve all agreed is an important thing to do,” Block said. “It’s like we’re on a shared mission together to produce the best product possible.” When students turn in rough drafts, Block sits down with them and asks what they know they need to improve on. Then he’ll give them feedback he sees. At other points, students review one another’s work. Block says that often students give the same critique he would have offered. Students said seeing one another’s work helped them see where their own was lacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We had to edit other people’s papers and give feedback, and you read it and realize it's amazing,” said \u003ca href=\"http://mooneygov.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Marlyn Mooney\u003c/a>. She loved learning about the topics her classmates were working on and continuing the conversation around big ideas beyond class. One part of her project investigated the food industry and some of its unhealthy practices. The issue has become a personal passion for her that she shares with her friends, perhaps more than they would like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block says in a class period he will spend about five minutes reminding students about upcoming due dates and things to keep in mind as they work. The other 60 minutes he spends moving through the classroom, asking questions to push students farther in their thinking, checking in on students' progress and giving feedback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/107001402\">Democracy and Education\u003c/a> from \u003ca href=\"http://vimeo.com/user14128750\">Amani Bey\u003c/a> on \u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com\">Vimeo\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I want to give feedback as much as possible while it’s in process and give students a chance to work on skills they are still developing,” Block said. He sees it as a mentoring relationship, and is certain that if he gave just one deadline the quality of work would be dramatically lower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It takes a lot of trust and confidence,” Block said, acknowledging that most teachers didn’t grow up with this kind of education. “If people miss some of the steps, then it’s not successful and they think it’s a waste,” he said. But it takes time to grow as a teacher in this system, which is why Block believes teacher mentorship is so important. He and his colleagues are continually tweaking projects to reflect lessons learned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>STUDENTS TAKE PRIDE IN THEIR WORK\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m most proud that I thoughtfully completed this entire project, and I walked away knowing 10 times more than I did before and feeling 10 times more involved than I did before,” Cohen said. “I feel like mentally, emotionally and physically, I got something out of the project.” She says that beats any grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I can articulate how I feel in a very solid sense and that other people will listen,” said Ron Harper. “I finally realized I have a voice and I can use it. And that feels good.” He focused on juvenile incarceration, as well as the power of social movements like Black Lives Matter. Harper says the research he did on his own made him sad, but that he was motivated to keep reading because he cared about the topics he chose.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'I think it's important to give students freedom on writing and reading, because it's hard to enjoy a subject you’re forced to research.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Other students expressed their appreciation for a project that let them examine society and their place in it. Many students struggled to condense all their research into cohesive, clear arguments, but they often expressed pride both in their writing and in their multimedia representations of issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a reflection submitted to Block once the project was finished, \u003ca href=\"http://lawanddisorder.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Molly Olshin \u003c/a>wrote: “Research, media, and writing is not that difficult when you have the freedom to write on the subject you want. I think it's important to give students freedom on writing and reading, because it's hard to enjoy a subject you’re forced to research, especially if you don't [like] the subject.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another student, Darya Nemati wrote: “I obviously learned way more about the three topics I was investigating, but I think I also was able to dig deeper and learn about myself as a learner. I was able to investigate topics that were outside of my comfort zone and with each chapter I was able to delve just a little deeper into my research and analysis. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students weren’t shy about talking about their challenges as well. \u003ca href=\"http://moderndaydebey.weebly.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Amani Bey \u003c/a>wrote: “I struggled with slimming my idea down and at the same time writing a bunch about it. I think it made me stronger. To be able to write on an extremely particular claim and to expand on it and all its nuances have made me a great thinker.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>BLOCK'S TAKEAWAYS ON INQUIRY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>“This is not an assignment where there’s one right answer and where I have a specific vision of what the final product will look like,” Block said. “I give them the framework and students fill in the gaps. They do it through their own curiosity and creation.” That is a key takeaway for teachers interested in teaching with inquiry. If students are really allowed to bring themselves to their work, their final products won’t all come out in the same form. But that doesn't mean they can’t all be evaluated using the same rubric and set of standards.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Block thinks about what standards he wants the project to hit first and then builds backward from that point. In this project, students are meeting literacy and research standards through extensive individual research, lots of writing, crafting arguments, interpreting texts from both primary and secondary sources, and using that evidence to support their claims. Whether the student is looking at racism in America or the plight of undocumented people, those standards are embedded.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Inquiry is based around the act of questioning. As the teacher, that means asking common questions like, “what is the main argument of your piece,” but it also means asking questions about students’ ideas and sources that push them to look behind what can often be a one-dimensional viewpoint.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Structure long-term projects with deadlines (research document with quotes, rough draft, final draft, multimedia project), lots of formative feedback both from peers and from the teacher, self-evaluations and reflection pieces so that students can look back at what they took away from the work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Model good work throughout the process. That could mean holding up a student's clear introductory paragraph or reading a de Tocqueville observation together as a class. “I’m breaking down the distinction between professional work and student work,” Block said. He wants students to feel that their voices are just as important as those they read in books. 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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Block says it’s amazing to see what young people create when they are given freedom to choose. He’s also always impressed at how the questions of democracy leak out of the classroom and into everyday conversations. Students come in and talk to him about what they've been reading or he'll hear them discussing popular songs in new ways. Investigating democracy has taught them to look at their own world in new ways.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "What Do We Really Mean When We Say 'Personalized Learning'?",
"title": "What Do We Really Mean When We Say 'Personalized Learning'?",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39144\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/sosodaydreamart/10974117124/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-39144\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/01/girl-study-sketch-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Naomi Chung/Flickr\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Naomi Chung/Flickr\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The idea of personalized learning is seductive – it implies moving away from the industrialized form of education that pumps out cookie-cutter students with the same knowledge and skills. After decades of this approach, it is clear that all children don’t learn the same way and personalization seems to honor those differences. However, that term has taken on several different meanings.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization - but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you say personalization, what do you mean by that?” asked \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach?language=en\" target=\"_blank\">Diana Laufenberg\u003c/a>, director of Inquiry Schools and a former teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. “It’s not a word that always means the same thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Personalization is often used in the \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/01/combining-computer-games-with-classroom-teaching/\" target=\"_blank\">ed-tech community\u003c/a> to describe a student moving through a prescribed set of activities at his own pace. The only choice a student gets is what box to check on the screen and how quickly to move through the exercises. For many educators that’s not the true meaning of “personalized learning.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That has nothing to do with the person sitting in front of you,” Laufenberg said. “It meets the needs of an individual in a very standardized way, but it doesn’t take into account who that kid is.” For Laufenberg, personalization only comes when students have authentic choice over how to tackle a problem. A personalized environment gives students the freedom to follow a meaningful line of inquiry, while building the skills to connect, synthesize and analyze information into original productions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators at the \u003ca href=\"http://2015.educon.org/\" target=\"_blank\">EduCon conference\u003c/a> hosted by Science Leadership Academy eagerly discussed the merits and challenges of personalizing learning. Dozens of teachers agreed that a truly personalized learning experience requires student choice, is individualized, meaningful and resource rich. This kind of learning allows students to work at their own pace and level, meets the individual needs of students, and perhaps most importantly, is not a one-size fits all model. Technology was strikingly absent from these conversations. Instead, the common view of personalization focused on giving agency for learning to the student and valuing each individual in a classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"qftFpZKTbDgOW50foLeZWXX4b2sPwl35\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, in order to navigate the system of accountability in the U.S. educational system, many school district leaders require public school educators to teach a specific curriculum that will be evaluated on standardized tests, while at the same time telling teachers to be innovative and creative within their classrooms. When that happens, the structures around the classroom leave little room for the kind of authentic, whole-child personalization many teachers dream of offering. The demands of the system -- and education leaders’ desire to excel within it -- lend themselves well to the computerized, modular and often very standardized system of “personalization” many ed-tech companies are offering. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/are-teachers-and-ed-tech-businesses-working-towards-the-same-goal/\" target=\"_blank\">Those are the tools with a market in the current system\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization - but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance,” Laufenberg said. “Those things never come together as long as that is the overriding moment.” She cautions educators who may be excited about the progressive educational implications for “personalized learning” to make sure everyone they work with is on the same page about what that phrase means.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The definition of \"personalized learning\" is as varied as the richness of instruction tailored to learners. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_39144\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/sosodaydreamart/10974117124/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-39144\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2015/01/girl-study-sketch-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Naomi Chung/Flickr\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Naomi Chung/Flickr\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">The idea of personalized learning is seductive – it implies moving away from the industrialized form of education that pumps out cookie-cutter students with the same knowledge and skills. After decades of this approach, it is clear that all children don’t learn the same way and personalization seems to honor those differences. However, that term has taken on several different meanings.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">'We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization - but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance.'\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“When you say personalization, what do you mean by that?” asked \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach?language=en\" target=\"_blank\">Diana Laufenberg\u003c/a>, director of Inquiry Schools and a former teacher at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. “It’s not a word that always means the same thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Personalization is often used in the \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/01/combining-computer-games-with-classroom-teaching/\" target=\"_blank\">ed-tech community\u003c/a> to describe a student moving through a prescribed set of activities at his own pace. The only choice a student gets is what box to check on the screen and how quickly to move through the exercises. For many educators that’s not the true meaning of “personalized learning.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That has nothing to do with the person sitting in front of you,” Laufenberg said. “It meets the needs of an individual in a very standardized way, but it doesn’t take into account who that kid is.” For Laufenberg, personalization only comes when students have authentic choice over how to tackle a problem. A personalized environment gives students the freedom to follow a meaningful line of inquiry, while building the skills to connect, synthesize and analyze information into original productions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Educators at the \u003ca href=\"http://2015.educon.org/\" target=\"_blank\">EduCon conference\u003c/a> hosted by Science Leadership Academy eagerly discussed the merits and challenges of personalizing learning. Dozens of teachers agreed that a truly personalized learning experience requires student choice, is individualized, meaningful and resource rich. This kind of learning allows students to work at their own pace and level, meets the individual needs of students, and perhaps most importantly, is not a one-size fits all model. Technology was strikingly absent from these conversations. Instead, the common view of personalization focused on giving agency for learning to the student and valuing each individual in a classroom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, in order to navigate the system of accountability in the U.S. educational system, many school district leaders require public school educators to teach a specific curriculum that will be evaluated on standardized tests, while at the same time telling teachers to be innovative and creative within their classrooms. When that happens, the structures around the classroom leave little room for the kind of authentic, whole-child personalization many teachers dream of offering. The demands of the system -- and education leaders’ desire to excel within it -- lend themselves well to the computerized, modular and often very standardized system of “personalization” many ed-tech companies are offering. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/are-teachers-and-ed-tech-businesses-working-towards-the-same-goal/\" target=\"_blank\">Those are the tools with a market in the current system\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We often say we want creativity and innovation – personalization - but every mechanism we use to measure it is through control and compliance,” Laufenberg said. “Those things never come together as long as that is the overriding moment.” She cautions educators who may be excited about the progressive educational implications for “personalized learning” to make sure everyone they work with is on the same page about what that phrase means.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38623\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/DNA-Brain-thinking.gif\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-38623\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/DNA-Brain-thinking.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cem>The following excerpt is from “\u003ca href=\"http://www.ascd.org/Publications/Books/Overview/Authentic-Learning-in-the-Digital-Age.aspx\">Authentic Learning in the Digital Age: Engaging Students Through Inquiry\u003c/a>,” by Larissa Pahomov. This excerpt is from the chapter entitled “Making Reflection Relevant.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cb>Characteristics of Meaningful Reflection\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">For student reflection to be meaningful, it must be \u003ci>metacognitive, applicable, \u003c/i>and \u003ci>shared \u003c/i>with others. Let’s look at each of these characteristics in turn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Metacognitive\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Although it’s something of a buzz word, “metacognition” is a state of mind that can be useful for all the core values presented in this book. If students are metacognitive about inquiry, then they’re thinking about exactly how they are going to phrase that question; if they’re metacognitive about collaboration, then they’re considering how their introvert or extrovert personality will affect the group. Metacognition is essentially reflection on the micro level, an awareness of our own thought processes as we complete them. So what does metacognitive reflection look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">By sharing their reflections on their academic work, students can both advise and seek help from their peers. Sharing their achievements helps those who struggled with that particular task, and sharing their weak spots helps them troubleshoot as they work through a problem set or have a peer edit a rough draft.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>When children are first learning to reflect on their work, their educators use simple prompts to get them thinking: \u003ci>Do you like what you made? Did you do a good job? \u003c/i>Eventually, they are also asked to consider the process: \u003ci>What did you learn from this task\u003c/i>? Usually these questions are posed by an outsider—a parent or a preschool teacher, for example—who asks the learner for a simple assessment of the outcome. Metacognitive reflection, however, takes this process to the next level because it is concerned not with assessment, but with self-improvement: \u003ci>Could this be better? How? What steps should you take? \u003c/i>As a result, metacognitive reflection can be used to develop resilience in the face of a challenge. Many young children (and some adults) will throw down their work when they become frustrated with it, unable to transcend the struggle. By contrast, a student who has learned the value of metacognitive reflection will recognize frustration as a signal to pause and think through the situation instead of plowing ahead with the same approach or giving up entirely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Of course, there’s a danger of this metacognition turning into a kind of feedback loop: \u003ci>Am I reflecting adequately on my reflection? \u003c/i>The better question to keep in mind is, \u003ci>How is this reflection going to help me in the future? \u003c/i>In many cases, “the future” is just a few minutes away, but this mindset can also apply to cumulative reflection over a unit, a school year, or a lifetime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>Students who are not naturally inclined to stop and think need explicit practices to nudge themselves toward quality reflection—and digital tools to make it easier. Keeping a log of tasks and habits, for example, gives students a rich source of data to mine when reflecting on their progress, and there are many apps that will collect and aggregate this information in accessible and attractive ways. The myriad of daily journals, goal-setting programs, and “productivity” apps help to create a regular time and place for reflection, which students can use toward academic or personal projects. Even using a simple timer can help students chunk out their work so they take a reflective break, and some programs have breaks built into the timer cycle, so that a pause from the work is guaranteed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Applicable\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">The reflective question in the SLA admissions interview is a great tool for getting to know the student, but it doesn’t do much to actually serve their learning process. It’s completely divorced from the setting where the student actually did the work, and besides, the student already completed the project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"Y4YNmOOldpYACcuXUKwY1gc9FMwuz6cz\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">This kind of isolated, after-the-fact reflection dominates our understanding of the process. When asked to imagine a person reflecting, you probably conjure up an image of an individual alone, in a comfortable place, staring off into the distance, plaintively contemplating some earlier life event. This scene is likely set at the end of a calendar year, or at the end of a lifetime—or, if you imagined a professional setting, at a retirement party. These kinds of personal reflections contribute to the richness of life, because through them we are able to appreciate how our path has shaped our existence. But what about the life that is still to be lived and the work that is still to be done? Unfortunately, this sentimental notion of reflection for reflection’s sake keeps the practice from being used for active improvement in the here and now. Academic reflections, for example, often take place at the very end of the course, when both the professor and the student will be moving on to other courses and teaching loads. Students are not typically asked to consider how their performance evolves over the years either. Even though teachers often have a very clear notion of how the curriculum builds on itself and how students must develop their skills in a particular sequence, they often keep this structure hidden from their students. Occupied with the daily grind of delivering curriculum, it often doesn’t occur to them that their students might benefit from seeing the big picture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">If this structure is revealed to students, though, then they suddenly have a framework for assessing how their past performance will influence their future work. By being transparent about future tasks and assignments, teachers remind students that they’re going to have to use at least some of these skills again, so there’s no sense in making the same mistakes. Reflection suddenly has a real and immediate purpose: You know where this course is going, so how are you going to improve the quality of your own journey?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/Authentic-Learning-in-the-digital-age-engaging-students-through-inquiry.png\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-38624\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/Authentic-Learning-in-the-digital-age-engaging-students-through-inquiry-300x449.png\" alt=\"Authentic Learning in the digital age engaging students through inquiry\" width=\"300\" height=\"449\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>If students are going to really benefit from their reflections and apply them to future work, those thoughts have to get out of their heads and into some form of documentation. Proximity here is key; reviewing a previous reflection can be most instructive when students are working on the next task, so their reflection should be stored wherever that work is happening. Paper portfolios can approximate this, although that method forces students to carry a year’s worth of work and reflection with them at all times (which is why most teachers choose to keep portfolios in the classroom—logical, but limiting). By contrast, online homes for student reflection are universally accessible and can be organized to accompany student work, so that the past reflection is right in front of students as they start a new task. Digital tools also provide different mediums for students to capture their thoughts—they can type or tag, or talk into the microphone or camera.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Electronic tools of analysis can also play a big role here. Just as athletes track their physical performance using a specific set of metrics, students may benefit from reviewing their academic achievements in different areas, like the categories of a rubric or a list of discrete skills. When used by outside forces as the exclusive criteria for judging a school, this kind of “data-driven” approach can be myopic, but when used by students as one of several tools for measuring success, the process can be empowering. The standards-based grading movement has a multitude of resources available online, including free online grade books for teachers. By tying a numerical score to specific skills, students are naturally encouraged to reflect on their past performance so that they can improve the work, not just the grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Shared\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Let’s go back to that image of the lone person lost in reflection. Once they are done collecting their thoughts, who are they going to share them with? Most likely a trusted confidant or private journal—a safe place with no chance of betrayal. This tendency toward secrecy is natural. In the interest of keeping up appearances, we don’t really like to share our weaknesses and past failures (although we do love gawking at the problems and misfortunes of others). But if we are really seeking to take action based on our reflections, then we will likely need some help, and that means we have to own up about what needs work. To make students comfortable with this practice, the classroom has to become a place where each student is recognized as being on an individual path of improvement—and, an important point, no student has reached the end of the path, because \u003ci>there is no end. \u003c/i>And if there is no finish line, it becomes more difficult for students to compare their relative positions on the journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Once that culture has been established, the classroom can become a place of collective support instead of individual competition. By sharing their reflections on their academic work, students can both advise and seek help from their peers. Sharing their achievements helps those who struggled with that particular task, and sharing their weak spots helps them troubleshoot as they work through a problem set or have a peer edit a rough draft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>Just as electronic tools make reflections easy to access for an individual, so, too, do they make it easy to share. Sharing becomes instantaneous when material is available online; the collection of commentary from an entire class can also be indexed, searched, and organized by theme—a feature that may be of great use for the teacher, who will want to look at both individual goals and the class’s experience as a whole. If students are sensitive about sharing their reflections, the work can also be posted anonymously. Like writing in to an advice column with a pseudonym, the practice allows them to receive guidance and support without embarrassing themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cem>Larissa Pahomov teaches students English and Journalism at the\u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\"> Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> in Philadelphia, an inquiry-driven, project-based, 1:1 laptop school.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38623\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1280px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/DNA-Brain-thinking.gif\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-38623\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/DNA-Brain-thinking.gif\" alt=\"iStock\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">iStock\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cem>The following excerpt is from “\u003ca href=\"http://www.ascd.org/Publications/Books/Overview/Authentic-Learning-in-the-Digital-Age.aspx\">Authentic Learning in the Digital Age: Engaging Students Through Inquiry\u003c/a>,” by Larissa Pahomov. This excerpt is from the chapter entitled “Making Reflection Relevant.”\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cb>Characteristics of Meaningful Reflection\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">For student reflection to be meaningful, it must be \u003ci>metacognitive, applicable, \u003c/i>and \u003ci>shared \u003c/i>with others. Let’s look at each of these characteristics in turn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Metacognitive\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Although it’s something of a buzz word, “metacognition” is a state of mind that can be useful for all the core values presented in this book. If students are metacognitive about inquiry, then they’re thinking about exactly how they are going to phrase that question; if they’re metacognitive about collaboration, then they’re considering how their introvert or extrovert personality will affect the group. Metacognition is essentially reflection on the micro level, an awareness of our own thought processes as we complete them. So what does metacognitive reflection look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">By sharing their reflections on their academic work, students can both advise and seek help from their peers. Sharing their achievements helps those who struggled with that particular task, and sharing their weak spots helps them troubleshoot as they work through a problem set or have a peer edit a rough draft.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>When children are first learning to reflect on their work, their educators use simple prompts to get them thinking: \u003ci>Do you like what you made? Did you do a good job? \u003c/i>Eventually, they are also asked to consider the process: \u003ci>What did you learn from this task\u003c/i>? Usually these questions are posed by an outsider—a parent or a preschool teacher, for example—who asks the learner for a simple assessment of the outcome. Metacognitive reflection, however, takes this process to the next level because it is concerned not with assessment, but with self-improvement: \u003ci>Could this be better? How? What steps should you take? \u003c/i>As a result, metacognitive reflection can be used to develop resilience in the face of a challenge. Many young children (and some adults) will throw down their work when they become frustrated with it, unable to transcend the struggle. By contrast, a student who has learned the value of metacognitive reflection will recognize frustration as a signal to pause and think through the situation instead of plowing ahead with the same approach or giving up entirely.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Of course, there’s a danger of this metacognition turning into a kind of feedback loop: \u003ci>Am I reflecting adequately on my reflection? \u003c/i>The better question to keep in mind is, \u003ci>How is this reflection going to help me in the future? \u003c/i>In many cases, “the future” is just a few minutes away, but this mindset can also apply to cumulative reflection over a unit, a school year, or a lifetime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>Students who are not naturally inclined to stop and think need explicit practices to nudge themselves toward quality reflection—and digital tools to make it easier. Keeping a log of tasks and habits, for example, gives students a rich source of data to mine when reflecting on their progress, and there are many apps that will collect and aggregate this information in accessible and attractive ways. The myriad of daily journals, goal-setting programs, and “productivity” apps help to create a regular time and place for reflection, which students can use toward academic or personal projects. Even using a simple timer can help students chunk out their work so they take a reflective break, and some programs have breaks built into the timer cycle, so that a pause from the work is guaranteed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Applicable\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">The reflective question in the SLA admissions interview is a great tool for getting to know the student, but it doesn’t do much to actually serve their learning process. It’s completely divorced from the setting where the student actually did the work, and besides, the student already completed the project.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">This kind of isolated, after-the-fact reflection dominates our understanding of the process. When asked to imagine a person reflecting, you probably conjure up an image of an individual alone, in a comfortable place, staring off into the distance, plaintively contemplating some earlier life event. This scene is likely set at the end of a calendar year, or at the end of a lifetime—or, if you imagined a professional setting, at a retirement party. These kinds of personal reflections contribute to the richness of life, because through them we are able to appreciate how our path has shaped our existence. But what about the life that is still to be lived and the work that is still to be done? Unfortunately, this sentimental notion of reflection for reflection’s sake keeps the practice from being used for active improvement in the here and now. Academic reflections, for example, often take place at the very end of the course, when both the professor and the student will be moving on to other courses and teaching loads. Students are not typically asked to consider how their performance evolves over the years either. Even though teachers often have a very clear notion of how the curriculum builds on itself and how students must develop their skills in a particular sequence, they often keep this structure hidden from their students. Occupied with the daily grind of delivering curriculum, it often doesn’t occur to them that their students might benefit from seeing the big picture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">If this structure is revealed to students, though, then they suddenly have a framework for assessing how their past performance will influence their future work. By being transparent about future tasks and assignments, teachers remind students that they’re going to have to use at least some of these skills again, so there’s no sense in making the same mistakes. Reflection suddenly has a real and immediate purpose: You know where this course is going, so how are you going to improve the quality of your own journey?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/Authentic-Learning-in-the-digital-age-engaging-students-through-inquiry.png\">\u003cimg class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-38624\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/12/Authentic-Learning-in-the-digital-age-engaging-students-through-inquiry-300x449.png\" alt=\"Authentic Learning in the digital age engaging students through inquiry\" width=\"300\" height=\"449\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>If students are going to really benefit from their reflections and apply them to future work, those thoughts have to get out of their heads and into some form of documentation. Proximity here is key; reviewing a previous reflection can be most instructive when students are working on the next task, so their reflection should be stored wherever that work is happening. Paper portfolios can approximate this, although that method forces students to carry a year’s worth of work and reflection with them at all times (which is why most teachers choose to keep portfolios in the classroom—logical, but limiting). By contrast, online homes for student reflection are universally accessible and can be organized to accompany student work, so that the past reflection is right in front of students as they start a new task. Digital tools also provide different mediums for students to capture their thoughts—they can type or tag, or talk into the microphone or camera.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Electronic tools of analysis can also play a big role here. Just as athletes track their physical performance using a specific set of metrics, students may benefit from reviewing their academic achievements in different areas, like the categories of a rubric or a list of discrete skills. When used by outside forces as the exclusive criteria for judging a school, this kind of “data-driven” approach can be myopic, but when used by students as one of several tools for measuring success, the process can be empowering. The standards-based grading movement has a multitude of resources available online, including free online grade books for teachers. By tying a numerical score to specific skills, students are naturally encouraged to reflect on their past performance so that they can improve the work, not just the grade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p4\">\u003cb>Shared\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Let’s go back to that image of the lone person lost in reflection. Once they are done collecting their thoughts, who are they going to share them with? Most likely a trusted confidant or private journal—a safe place with no chance of betrayal. This tendency toward secrecy is natural. In the interest of keeping up appearances, we don’t really like to share our weaknesses and past failures (although we do love gawking at the problems and misfortunes of others). But if we are really seeking to take action based on our reflections, then we will likely need some help, and that means we have to own up about what needs work. To make students comfortable with this practice, the classroom has to become a place where each student is recognized as being on an individual path of improvement—and, an important point, no student has reached the end of the path, because \u003ci>there is no end. \u003c/i>And if there is no finish line, it becomes more difficult for students to compare their relative positions on the journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Once that culture has been established, the classroom can become a place of collective support instead of individual competition. By sharing their reflections on their academic work, students can both advise and seek help from their peers. Sharing their achievements helps those who struggled with that particular task, and sharing their weak spots helps them troubleshoot as they work through a problem set or have a peer edit a rough draft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">➤\u003c/span> \u003cb>The digital connection. \u003c/b>Just as electronic tools make reflections easy to access for an individual, so, too, do they make it easy to share. Sharing becomes instantaneous when material is available online; the collection of commentary from an entire class can also be indexed, searched, and organized by theme—a feature that may be of great use for the teacher, who will want to look at both individual goals and the class’s experience as a whole. If students are sensitive about sharing their reflections, the work can also be posted anonymously. Like writing in to an advice column with a pseudonym, the practice allows them to receive guidance and support without embarrassing themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cem>Larissa Pahomov teaches students English and Journalism at the\u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\"> Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> in Philadelphia, an inquiry-driven, project-based, 1:1 laptop school.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38295\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/student-montage.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/student-montage-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Science Leadership Academy students (Bailey Collins)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38295\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Science Leadership Academy students (Bailey Collins)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Inquiry-based learning is not a new pedagogy, but it has come back into fashion in progressive education circles recently because of new emphasis on the power of students' innate curiosity to drive learning. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/reinventing-school-new-learning-environment-ecosystems-for-inquiry-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">Inquiry-based learning\u003c/a> asks students to discover knowledge on their own with \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/math-and-inquiry-the-importance-of-letting-students-stumble/\" target=\"_blank\">guidance from their teachers\u003c/a>. Rather than receiving information up front through lectures, students research guiding questions, ask their own follow-ups and get help along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning through inquiry requires more student agency and demands that teachers and administrators trust that students will ask when they need help. It also places the responsibility for completing tasks and meeting deadlines on the shoulders of students. \u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> (SLA) in Philadelphia is a partnership between The School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. It has become well-known for its project-based, inquiry focused teaching style, which asks students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. Students like the approach, but acknowledge that sometimes it puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to testing - they aren't used to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy students spoke about their learning experience at the school. They describe the challenge of staying on task, but see it as a lifelong skill. “You know what you should and you shouldn't do,\" said Eric Loth, who admits it isn't easy. \"You just got to realize it's gotta get done sooner or later.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nomi Martin-Brouilette said she appreciates the trust SLA's teachers place in students to be partners in their learning. \"It's good to find things out for yourself, to come up with your own questions about things you're wondering about,\" she said. \"It makes learning more meaningful than answering a question that already has an answer and you don't understand why you are doing it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Listen to students describe the good parts and the hard parts of learning through inquiry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>*These interviews were done in January, 2014 and some students have graduated.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>All photos by Bailey Collins\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174146172&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174146336&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174146000&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174146881&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174147187&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174147474&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174148124&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174147904&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174147317&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"float: left;margin: 0 15px 15px 0\">\u003ciframe src=\"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/174147607&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv style=\"clear: both;margin-bottom: 30px\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_38295\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/student-montage.jpg\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/10/student-montage-640x360.jpg\" alt=\"Science Leadership Academy students (Bailey Collins)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" class=\"size-large wp-image-38295\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Science Leadership Academy students (Bailey Collins)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Inquiry-based learning is not a new pedagogy, but it has come back into fashion in progressive education circles recently because of new emphasis on the power of students' innate curiosity to drive learning. \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/09/reinventing-school-new-learning-environment-ecosystems-for-inquiry-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">Inquiry-based learning\u003c/a> asks students to discover knowledge on their own with \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/math-and-inquiry-the-importance-of-letting-students-stumble/\" target=\"_blank\">guidance from their teachers\u003c/a>. Rather than receiving information up front through lectures, students research guiding questions, ask their own follow-ups and get help along the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning through inquiry requires more student agency and demands that teachers and administrators trust that students will ask when they need help. It also places the responsibility for completing tasks and meeting deadlines on the shoulders of students. \u003ca href=\"https://www.scienceleadership.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> (SLA) in Philadelphia is a partnership between The School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. It has become well-known for its project-based, inquiry focused teaching style, which asks students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways. Students like the approach, but acknowledge that sometimes it puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to testing - they aren't used to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy students spoke about their learning experience at the school. They describe the challenge of staying on task, but see it as a lifelong skill. “You know what you should and you shouldn't do,\" said Eric Loth, who admits it isn't easy. \"You just got to realize it's gotta get done sooner or later.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nomi Martin-Brouilette said she appreciates the trust SLA's teachers place in students to be partners in their learning. \"It's good to find things out for yourself, to come up with your own questions about things you're wondering about,\" she said. \"It makes learning more meaningful than answering a question that already has an answer and you don't understand why you are doing it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Listen to students describe the good parts and the hard parts of learning through inquiry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"disqusTitle": "Math and Inquiry: The Importance of Letting Students Stumble",
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"content": "\u003cdiv id=\"attachment_33742\" class=\"module image center mceTemp\" style=\"width: 640px\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33742\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-33742\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg\" alt=\"A Science Leadership Academy sophomore puts the finishing touches on a geometry project during her lunch period.\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Science Leadership Academy sophomore puts the finishing touches on a geometry project during her lunch period.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">For subjects like math and foreign language, which are traditionally taught in a linear and highly structured context, using more open-ended \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/inquiry-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">inquiry-based models\u003c/a> can be challenging. Teachers of these subjects may find it hard to break out of linear teaching style because the assumption is that students can’t move to more complicated skills before mastering basic ones. But inquiry learning is based on the premise that, with a little bit of structure and guidance, teachers can support students to ask questions that lead them to learn those same important skills -- in ways that are meaningful to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This model, however, can be especially hard to follow in public school classrooms tied to pre-set curricula. Class time, class size, assessments, resources, student buy-in, administrative pressures, and students' learned helplessness are just a few of the reasons why it can be challenging to create learning experiences that are deep, authentic, and driven by inquiry, according to participants at \u003ca href=\"http://educonphilly.org/\" target=\"_blank\">EduCon 2.6\u003c/a> hosted by \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Science Leadership Academy (SLA)\u003c/a>, a public high school in Philadelphia recently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy, which has an established track record as an inquiry-based school, has just opened a second campus in Philadelphia called the \u003ca href=\"http://slabeeber.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Beeber school\u003c/a>, whose teachers are still adapting to the inquiry model. With one freshmen class and a new crop of teachers still adjusting to project-based and inquiry driven approaches to learning, the school is a good model for learning how these complex ideas flesh out.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">\"As much as we can say it's okay for students to fail within the class, if they don’t pass the test at the end of the year, it’s suddenly not okay.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“You have to spend a lot of time and a lot of energy supporting kids to unlearn how they’ve been taught to learn for the majority of their lives,” said Marina Isakowitz, a ninth-grade math teacher at Beeber. Students at both SLA campuses come from public middle schools across the city and enter with varying levels of proficiency and very little experience with inquiry learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Isakowitz starts the year by asking lots of low-stakes, but complex questions as a way of scaffolding a new kind of learning for her students. Gradually, she says, they realize that this math class isn't going to be like others they've been in and they begin to understand and appreciate the freedom they've been given. It’s about providing just enough structure that the class holds together, but not so much that teachers are telling students what to do and how to do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watching students struggle with how to ask good questions and discover answers can be hard. “I, as the teacher say, 'I’m going to let you bruise yourself, and that’s going to be hard to watch, but I’m not going to step in and help,'” Isakowitz said. That can feel like she’s not doing her job, she said, but she knows it's an important part of getting them to take ownership of their learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s so terrifying as a teacher when you have this notion of what looks right, and they’re not doing it right and I’m failing as a teacher because of that,” Isakowitz said. She’s had to learn to hang back and watch what develops. She’s also had to challenge her own ideas about math education, including the notion that students must learn one skill in order to move onto the next one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[contextly_sidebar id=\"c8fa7cb09f91b16054b27f17cd80548e\"]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"How much of this hierarchy comes from the idea that they need to know A in order to do B,\" Isakowitz said. She’s constantly asking herself, “How can I let them explore something and let them learn the skills along the way?” For example, Isakowitz designed a project based on students' complaints over the unbearably high temperatures at the school in the summer. They are working to come up with a solution to a problem they are physically invested in by researching air conditioning systems, figuring out how many units their school would need based on its size and layout, and calculating costs. In the process, students are learning about things like systems of equations and slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sometimes that means letting them go down a dead end -- that I know is a dead end -- because they just need to figure it out,” Isakowitz said. Within the framework of research and discovery she is building in different ideas and units that the state requires ninth graders to learn. Even with the best of intentions, there are times when the class has to cover a topic that will be on the test but it doesn’t fit into a project. In those cases, Isakowitz tries to be honest about why the learning style has changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33745\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-engineering.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-33745\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-engineering-300x434.jpg\" alt=\"An SLA senior explains how he got interested in robotics during his senior engineering seminar.\" width=\"300\" height=\"434\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An SLA senior explains how he got interested in robotics during his senior engineering seminar.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“As much as we can say it's okay for students to fail within the class, if they don’t pass the test at the end of the year it’s suddenly not okay,” one teacher said in response to the discussion. That mixed message is a challenge to many teachers who understand that learning from mistakes is an important part of a good education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Isakowitz faces that challenge every year when her students have to take a test that determines if they graduate. “I’m wagering my students' ability to graduate high school on this teaching practice,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using a project-based inquiry approach to learning math is not easier, but kids are learning the material in ways that are relevant to them. Consequently, there are some topics that Isakowitz knows she won’t be able to cover. She’s hoping that her students have learned the topics she covered deeply well enough to make up for any gaps in knowledge on the state tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents are having a hard time watching their kids struggle,” another teacher participant said. “Especially kids who were successful learning the other way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching a topic like math without the traditional sequencing can be hard for everyone in the community to understand and requires tolerance for failure. The payoff is when, for example, a student becomes a senior and chooses mechanical engineering as an elective because he loves solving problems and has been learning to do it all through high school.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "For subjects like math and foreign language, which are traditionally taught in a linear and highly structured context, using more open-ended inquiry-based models can be challenging. But inquiry learning is based on the premise that, with a little bit of structure and guidance, teachers can support students to ask questions that lead them to learn those same important skills -- in ways that are meaningful to them.",
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"title": "Math and Inquiry: The Importance of Letting Students Stumble | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cdiv id=\"attachment_33742\" class=\"module image center mceTemp\" style=\"width: 640px\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33742\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-33742\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg\" alt=\"A Science Leadership Academy sophomore puts the finishing touches on a geometry project during her lunch period.\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-math-360-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Science Leadership Academy sophomore puts the finishing touches on a geometry project during her lunch period.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">For subjects like math and foreign language, which are traditionally taught in a linear and highly structured context, using more open-ended \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/tag/inquiry-learning/\" target=\"_blank\">inquiry-based models\u003c/a> can be challenging. Teachers of these subjects may find it hard to break out of linear teaching style because the assumption is that students can’t move to more complicated skills before mastering basic ones. But inquiry learning is based on the premise that, with a little bit of structure and guidance, teachers can support students to ask questions that lead them to learn those same important skills -- in ways that are meaningful to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This model, however, can be especially hard to follow in public school classrooms tied to pre-set curricula. Class time, class size, assessments, resources, student buy-in, administrative pressures, and students' learned helplessness are just a few of the reasons why it can be challenging to create learning experiences that are deep, authentic, and driven by inquiry, according to participants at \u003ca href=\"http://educonphilly.org/\" target=\"_blank\">EduCon 2.6\u003c/a> hosted by \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Science Leadership Academy (SLA)\u003c/a>, a public high school in Philadelphia recently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Science Leadership Academy, which has an established track record as an inquiry-based school, has just opened a second campus in Philadelphia called the \u003ca href=\"http://slabeeber.org/\" target=\"_blank\">Beeber school\u003c/a>, whose teachers are still adapting to the inquiry model. With one freshmen class and a new crop of teachers still adjusting to project-based and inquiry driven approaches to learning, the school is a good model for learning how these complex ideas flesh out.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">\"As much as we can say it's okay for students to fail within the class, if they don’t pass the test at the end of the year, it’s suddenly not okay.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“You have to spend a lot of time and a lot of energy supporting kids to unlearn how they’ve been taught to learn for the majority of their lives,” said Marina Isakowitz, a ninth-grade math teacher at Beeber. Students at both SLA campuses come from public middle schools across the city and enter with varying levels of proficiency and very little experience with inquiry learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Isakowitz starts the year by asking lots of low-stakes, but complex questions as a way of scaffolding a new kind of learning for her students. Gradually, she says, they realize that this math class isn't going to be like others they've been in and they begin to understand and appreciate the freedom they've been given. It’s about providing just enough structure that the class holds together, but not so much that teachers are telling students what to do and how to do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watching students struggle with how to ask good questions and discover answers can be hard. “I, as the teacher say, 'I’m going to let you bruise yourself, and that’s going to be hard to watch, but I’m not going to step in and help,'” Isakowitz said. That can feel like she’s not doing her job, she said, but she knows it's an important part of getting them to take ownership of their learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s so terrifying as a teacher when you have this notion of what looks right, and they’re not doing it right and I’m failing as a teacher because of that,” Isakowitz said. She’s had to learn to hang back and watch what develops. She’s also had to challenge her own ideas about math education, including the notion that students must learn one skill in order to move onto the next one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"How much of this hierarchy comes from the idea that they need to know A in order to do B,\" Isakowitz said. She’s constantly asking herself, “How can I let them explore something and let them learn the skills along the way?” For example, Isakowitz designed a project based on students' complaints over the unbearably high temperatures at the school in the summer. They are working to come up with a solution to a problem they are physically invested in by researching air conditioning systems, figuring out how many units their school would need based on its size and layout, and calculating costs. In the process, students are learning about things like systems of equations and slope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sometimes that means letting them go down a dead end -- that I know is a dead end -- because they just need to figure it out,” Isakowitz said. Within the framework of research and discovery she is building in different ideas and units that the state requires ninth graders to learn. Even with the best of intentions, there are times when the class has to cover a topic that will be on the test but it doesn’t fit into a project. In those cases, Isakowitz tries to be honest about why the learning style has changed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33745\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-engineering.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-33745\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/SLA-engineering-300x434.jpg\" alt=\"An SLA senior explains how he got interested in robotics during his senior engineering seminar.\" width=\"300\" height=\"434\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An SLA senior explains how he got interested in robotics during his senior engineering seminar.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“As much as we can say it's okay for students to fail within the class, if they don’t pass the test at the end of the year it’s suddenly not okay,” one teacher said in response to the discussion. That mixed message is a challenge to many teachers who understand that learning from mistakes is an important part of a good education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Isakowitz faces that challenge every year when her students have to take a test that determines if they graduate. “I’m wagering my students' ability to graduate high school on this teaching practice,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using a project-based inquiry approach to learning math is not easier, but kids are learning the material in ways that are relevant to them. Consequently, there are some topics that Isakowitz knows she won’t be able to cover. She’s hoping that her students have learned the topics she covered deeply well enough to make up for any gaps in knowledge on the state tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents are having a hard time watching their kids struggle,” another teacher participant said. “Especially kids who were successful learning the other way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teaching a topic like math without the traditional sequencing can be hard for everyone in the community to understand and requires tolerance for failure. The payoff is when, for example, a student becomes a senior and chooses mechanical engineering as an elective because he loves solving problems and has been learning to do it all through high school.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Do Rigid College Admissions Leave Room for Creative Thinkers?",
"title": "Do Rigid College Admissions Leave Room for Creative Thinkers?",
"headTitle": "MindShift | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33391\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/brainchildvn/2280342987/sizes/z/in/photostream/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-33391\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251.jpg\" alt=\"2280342987_0009b29238_z\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Getting kids into college is the main goal of many high schools. There are plenty of arguments about why higher education isn’t right for every student and myriad ideas about how young adults could productively spend time exploring their passions. But in most cases, high schools have a close eye on application requirements at universities and strive to produce “college ready” graduates, students who are equipped to make informed choices about the next phase of their lives and are prepared academically to succeed in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities say they're looking for students who are engaged citizens and independent thinkers with a desire to be a part of the school’s community. But many of the measures used to determine college admission don’t test for those qualities. Instead, colleges look at SAT or ACT test scores, the number of Advanced Placement classes a student has completed, GPAs and the ability to write a strong essay. There is often a disconnect between the kind of student colleges say they want and what students have to do to be admitted. That’s why high school graduates are increasingly becoming, “robo students” in the words of Stanford Lecturer Denise Pope, young people “doing school,” but not necessarily learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CHANGE COMING SLOWLY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given this phenomenon, some universities and colleges are beginning to rethink their admission policies and recognize more directly how their requirements influence the kind of teaching and learning that happens at the K-12 level.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“We need to send the message to high schools that we’re looking for more.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“I think that colleges need to change what they look for,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=526373\">Robert Sternberg\u003c/a>, who recently resigned as president of the University of Wyoming (UW). “We should be admitting students for their active citizenship and leadership skills, the kinds of skills that are really important for life.” Sternberg spent 30 years as a professor at Yale University, five years as a dean at Tufts University and was the Provost of Oklahoma State University for three years before becoming President of UW. In all of these roles, Sternberg has pushed the institutions to rethink admissions policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The tests we rely on so heavily really don’t measure creative thinking and they don’t measure common sense thinking, wisdom, ethics, work ethic -- they don’t measure your character,” Sternberg said. In his view, students go to college to develop into active and engaged citizens. If colleges kept that ultimate goal in mind in their admissions process, it would send a message to high schools about the skills that universities value and want to see in prospetive students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sternberg's research as a psychology professor at Yale centered on measuring intelligence and creativity shows how socialization steers the way kids develop. Kids who grow up in adverse circumstances learn to adapt with practical survival skills, while more affluent kids are often asked to focus on analytical and memory skills. The traditional college application process largely tests analytical skills, giving the kids who developed in an environment that valued those qualities an advantage. That system doesn’t allow colleges to admit the most creative and adaptable student populations, Sternberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-33399\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/successful-intelligence2-300x466.jpg\" alt=\"successful-intelligence2\" width=\"300\" height=\"466\">While at Tufts, he helped the school pilot a new \u003ca href=\"http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/28/sternberg\">admissions policy based on testing students for their creative and practical skills\u003c/a> in addition to their analytical skills. The school found that the new method helped them better predict student success. The application asked questions like, “How would you persuade a friend of an idea that the friend didn’t immediately accept?” Or, “How could one of your personal passions positively affect the world?” Students could choose to express their answers in multiple ways including essays, creative YouTube videos, and through drawings. Admissions officers were trained to look for the thinking behind the answers, not just writing skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tufts had to hire a few more admissions officers and retrain the existing ones, but Sternberg said gradually the student population began to change. “The benefits were much greater than the costs because admissions should be based on the mission of your college or university,” Sternberg said. “It changes the kids who are accepted and it begins to change how you think about what it means to have a talented student,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students learn what's important for them to know from their environment. “The point is that what you ought to be measuring is how well they’ve learned the skills that allow them to adapt to the environment in which they grew up,” Sternberg said. That knowledge will help colleges understand how the student will adapt in a new environment. Tests weighted towards skill sets that weren’t necessary for survival in certain environments, make those students look comparatively much worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to send the message to high schools that we’re looking for more,” Sternberg said. “The way to do that is augment what we use to admit kids.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE HIGH SCHOOL PERSPECTIVE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> (SLA), a public magnet high school in Philadelphia is a fairly young school, just eight years old. But in that short time, it's developed a reputation around the country as a shining example of the merits of inquiry-based learning approach. Colleges sometimes have a difficult time understanding the school’s approach to developing autonomous, critical thinkers. For example, SLA doesn’t offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, because making students take a summative test at the end of the year is antithetical to the concept of allowing students to guide their own learning based on interest and collaborative work -- and just as importantly, the value of the incremental learning process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can never be a revolutionary at the expense of the kids,” said SLA principal Chris Lehmann. He says there are plenty of things that high schools can do that are innovative and different, but schools need to know when that is appropriate and when experimentation might hurt its students. SLA has a good track record of sending students to college, despite some of its non-traditional practices -- 97 percent are accepted to colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lehmann describes SLA as taking the traditionally recognizable school mold and stretching it to its edge. “One of the reasons we chose to do that was because we knew we had to get kids into college,” Lehmann said. “There are so many colleges who really want kids who can problem solve, who can lead, who can think and who have a really innovative mind,” he said. That’s why SLA invites college representatives to visit the school and observe for themselves the kind of learning taking place there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve spent a lot of time bringing colleges to SLA and showing them what SLA kids can do,” Lehmann said. “What sells colleges on our kids is our kids,” he said. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Lehmann says a school doing something out of the mold always has to be prepared to argue for its approach, especially when it’s a new district school, not an established private one. Lehmann says he has been pleasantly surprised at how well college representatives respond to the SLA model.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">“Colleges sometimes are slow to recognize the good work and best practice that is happening around them.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Grades are another area where Science Leadership Academy has compromised between its ideal and what colleges want. Teachers give a lot of narrative and qualitative feedback on student work, but at the end of the class they also give students a letter grade -- that’s what colleges want to see. It’s a delicate balance between building school cultures and practices that genuinely reflect the values of its educators and playing within the system. It can be done -- but it takes extra effort and awareness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While change is slow, Lehmann says some schools are beginning to shift how they teach to be more in line with SLA’s inquiry-based approach. Schools like Drexel University and MIT are trying out hands-on programs, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.rhobserver.com/20148/bard-elevates-its-entrance-exam/\">Bard is experimenting with its admissions strategy\u003c/a>. “Colleges sometimes are slow to recognize the good work and best practice that is happening around them,” Lehmann said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For me the evolution of education has to understand that it requires one part vision and one part history,” Lehmann said. “Let’s not think that we need to remake everything that has ever happened without an eye to the past. That’s when you make mistakes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE MODERN WORLD REQUIRES HYBRID-THINKING\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the perspective of employers, college graduates need to be ready to enter a working world that requires flexible, adaptable, nimble thinkers and doers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.jumpassociates.com/\">Jump Associates\u003c/a>, a strategy and information firm, is an example of a company that requires a more \"hybrid\" nature of skill sets in the working world. Companies hire Jump to solve complex, ambiguous problems. For example, the company worked with Samsung to try and come up with a tablet that would outshine Apple’s iPad before the iPad had even been released. There was very little information on hand, but a solution had to be reached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of these organizations are facing problems of extreme ambiguity,” said Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates. ‘The world is changing, what do I do about that.’ In that situation the biggest problem is to define the problem.” To do that, Jump Associates tries to hire what they call “hybrid-thinkers,” people who are \"one part technologist, one part humanist and one part capitalist.\" “What we’ve learned is you start with people who have deep expertise in multiple disciplines at the same time,” Patnaik said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But universities don’t often encourage that kind of cross-discipline thinking naturally. “Universities are set up to be incredibly siloed,” said Patnaik who teaches a class at Stanford. “These bigger more nebulous, more meaningful questions live in between and across these silos.” But it’s difficult to change the system because most people came up through that a system that encourages them to continually narrow their focus of study.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“Universities are set up to be incredibly siloed.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Patnaik thinks the U.S. is getting off track by trying to compete with China and India in math and science because of the assumption that those fields lead to jobs. “I worry that the last five years of economic recession has made us all very scared, and when you’re scared, you start thinking, 'What’s in it for me in the short term,'” he said. He doesn’t think the U.S. will ever be as good at pumping out math and science majors as India or China, but if the it plays to its traditional strengths – creativity, innovation, bridging cognitive gaps – then there’s an opportunity to be the country that shapes the problem. “We’re throwing that all away out of fear and calling it STEM,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jump Associates asks its employees to solve seemingly unsolvable problems. “We need people to come up with ideas about what ought to be designed,” Patnaik said. While universities are slowly evolving to meet this challenge, focusing on more interdisciplinary learning for instance, students are often still focused on learning to become “successful,” rather than on learning because it makes them well-rounded and productive humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One start-up is tackling the notion of what an elite college education might look like. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.minervaproject.com/\">Minerva Project\u003c/a> received $25 million in seed money to produce what they call \"high quality\" higher education, entirely online. The university plans to accept its first class in September of 2014 and is working to finalize its hybrid curriculum and online delivery mechanisms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our goal is to create leaders and innovators in a variety of disciplines that operate in a global context,” said \u003ca href=\"http://chronicle.com/article/Behavior-Expert-Seizes-Chance/138375/\">Stephen Kosslyn, dean of faculty at Minerva Project\u003c/a>. “That’s where we start.” By starting from scratch, the school is free of the traditions and expectations that become stumbling blocks for older institutions grappling with change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kosslyn has a lot of experience with tradition-laden institutions -- he was on the \u003ca href=\"http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=kosslynlab\">faculty of Harvard\u003c/a> for more than 30 years, teaching psychology, and then as the Dean of Social Sciences. He’s familiar with slow moving initiatives to change the way universities run. “I was ready for something else,” Kosslyn said. “I wanted to do something that would really make a difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Minerva Project has thrown out all the assumptions about “college readiness” that have long existed. Instead, the founders focused on the skills students should have when they finish -- critical analysis, creative thinking and effective communication – and backed into thinking about how to get them to that point. Kosslyn admits that it’s difficult to define what is meant in each of those categories. Critical analysis involves critical thinking and the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and various outcomes. But critical thinking can also be more than one thing. “Breaking it down, we get to the point that we can teach things,” Kosslyn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kosslyn and his team intend to help students prepare for an unknown future by developing skill sets that allow them to adapt. “We’re interested in cultivating habits of mind that become very effortless and automatic and allow you to do these things,” Kosslyn said. It also means they're looking for very different qualities in students they accept.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re looking for a combination of cognitive abilities and personality characteristics,” Kosslyn said, not SAT scores. Minerva wants students that exhibit grit, an openness to new experiences, and maturity. They’re using a test they've created that tries to measure these qualities that's agnostic of a student's class, background, and country of origin, important for a university expecting a global population. But Kosslyn said those test won’t make or break an application. “What you need to do is look at the entire picture, including what they’ve done before,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students who attend Minerva will have to be self-directed and good at working collaboratively. Their courses will be delivered online and the university will likely leverage the information on the web to require students to be independently motivated. “What you need is people who are really motivated and have enough ability that they can teach themselves or can function in a group that’s helping them to learn,” Kosslyn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hope is that students will begin to know their own strengths and bring those to collaborations. “The problems we are faced with are complex enough that we will need to solve them in teams,” Kosslyn said. And since collaborative work is a required skill in most jobs, Minerva students will learn it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in the first year the students will take four courses: multi-modal communication, complex systems, empirical systems, and computational sciences. The intention is for traditionally separate subjects to be integrated if they involve complimentary skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>COMPETENCY-BASED UNIVERSITIES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the Minerva experiment develops, some existing universities are taking steps to award college credit based on skills learned, not the amount of time they've been enrolled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One approach to this problem is to standardize the definition by a college degree. “The learning and expectations should be the constant and if you can do it faster why should that be a problem,” said Jamie Marisotis, CEO of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.luminafoundation.org/\">Lumina Foundation\u003c/a>, an organization working to ensure that 60 percent of Americans have post-secondary degrees by 2025. The Lumina Foundation supports experiments like \u003ca href=\"http://collegeforamerica.org/\">College For America\u003c/a>, a project of Southern New Hampshire University and the \u003ca href=\"http://flex.wisconsin.edu/\">University of Wisconsin’s Flexible Option\u003c/a>. These programs are experimenting with degree programs based on mastering required skills and contents at a pace the student sets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Competency should not mean competency in tasks,” Marisotis said. “What we’re really talking about in terms of competency are those broader things like constructing an argument.” He’d like higher education to follow the example set by K-12 education with the Common Core State Standards, a set of broad criteria that students master before graduating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By eliminating the four-year degree and making sure that every student graduates with a similar set of skills, \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/education/edlife/degrees-based-on-what-you-can-do-not-how-long-you-went.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hp\">a college education would become less expensive\u003c/a> and more accessible to a broader population. But, it would also undermine the pedagogical approaches of many university departments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very sympathetic to the perspective of the faculty because what we’re talking about is very different than what they have done and what they’ve gone into their careers to do,” Marisotis said. He says those who want to see change in higher education need to be patient with faculty who are crucial to making any new system work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The main model is to produce high quality learners with high quality outcomes that they can apply in their lives,” Marisotis said. But to do that, he believes universities need to be clearer about what the learning expectations should be and where faculty fit into the vision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Universities say they're looking for students who are engaged citizens and independent thinkers with a desire to be a part of the school’s community. But many of the measures used to determine college admission don’t test for those qualities. Instead, colleges look at SAT or ACT test scores, the number of Advanced Placement classes a student has completed, GPAs and the ability to write a strong essay. There is often a disconnect between the kind of student colleges say they want and what students have to do to be admitted.",
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"title": "Do Rigid College Admissions Leave Room for Creative Thinkers? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_33391\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/brainchildvn/2280342987/sizes/z/in/photostream/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-33391\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251.jpg\" alt=\"2280342987_0009b29238_z\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251-400x225.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/2280342987_0009b29238_z-e1389378534251-320x180.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Getting kids into college is the main goal of many high schools. There are plenty of arguments about why higher education isn’t right for every student and myriad ideas about how young adults could productively spend time exploring their passions. But in most cases, high schools have a close eye on application requirements at universities and strive to produce “college ready” graduates, students who are equipped to make informed choices about the next phase of their lives and are prepared academically to succeed in college.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Universities say they're looking for students who are engaged citizens and independent thinkers with a desire to be a part of the school’s community. But many of the measures used to determine college admission don’t test for those qualities. Instead, colleges look at SAT or ACT test scores, the number of Advanced Placement classes a student has completed, GPAs and the ability to write a strong essay. There is often a disconnect between the kind of student colleges say they want and what students have to do to be admitted. That’s why high school graduates are increasingly becoming, “robo students” in the words of Stanford Lecturer Denise Pope, young people “doing school,” but not necessarily learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CHANGE COMING SLOWLY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given this phenomenon, some universities and colleges are beginning to rethink their admission policies and recognize more directly how their requirements influence the kind of teaching and learning that happens at the K-12 level.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“We need to send the message to high schools that we’re looking for more.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>“I think that colleges need to change what they look for,” said \u003ca href=\"http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=526373\">Robert Sternberg\u003c/a>, who recently resigned as president of the University of Wyoming (UW). “We should be admitting students for their active citizenship and leadership skills, the kinds of skills that are really important for life.” Sternberg spent 30 years as a professor at Yale University, five years as a dean at Tufts University and was the Provost of Oklahoma State University for three years before becoming President of UW. In all of these roles, Sternberg has pushed the institutions to rethink admissions policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The tests we rely on so heavily really don’t measure creative thinking and they don’t measure common sense thinking, wisdom, ethics, work ethic -- they don’t measure your character,” Sternberg said. In his view, students go to college to develop into active and engaged citizens. If colleges kept that ultimate goal in mind in their admissions process, it would send a message to high schools about the skills that universities value and want to see in prospetive students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sternberg's research as a psychology professor at Yale centered on measuring intelligence and creativity shows how socialization steers the way kids develop. Kids who grow up in adverse circumstances learn to adapt with practical survival skills, while more affluent kids are often asked to focus on analytical and memory skills. The traditional college application process largely tests analytical skills, giving the kids who developed in an environment that valued those qualities an advantage. That system doesn’t allow colleges to admit the most creative and adaptable student populations, Sternberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-33399\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2014/01/successful-intelligence2-300x466.jpg\" alt=\"successful-intelligence2\" width=\"300\" height=\"466\">While at Tufts, he helped the school pilot a new \u003ca href=\"http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/28/sternberg\">admissions policy based on testing students for their creative and practical skills\u003c/a> in addition to their analytical skills. The school found that the new method helped them better predict student success. The application asked questions like, “How would you persuade a friend of an idea that the friend didn’t immediately accept?” Or, “How could one of your personal passions positively affect the world?” Students could choose to express their answers in multiple ways including essays, creative YouTube videos, and through drawings. Admissions officers were trained to look for the thinking behind the answers, not just writing skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tufts had to hire a few more admissions officers and retrain the existing ones, but Sternberg said gradually the student population began to change. “The benefits were much greater than the costs because admissions should be based on the mission of your college or university,” Sternberg said. “It changes the kids who are accepted and it begins to change how you think about what it means to have a talented student,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students learn what's important for them to know from their environment. “The point is that what you ought to be measuring is how well they’ve learned the skills that allow them to adapt to the environment in which they grew up,” Sternberg said. That knowledge will help colleges understand how the student will adapt in a new environment. Tests weighted towards skill sets that weren’t necessary for survival in certain environments, make those students look comparatively much worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need to send the message to high schools that we’re looking for more,” Sternberg said. “The way to do that is augment what we use to admit kids.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE HIGH SCHOOL PERSPECTIVE\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> (SLA), a public magnet high school in Philadelphia is a fairly young school, just eight years old. But in that short time, it's developed a reputation around the country as a shining example of the merits of inquiry-based learning approach. Colleges sometimes have a difficult time understanding the school’s approach to developing autonomous, critical thinkers. For example, SLA doesn’t offer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, because making students take a summative test at the end of the year is antithetical to the concept of allowing students to guide their own learning based on interest and collaborative work -- and just as importantly, the value of the incremental learning process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can never be a revolutionary at the expense of the kids,” said SLA principal Chris Lehmann. He says there are plenty of things that high schools can do that are innovative and different, but schools need to know when that is appropriate and when experimentation might hurt its students. SLA has a good track record of sending students to college, despite some of its non-traditional practices -- 97 percent are accepted to colleges.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lehmann describes SLA as taking the traditionally recognizable school mold and stretching it to its edge. “One of the reasons we chose to do that was because we knew we had to get kids into college,” Lehmann said. “There are so many colleges who really want kids who can problem solve, who can lead, who can think and who have a really innovative mind,” he said. That’s why SLA invites college representatives to visit the school and observe for themselves the kind of learning taking place there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve spent a lot of time bringing colleges to SLA and showing them what SLA kids can do,” Lehmann said. “What sells colleges on our kids is our kids,” he said. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Lehmann says a school doing something out of the mold always has to be prepared to argue for its approach, especially when it’s a new district school, not an established private one. Lehmann says he has been pleasantly surprised at how well college representatives respond to the SLA model.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">“Colleges sometimes are slow to recognize the good work and best practice that is happening around them.\"\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Grades are another area where Science Leadership Academy has compromised between its ideal and what colleges want. Teachers give a lot of narrative and qualitative feedback on student work, but at the end of the class they also give students a letter grade -- that’s what colleges want to see. It’s a delicate balance between building school cultures and practices that genuinely reflect the values of its educators and playing within the system. It can be done -- but it takes extra effort and awareness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While change is slow, Lehmann says some schools are beginning to shift how they teach to be more in line with SLA’s inquiry-based approach. Schools like Drexel University and MIT are trying out hands-on programs, and \u003ca href=\"http://www.rhobserver.com/20148/bard-elevates-its-entrance-exam/\">Bard is experimenting with its admissions strategy\u003c/a>. “Colleges sometimes are slow to recognize the good work and best practice that is happening around them,” Lehmann said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For me the evolution of education has to understand that it requires one part vision and one part history,” Lehmann said. “Let’s not think that we need to remake everything that has ever happened without an eye to the past. That’s when you make mistakes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>THE MODERN WORLD REQUIRES HYBRID-THINKING\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the perspective of employers, college graduates need to be ready to enter a working world that requires flexible, adaptable, nimble thinkers and doers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://www.jumpassociates.com/\">Jump Associates\u003c/a>, a strategy and information firm, is an example of a company that requires a more \"hybrid\" nature of skill sets in the working world. Companies hire Jump to solve complex, ambiguous problems. For example, the company worked with Samsung to try and come up with a tablet that would outshine Apple’s iPad before the iPad had even been released. There was very little information on hand, but a solution had to be reached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of these organizations are facing problems of extreme ambiguity,” said Dev Patnaik, CEO of Jump Associates. ‘The world is changing, what do I do about that.’ In that situation the biggest problem is to define the problem.” To do that, Jump Associates tries to hire what they call “hybrid-thinkers,” people who are \"one part technologist, one part humanist and one part capitalist.\" “What we’ve learned is you start with people who have deep expertise in multiple disciplines at the same time,” Patnaik said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But universities don’t often encourage that kind of cross-discipline thinking naturally. “Universities are set up to be incredibly siloed,” said Patnaik who teaches a class at Stanford. “These bigger more nebulous, more meaningful questions live in between and across these silos.” But it’s difficult to change the system because most people came up through that a system that encourages them to continually narrow their focus of study.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">“Universities are set up to be incredibly siloed.”\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Patnaik thinks the U.S. is getting off track by trying to compete with China and India in math and science because of the assumption that those fields lead to jobs. “I worry that the last five years of economic recession has made us all very scared, and when you’re scared, you start thinking, 'What’s in it for me in the short term,'” he said. He doesn’t think the U.S. will ever be as good at pumping out math and science majors as India or China, but if the it plays to its traditional strengths – creativity, innovation, bridging cognitive gaps – then there’s an opportunity to be the country that shapes the problem. “We’re throwing that all away out of fear and calling it STEM,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jump Associates asks its employees to solve seemingly unsolvable problems. “We need people to come up with ideas about what ought to be designed,” Patnaik said. While universities are slowly evolving to meet this challenge, focusing on more interdisciplinary learning for instance, students are often still focused on learning to become “successful,” rather than on learning because it makes them well-rounded and productive humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One start-up is tackling the notion of what an elite college education might look like. The \u003ca href=\"http://www.minervaproject.com/\">Minerva Project\u003c/a> received $25 million in seed money to produce what they call \"high quality\" higher education, entirely online. The university plans to accept its first class in September of 2014 and is working to finalize its hybrid curriculum and online delivery mechanisms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our goal is to create leaders and innovators in a variety of disciplines that operate in a global context,” said \u003ca href=\"http://chronicle.com/article/Behavior-Expert-Seizes-Chance/138375/\">Stephen Kosslyn, dean of faculty at Minerva Project\u003c/a>. “That’s where we start.” By starting from scratch, the school is free of the traditions and expectations that become stumbling blocks for older institutions grappling with change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kosslyn has a lot of experience with tradition-laden institutions -- he was on the \u003ca href=\"http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=kosslynlab\">faculty of Harvard\u003c/a> for more than 30 years, teaching psychology, and then as the Dean of Social Sciences. He’s familiar with slow moving initiatives to change the way universities run. “I was ready for something else,” Kosslyn said. “I wanted to do something that would really make a difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Minerva Project has thrown out all the assumptions about “college readiness” that have long existed. Instead, the founders focused on the skills students should have when they finish -- critical analysis, creative thinking and effective communication – and backed into thinking about how to get them to that point. Kosslyn admits that it’s difficult to define what is meant in each of those categories. Critical analysis involves critical thinking and the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and various outcomes. But critical thinking can also be more than one thing. “Breaking it down, we get to the point that we can teach things,” Kosslyn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kosslyn and his team intend to help students prepare for an unknown future by developing skill sets that allow them to adapt. “We’re interested in cultivating habits of mind that become very effortless and automatic and allow you to do these things,” Kosslyn said. It also means they're looking for very different qualities in students they accept.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re looking for a combination of cognitive abilities and personality characteristics,” Kosslyn said, not SAT scores. Minerva wants students that exhibit grit, an openness to new experiences, and maturity. They’re using a test they've created that tries to measure these qualities that's agnostic of a student's class, background, and country of origin, important for a university expecting a global population. But Kosslyn said those test won’t make or break an application. “What you need to do is look at the entire picture, including what they’ve done before,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Students who attend Minerva will have to be self-directed and good at working collaboratively. Their courses will be delivered online and the university will likely leverage the information on the web to require students to be independently motivated. “What you need is people who are really motivated and have enough ability that they can teach themselves or can function in a group that’s helping them to learn,” Kosslyn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hope is that students will begin to know their own strengths and bring those to collaborations. “The problems we are faced with are complex enough that we will need to solve them in teams,” Kosslyn said. And since collaborative work is a required skill in most jobs, Minerva students will learn it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, in the first year the students will take four courses: multi-modal communication, complex systems, empirical systems, and computational sciences. The intention is for traditionally separate subjects to be integrated if they involve complimentary skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>COMPETENCY-BASED UNIVERSITIES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the Minerva experiment develops, some existing universities are taking steps to award college credit based on skills learned, not the amount of time they've been enrolled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One approach to this problem is to standardize the definition by a college degree. “The learning and expectations should be the constant and if you can do it faster why should that be a problem,” said Jamie Marisotis, CEO of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.luminafoundation.org/\">Lumina Foundation\u003c/a>, an organization working to ensure that 60 percent of Americans have post-secondary degrees by 2025. The Lumina Foundation supports experiments like \u003ca href=\"http://collegeforamerica.org/\">College For America\u003c/a>, a project of Southern New Hampshire University and the \u003ca href=\"http://flex.wisconsin.edu/\">University of Wisconsin’s Flexible Option\u003c/a>. These programs are experimenting with degree programs based on mastering required skills and contents at a pace the student sets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Competency should not mean competency in tasks,” Marisotis said. “What we’re really talking about in terms of competency are those broader things like constructing an argument.” He’d like higher education to follow the example set by K-12 education with the Common Core State Standards, a set of broad criteria that students master before graduating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By eliminating the four-year degree and making sure that every student graduates with a similar set of skills, \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/education/edlife/degrees-based-on-what-you-can-do-not-how-long-you-went.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&hp\">a college education would become less expensive\u003c/a> and more accessible to a broader population. But, it would also undermine the pedagogical approaches of many university departments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m very sympathetic to the perspective of the faculty because what we’re talking about is very different than what they have done and what they’ve gone into their careers to do,” Marisotis said. He says those who want to see change in higher education need to be patient with faculty who are crucial to making any new system work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The main model is to produce high quality learners with high quality outcomes that they can apply in their lives,” Marisotis said. But to do that, he believes universities need to be clearer about what the learning expectations should be and where faculty fit into the vision.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_27623\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 616px\">\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/scratchpost/7171535345/sizes/z/in/photostream/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-27623\" title=\"\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z.jpg\" alt=\"7171535345_65369bbb0b_z\" width=\"616\" height=\"316\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z.jpg 616w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z-400x205.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z-320x164.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 616px) 100vw, 616px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,\" said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/http://\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at \u003ca href=\"http://schedule.sxswedu.com/events/event_EDUP14151\">SXSWEdu\u003c/a> last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. BE FLEXIBLE.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students' voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning. But that requires a flexible mindset on the part of the teacher. \"That's a scary proposition for teachers,\" Laufenberg said. \"'What do you mean I'm going to have 60 kids doing 60 different projects,' teachers might say. But that's exactly the way for kids to do interesting, high-end work that they're invested in.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. She finally relented -- with the caveat that they not resort to cliches. In turn, the students turned in one of the best video projects she'd ever seen: a \u003ca href=\"http://www.schooltube.com/video/31acc2c8a0044660b2b9/There%27s%20A%20Pill%20For%20That:%20A%20Nation%20Of%20Pill-Poppers\">well-produced, polished video \u003c/a>about Americans' dependence on pharmaceutical drugs that was dense with facts backed up by students' research. \"And I almost killed this project,\" she said. \"There are vastly creative minds that are \u003c!--more-->capable of doing intensely wonderful things with their learning but often we don't let that live and breathe. Thankfully I got out of their way and let them do the work they were capable of.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. FOSTER INQUIRY BY SCAFFOLDING CURIOSITY.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nTeachers always come up to Laufenberg wanting to learn more about her progressive pedagogy -- and they invariably ask, \"But when do you just tell them things? Don't you have to just tell them sometimes?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg's answer: Get them curious enough in the subject to do research on their own.\u003cbr>\n\"Kids don't come to class just burning to know about the War of 1812,\" she said. \"And you just saying they have to know the facts is not good enough. But here's your chance to bring them along as a person and get them to learn about it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in exploring the subject of American identity with her history students, Laufenberg asked them to come up with words that convey to them the abstract idea of America, or what it means to be American. Many of her students came up with the words \"greedy\" and \"ignorant\" -- a trend she saw echoed throughout many of her classes during her years teaching at SLA. \"I got a clear vision of where my students were,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She asked her students to find images that epitomized America, then asked them to talk about their ideas with their peers, studying data about immigration, taking the American citizenship test themselves (most received an average score of 3, across the board regardless of age), so they could understand the processes and become personally invested in the subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Rather than saying, 'We're going to study immigration,' I took them through a process where they become interested in it themselves,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. DESIGN ARCHITECTURE FOR PARTICIPATION.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\"There are so many ways that kids can be active in their learning, beyond the standard call-and-respond business,\" Laufenberg said. It may be hard to do with 140 students, but if you consider all the available tools at your disposal, ideas can start to take shape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Example: Laufenberg asked her students to watch President Obama's State of the Union address and respond to what they watched and heard. She gave her students the option to either post comments on Twitter (fully public), Facebook (semi-public), Moodle (walled garden) or for low-tech participants, play Bingo with key words the students anticipated they might hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003ch5>RELATED:\u003c/h5>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/what-does-it-take-to-fully-embrace-inquiry-learning/\">Why Inquiry Learning is Worth the Trouble\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/02/how-to-fuel-students-learning-through-their-interests/\">How to Fuel Students' Learning Through Their Interests\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/how-can-teachers-prepare-kids-for-a-connected-world/\">How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though some goofed around a bit with comments (\"Our school is so cool, we're tweeting the State of the Union\"), at the end of the speech, students had posted a total of 438 tweets and 18 pages of Moodle chat. (Interestingly, no one went on Facebook, though she had set up a separate conversation on the school's Facebook page.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg was not surprised with the high quality of responses she saw from her students. \"Does Obama have the power to reform and adjust how the other branches work?\" one student tweeted. \"He's not touching on Iran issue… not a good sign,\" another posted. \"High school dropout laws, rebuilding jobs in our country, and more equipment in schools… me gusta,\" wrote yet another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I could have them face off against any pundit the next day,\" she said. \"They understood it. None of it went over their head -- they were making meaning of it. They were offering their own opinions, participating in the conversation.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg used every tool she had at her disposal as a framework for her students to build their learning around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. TEACHERS TEACH KIDS, NOT SUBJECTS.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nAs most teachers know, when students recognize that teachers are personally invested in their success, they do better, and that affirmation of students' disposition can help students achieve more. \"You can't ask kids to take risks if they don't trust that you care about them,\" Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nDuring the weeks and months that led up to the election, Laufenberg's students got into the neighborhoods and brought back stories from voters at the polls. Though they didn't always feel comfortable asking strangers questions, they went ahead with their assignments anyway. \"If none of it is ever real to them, if it's only in books, it lacks interest,\" she said. \"They \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to do real stuff, but we are perpetually underestimating what kids can do.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>6. EMBRACE FAILURE.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nLaufenberg made a point of defining the difference between \"blameworthy\" and \"praiseworthy\" failure. Blameworthy failure is when the student just decided not to participate in a project. But praiseworthy failure is quite different: kids take risks and experiments knowing that they might not get it right the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"No one talks about cancer research as blameworthy failure,\" she said. \"We don't expect a five-year-old to be able to shoot free-throws immediately. It's a process, and we value it in other things, but not when it comes to school. Kids are not coming in as perfect little products or machines -- they're human beings in the process of becoming.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the engineering industry, for example, there are \"failure festivals\" and \"failure reports\" during which engineers discuss the processes they've tried that didn't work. \"We need to have kids do that with their own learning,\" she said. \"Be self-aware enough to do something with that information.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>7. DON'T BE BORING.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\"I always told my kids, if I got boring, they should let me know, and if they got boring, I'd let them know,\" Laufenberg said. But here's the twist: kids may actually choose boring because it's easier, it's known, it's quantifiable. \"They know what they need to do to get a good score,\" she said. When it's not boring, when the answer is not predictable, that's when kids are actually challenged more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>8. FOSTER JOY.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nFor a government history teacher, this last directive has been a tall order. But Laufenberg made a point of trying to create a space where her students were valued, where creativity was paramount, and their voices were allowed to shine through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's incredibly taxing work, but one of the most exciting and meaningful ways to create transformative spaces,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Above all, what she wants to instill in her students is a sense of self-sufficiency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"If by the end of the year, they still need me, I haven't done my job,\" she said. \"I'm not coming with them to college. They have to be self-driven, independent thinkers.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watch Laufenberg's fascinating TED Talk \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html\">\"How to Learn? From Mistakes.\"\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe src=\"http://embed.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_27623\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 616px\">\u003ca href=\"http://www.flickr.com/photos/scratchpost/7171535345/sizes/z/in/photostream/\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-27623\" title=\"\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z.jpg\" alt=\"7171535345_65369bbb0b_z\" width=\"616\" height=\"316\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z.jpg 616w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z-400x205.jpg 400w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/23/2013/03/7171535345_65369bbb0b_z-320x164.jpg 320w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 616px) 100vw, 616px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,\" said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/http://\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a> for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at \u003ca href=\"http://schedule.sxswedu.com/events/event_EDUP14151\">SXSWEdu\u003c/a> last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1. BE FLEXIBLE.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nThe less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students' voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning. But that requires a flexible mindset on the part of the teacher. \"That's a scary proposition for teachers,\" Laufenberg said. \"'What do you mean I'm going to have 60 kids doing 60 different projects,' teachers might say. But that's exactly the way for kids to do interesting, high-end work that they're invested in.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. She finally relented -- with the caveat that they not resort to cliches. In turn, the students turned in one of the best video projects she'd ever seen: a \u003ca href=\"http://www.schooltube.com/video/31acc2c8a0044660b2b9/There%27s%20A%20Pill%20For%20That:%20A%20Nation%20Of%20Pill-Poppers\">well-produced, polished video \u003c/a>about Americans' dependence on pharmaceutical drugs that was dense with facts backed up by students' research. \"And I almost killed this project,\" she said. \"There are vastly creative minds that are \u003c!--more-->capable of doing intensely wonderful things with their learning but often we don't let that live and breathe. Thankfully I got out of their way and let them do the work they were capable of.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2. FOSTER INQUIRY BY SCAFFOLDING CURIOSITY.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nTeachers always come up to Laufenberg wanting to learn more about her progressive pedagogy -- and they invariably ask, \"But when do you just tell them things? Don't you have to just tell them sometimes?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg's answer: Get them curious enough in the subject to do research on their own.\u003cbr>\n\"Kids don't come to class just burning to know about the War of 1812,\" she said. \"And you just saying they have to know the facts is not good enough. But here's your chance to bring them along as a person and get them to learn about it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, in exploring the subject of American identity with her history students, Laufenberg asked them to come up with words that convey to them the abstract idea of America, or what it means to be American. Many of her students came up with the words \"greedy\" and \"ignorant\" -- a trend she saw echoed throughout many of her classes during her years teaching at SLA. \"I got a clear vision of where my students were,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She asked her students to find images that epitomized America, then asked them to talk about their ideas with their peers, studying data about immigration, taking the American citizenship test themselves (most received an average score of 3, across the board regardless of age), so they could understand the processes and become personally invested in the subject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Rather than saying, 'We're going to study immigration,' I took them through a process where they become interested in it themselves,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>3. DESIGN ARCHITECTURE FOR PARTICIPATION.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\"There are so many ways that kids can be active in their learning, beyond the standard call-and-respond business,\" Laufenberg said. It may be hard to do with 140 students, but if you consider all the available tools at your disposal, ideas can start to take shape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Example: Laufenberg asked her students to watch President Obama's State of the Union address and respond to what they watched and heard. She gave her students the option to either post comments on Twitter (fully public), Facebook (semi-public), Moodle (walled garden) or for low-tech participants, play Bingo with key words the students anticipated they might hear.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003ch5>RELATED:\u003c/h5>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/what-does-it-take-to-fully-embrace-inquiry-learning/\">Why Inquiry Learning is Worth the Trouble\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/02/how-to-fuel-students-learning-through-their-interests/\">How to Fuel Students' Learning Through Their Interests\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/how-can-teachers-prepare-kids-for-a-connected-world/\">How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?\u003c/a>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though some goofed around a bit with comments (\"Our school is so cool, we're tweeting the State of the Union\"), at the end of the speech, students had posted a total of 438 tweets and 18 pages of Moodle chat. (Interestingly, no one went on Facebook, though she had set up a separate conversation on the school's Facebook page.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg was not surprised with the high quality of responses she saw from her students. \"Does Obama have the power to reform and adjust how the other branches work?\" one student tweeted. \"He's not touching on Iran issue… not a good sign,\" another posted. \"High school dropout laws, rebuilding jobs in our country, and more equipment in schools… me gusta,\" wrote yet another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I could have them face off against any pundit the next day,\" she said. \"They understood it. None of it went over their head -- they were making meaning of it. They were offering their own opinions, participating in the conversation.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laufenberg used every tool she had at her disposal as a framework for her students to build their learning around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>4. TEACHERS TEACH KIDS, NOT SUBJECTS.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nAs most teachers know, when students recognize that teachers are personally invested in their success, they do better, and that affirmation of students' disposition can help students achieve more. \"You can't ask kids to take risks if they don't trust that you care about them,\" Laufenberg said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>5. PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nDuring the weeks and months that led up to the election, Laufenberg's students got into the neighborhoods and brought back stories from voters at the polls. Though they didn't always feel comfortable asking strangers questions, they went ahead with their assignments anyway. \"If none of it is ever real to them, if it's only in books, it lacks interest,\" she said. \"They \u003cem>want\u003c/em> to do real stuff, but we are perpetually underestimating what kids can do.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>6. EMBRACE FAILURE.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nLaufenberg made a point of defining the difference between \"blameworthy\" and \"praiseworthy\" failure. Blameworthy failure is when the student just decided not to participate in a project. But praiseworthy failure is quite different: kids take risks and experiments knowing that they might not get it right the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"No one talks about cancer research as blameworthy failure,\" she said. \"We don't expect a five-year-old to be able to shoot free-throws immediately. It's a process, and we value it in other things, but not when it comes to school. Kids are not coming in as perfect little products or machines -- they're human beings in the process of becoming.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the engineering industry, for example, there are \"failure festivals\" and \"failure reports\" during which engineers discuss the processes they've tried that didn't work. \"We need to have kids do that with their own learning,\" she said. \"Be self-aware enough to do something with that information.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>7. DON'T BE BORING.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\"I always told my kids, if I got boring, they should let me know, and if they got boring, I'd let them know,\" Laufenberg said. But here's the twist: kids may actually choose boring because it's easier, it's known, it's quantifiable. \"They know what they need to do to get a good score,\" she said. When it's not boring, when the answer is not predictable, that's when kids are actually challenged more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>8. FOSTER JOY.\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nFor a government history teacher, this last directive has been a tall order. But Laufenberg made a point of trying to create a space where her students were valued, where creativity was paramount, and their voices were allowed to shine through.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's incredibly taxing work, but one of the most exciting and meaningful ways to create transformative spaces,\" she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Above all, what she wants to instill in her students is a sense of self-sufficiency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"If by the end of the year, they still need me, I haven't done my job,\" she said. \"I'm not coming with them to college. They have to be self-driven, independent thinkers.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Watch Laufenberg's fascinating TED Talk \u003ca href=\"http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html\">\"How to Learn? From Mistakes.\"\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv id=\"attachment_26895\" class=\"module image aligncenter mceTemp mceIEcenter\" style=\"width: 620px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-26895\" title=\"\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2013/01/139698456-620x413.jpg\" alt=\"139698456\" width=\"620\" height=\"413\">\n\u003cp class=\"wp-media-credit\">Getty\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">“Polynomial functions!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Trig identities!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How about the properties? Commutative, associative, distributive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So unfolded a laundry list of what a group of math teachers considered the more painful and less necessary concepts covered in the average high school math curriculum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The laments, aired at \u003ca href=\"http://educonphilly.org/\">EduCon 2.5\u003c/a> in Philadelphia at Science Leadership Academy last weekend, were part of a discussion around how to rebuild math instruction under the radically different—and admittedly unlikely—parameters posed by moderator \u003ca href=\"http://www.linkedin.com/pub/mike-thayer/43/254/289\">Mike Thayer\u003c/a>, a math teacher at Summit Public Schools in New Jersey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer, who also has a background teaching high school physics, proposed a scenario in which high school freshmen would take a one-year course (or a one-semester course in a block scheduling system) that covered the essentials of Algebra 1 and 2, Geometry, and possibly parts of Trigonometry. Any additional math concepts might be learned in a cross-disciplinary fashion through other courses. For example, chemistry teachers would be responsible for teaching\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\u003cstrong>“I'd like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”\u003c/strong>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>students the basics of logarithms while covering the pH scale. Biology teachers would explain concepts of exponential growth to their students when discussing species population and reproduction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rationale of such a course, Thayer said, would be to create a version of math instruction that more fully lives with the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning\">inquiry-based learning\u003c/a> approach embraced by the \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a>, the public magnet high school where the conference took place. His vision—which hinges on what he concedes is a large assumption that students would enter high school \u003c!--more-->competent in basic computational thinking—is for a course that would both streamline a high school student’s general math experience, and empower and encourage them to learn additional math skills to solve real-world problems of their own interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one teacher at the discussion put it: “I'd like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer asked the teachers to consider four questions as they imagined the hypothetical course:\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>WHAT STAYS AND WHAT GOES?\u003c/strong> Consider both what concepts would get more or less emphasis, as well as what method of learning (lectures, work sheets, group work, collaborative projects, etc.) would work best.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>NEXT STEP FOR STUDENTS?\u003c/strong> Options could include more advanced mathematics courses, independent mathematics projects, courses in other subjects that included applicable advanced math concepts, or some combination.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>HOW WOULD TEACHING CHANGE?\u003c/strong> Choose which lessons you'd save and which lessons you'd skip. Envision whether you'd use the same kinds of exercises to develop students skills, and whether you'd structure class time in the same manner, or perhaps utilize it differently.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>WHAT WOULD YOU ASSESS?\u003c/strong> Tests should reflect the purpose of the course, to develop students' understanding of the theoretical and practical purposes of math.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>Most of the discussion during the 90-minute talk focused on the first two points, and the group generally agreed the course would need to focus on changing student thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I am hearing is that if we would like to really make math meaningful for our students, we need to do things to create the ability for them to be truly mathematical thinkers,” Thayer said at one point after hearing a few responses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were, however, disagreements over the relative importance of concepts. And a couple of teachers even asked whether geometry would fit within the parameters of such a course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group also questioned whether a focus on real-world math applications would be the most likely way to spur students into independent investigation, and whether that focus could create an unintended bias in the kind of material covered. As an example, teachers noted that using tools like \u003ca href=\"http://www.101qs.com/\">101 Questions\u003c/a>, a website that asks users to think of a question related to a displayed image, could result in an excessive focus on proportionality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer encouraged such discourse, suggesting it would be essential in his new model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the first thing for us, in order to be masters in context as well as content, is to recognize our strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “I would love for somebody else to be able to come into my classroom and explain why [a concept] is important.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a speech at EduCon earlier that morning, Philadelphia public schools \u003ca href=\"http://www.phila.k12.pa.us/leadership/#ceo\">Superintendent William Hite\u003c/a> stressed the need for teachers to move from content to context expertise. And \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/what-does-it-take-to-fully-embrace-inquiry-learning/\">in a later discussion\u003c/a>, Science Leadership Academy founding Principal Chris Lehmann conceded such an approach could be more difficult in a math classroom, but not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer, meanwhile, warned that if math teachers didn’t find a way to make that difficult shift, they could be marginalized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most of the stuff we teach” in traditional courses, he said, “the \u003ca href=\"http://www.khanacademy.org/\">Khan Academy\u003c/a> does it for free.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer, who also has a background teaching high school physics, proposed a scenario in which high school freshmen would take a one-year course (or a one-semester course in a block scheduling system) that covered the essentials of Algebra 1 and 2, Geometry, and possibly parts of Trigonometry. Any additional math concepts might be learned in a cross-disciplinary fashion through other courses. For example, chemistry teachers would be responsible for teaching\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\u003cstrong>“I'd like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”\u003c/strong>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>students the basics of logarithms while covering the pH scale. Biology teachers would explain concepts of exponential growth to their students when discussing species population and reproduction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rationale of such a course, Thayer said, would be to create a version of math instruction that more fully lives with the \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquiry-based_learning\">inquiry-based learning\u003c/a> approach embraced by the \u003ca href=\"http://www.scienceleadership.org/\">Science Leadership Academy\u003c/a>, the public magnet high school where the conference took place. His vision—which hinges on what he concedes is a large assumption that students would enter high school \u003c!--more-->competent in basic computational thinking—is for a course that would both streamline a high school student’s general math experience, and empower and encourage them to learn additional math skills to solve real-world problems of their own interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one teacher at the discussion put it: “I'd like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer asked the teachers to consider four questions as they imagined the hypothetical course:\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>WHAT STAYS AND WHAT GOES?\u003c/strong> Consider both what concepts would get more or less emphasis, as well as what method of learning (lectures, work sheets, group work, collaborative projects, etc.) would work best.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>NEXT STEP FOR STUDENTS?\u003c/strong> Options could include more advanced mathematics courses, independent mathematics projects, courses in other subjects that included applicable advanced math concepts, or some combination.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>HOW WOULD TEACHING CHANGE?\u003c/strong> Choose which lessons you'd save and which lessons you'd skip. Envision whether you'd use the same kinds of exercises to develop students skills, and whether you'd structure class time in the same manner, or perhaps utilize it differently.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>WHAT WOULD YOU ASSESS?\u003c/strong> Tests should reflect the purpose of the course, to develop students' understanding of the theoretical and practical purposes of math.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>Most of the discussion during the 90-minute talk focused on the first two points, and the group generally agreed the course would need to focus on changing student thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I am hearing is that if we would like to really make math meaningful for our students, we need to do things to create the ability for them to be truly mathematical thinkers,” Thayer said at one point after hearing a few responses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were, however, disagreements over the relative importance of concepts. And a couple of teachers even asked whether geometry would fit within the parameters of such a course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group also questioned whether a focus on real-world math applications would be the most likely way to spur students into independent investigation, and whether that focus could create an unintended bias in the kind of material covered. As an example, teachers noted that using tools like \u003ca href=\"http://www.101qs.com/\">101 Questions\u003c/a>, a website that asks users to think of a question related to a displayed image, could result in an excessive focus on proportionality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer encouraged such discourse, suggesting it would be essential in his new model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think the first thing for us, in order to be masters in context as well as content, is to recognize our strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “I would love for somebody else to be able to come into my classroom and explain why [a concept] is important.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a speech at EduCon earlier that morning, Philadelphia public schools \u003ca href=\"http://www.phila.k12.pa.us/leadership/#ceo\">Superintendent William Hite\u003c/a> stressed the need for teachers to move from content to context expertise. And \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/01/what-does-it-take-to-fully-embrace-inquiry-learning/\">in a later discussion\u003c/a>, Science Leadership Academy founding Principal Chris Lehmann conceded such an approach could be more difficult in a math classroom, but not impossible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thayer, meanwhile, warned that if math teachers didn’t find a way to make that difficult shift, they could be marginalized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most of the stuff we teach” in traditional courses, he said, “the \u003ca href=\"http://www.khanacademy.org/\">Khan Academy\u003c/a> does it for free.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_24418\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 620px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/classroom.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-24418\" title=\"classroom\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/classroom-620x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following is an excerpt of \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974525219/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top\">One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School\u003c/a>, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab’s Human Dynamics group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Today’s problems — from global poverty to climate change to the obesity epidemic — are more interconnected and intertwined than ever before and they can’t possibly be solved in the academic or research ‘silos’ of the twentieth century,” writes Frank Moss, the former head of the M.I.T. Media Lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools cannot just simply add a “creativity hour” and call it a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Principal at High Tech High, an innovative, project-based learning school in San Diego, California, Larry Rosenstock, points out, “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After indicating the problem at hand, scoop out the tools, research, networks, and people required to get it solved. Get out of your comfort zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003cp>\"You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class. Instead, we need to arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums. What does learning look like in this model? Letting kids learn by doing — the essence of the philosophy of educator John Dewey. He wrote: “The school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” Let kids travel to places, work with mentors, and inquire about the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning. School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating.” Let kids create for themselves. We can start by employing project-based learning, where students probe real world problems collaboratively. Back in 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick wrote a famous article laying out what he called the “project method”: a curriculum based on “wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment...the essential factor [being] the presence of a dominating purpose.” In \u003c!--more-->project-based classrooms, learning literally comes alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: BRIGHTWORKS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let’s examine three institutions: The Brightworks School, a K-12 private school; Stanford d.school, an institute of design; and the M.I.T. Media Lab, a graduate program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Brightworks School in San Francisco, California, which opened its doors in September 2011, epitomizes a new style of learning. Founder Gever Tulley told me, “If the pedagogical unit of traditional public education is a day divided into a series of 45 minute periods, then the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first phase of the arc is called exploration. “Within this phase,” Tulley says, “we create a landscape of experiences populated by passionate people who have devoted some portion of their lives to an aspect of the topic.” The children begin a journey looking through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and eventually mold a clear statement of what they intend to accomplish in the next phase. The second phase is expression. Tulley notes, “During this phrase, the mixed age teams work together, sharing skills, to take the ideas to completion — within the deadline.” The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first topic of the previous school year was cities. For three weeks, the students looked at the history of cities, how cities work, and the future of cities. 18 field trips were built into their schedule. Almost every day, Tulley explains, “we went into the city to see something or work with someone who has dedicated their life to some aspect of the city. Be they in waste water management, city planners, or architects.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley. “Part of that is to expand the notion of cities in the students’ minds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Note: project-based learning is not necessarily expensive. He reveals, “If you look at the net aggregate cost of putting a child through a nearby public school in terms of public expenditure, at Brightworks, we do not spend anymore on kids in our private school in terms of net aggregate cost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: STANFORD D.SCHOOL\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Stanford d.school, projects drive the curriculum. Bringing majors from engineering, business, medicine, science, and design to come together to solve real or abstract problems is the underpinning of the institution’s philosophy. The goal is to have students become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Its founder and director is David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class and regain their creative confidence, often lost in the early years of schooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on the axioms of what Kelley has called “design thinking,” instead of being spoon-fed problems to solve, students must first define problems themselves through observation, research, and dialogue. After, students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another in the stage of “ideation.” Next, by means of prototypes, students make sketches and three-dimensional models of potential ideas to iterate continuously. Lastly, students make the final touches on a finished prototype.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 education. From extracting water for irrigation in Burma to supplying solar lanterns for the poor in rural India and Africa to building infant warmers in Nepal, these students are certainly making their mark on the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning. Their research program is “focused on inventing a better future through creative applications of innovative digital technologies.” Instead of lectures, grading, and tests, roughly 25 groups of graduate student researchers and a few undergraduate researchers work with faculty members and scientists on a research topic. Due to its non-linear and collaborative process, fascinating innovations are born from Aida, a dashboard-mounted robot for cars and trucks to a trillion-frame-per-second video to Huggable, a robot teddy bear companion for pediatric hospital patients.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003cp>“If you go into a [traditional] classroom where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>How can we evaluate projects? We can’t grade them the same way as tests. Gever Tulley offered me a very relevant hypothetical situation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development. If the teacher thought the task was too easy for us, he or she might add a twist — the boat needs to have two masts or sail power. Half a day, a few times a week, you and I would work on this project and we have a deadline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Suppose then we build the boat, drop it in the Hudson River, and it sinks. No one has to tell us that our boat is not working. We don’t need the ‘F.’ Its unnecessary and inappropriate. That first version of the boat could have been a hypothesis. We learned from the experience and the next version will be more well thought out. So after going back to drawing board and making tweaks, we test the final version. We find that the boat sails well downwind, but cannot sail upwind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What grade should a teacher give? Is that a ‘C’ because it only went in one direction? Or is that an ‘A’ because we tried a bold idea but we neglected 3,000 years of sailing history and would have been able to sail it in both directions if we had done our research? You can’t decide. The feedback from the boat is its own incentive to improve our thinking for the next project.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point is that evaluation is no longer about giving a single number, but rather a documented process from start to finish. At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term. Plus, portfolios and publishing your work online is one of the biggest motivators for kids. When she was teaching at the Science Leadership Academy, Diana Laufenberg said that if you Googled her students’ names, you would find an entire web history linked to them. Couple that with the fact that in project-based learning, kids are working on something they have a passion for, thus they have a stake in the outcome and will keep trying even when something isn’t working. That’s true in life as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_24421\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/7566329228_4d5377458b_z.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-24421\" title=\"7566329228_4d5377458b_z\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/7566329228_4d5377458b_z-300x198.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"198\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IS MESSY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.” Get over compliance and control!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a summary published on Edutopia, Brigid Barron and Linda Darling-Hammond reviewed numerous studies and found that:\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Students learn more deeply when they can apply classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems, and when they take part in projects that require sustained engagement and collaboration.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Active-learning practices have a more significant impact on student performance than any other variable, including student background and prior achievement.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>As the old adage goes, “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.” Harvard Professor Howard Gardner said to me that schools should incorporate the best of two models of learning: a hands-on children’s museum, which encourages open-ended exploration, and an apprenticeship, which provides a more structured environment for practicing meaningful skills in an authentic, real-life context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bottom line is that you don’t have to learn the boring stuff before you start applying it. Start rolling around in the dirt from the get go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Nikhil Goyal lives with his family in Woodbury, New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry, Fox and Friends, Fox Business: Varney & Co., NBC Nightly News, and Huffington Post.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"description": "The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York. Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_24418\" class=\"wp-caption center\" style=\"max-width: 620px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/classroom.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-large wp-image-24418\" title=\"classroom\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/classroom-620x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"300\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The following is an excerpt of \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974525219/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top\">One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School\u003c/a>, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"dropcap-serif\">Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab’s Human Dynamics group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Today’s problems — from global poverty to climate change to the obesity epidemic — are more interconnected and intertwined than ever before and they can’t possibly be solved in the academic or research ‘silos’ of the twentieth century,” writes Frank Moss, the former head of the M.I.T. Media Lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools cannot just simply add a “creativity hour” and call it a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Principal at High Tech High, an innovative, project-based learning school in San Diego, California, Larry Rosenstock, points out, “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After indicating the problem at hand, scoop out the tools, research, networks, and people required to get it solved. Get out of your comfort zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003cp>\"You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class. Instead, we need to arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums. What does learning look like in this model? Letting kids learn by doing — the essence of the philosophy of educator John Dewey. He wrote: “The school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” Let kids travel to places, work with mentors, and inquire about the world around them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning. School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating.” Let kids create for themselves. We can start by employing project-based learning, where students probe real world problems collaboratively. Back in 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick wrote a famous article laying out what he called the “project method”: a curriculum based on “wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment...the essential factor [being] the presence of a dominating purpose.” In \u003c!--more-->project-based classrooms, learning literally comes alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: BRIGHTWORKS\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Let’s examine three institutions: The Brightworks School, a K-12 private school; Stanford d.school, an institute of design; and the M.I.T. Media Lab, a graduate program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Brightworks School in San Francisco, California, which opened its doors in September 2011, epitomizes a new style of learning. Founder Gever Tulley told me, “If the pedagogical unit of traditional public education is a day divided into a series of 45 minute periods, then the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first phase of the arc is called exploration. “Within this phase,” Tulley says, “we create a landscape of experiences populated by passionate people who have devoted some portion of their lives to an aspect of the topic.” The children begin a journey looking through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and eventually mold a clear statement of what they intend to accomplish in the next phase. The second phase is expression. Tulley notes, “During this phrase, the mixed age teams work together, sharing skills, to take the ideas to completion — within the deadline.” The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first topic of the previous school year was cities. For three weeks, the students looked at the history of cities, how cities work, and the future of cities. 18 field trips were built into their schedule. Almost every day, Tulley explains, “we went into the city to see something or work with someone who has dedicated their life to some aspect of the city. Be they in waste water management, city planners, or architects.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley. “Part of that is to expand the notion of cities in the students’ minds.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Note: project-based learning is not necessarily expensive. He reveals, “If you look at the net aggregate cost of putting a child through a nearby public school in terms of public expenditure, at Brightworks, we do not spend anymore on kids in our private school in terms of net aggregate cost.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: STANFORD D.SCHOOL\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Stanford d.school, projects drive the curriculum. Bringing majors from engineering, business, medicine, science, and design to come together to solve real or abstract problems is the underpinning of the institution’s philosophy. The goal is to have students become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Its founder and director is David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class and regain their creative confidence, often lost in the early years of schooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on the axioms of what Kelley has called “design thinking,” instead of being spoon-fed problems to solve, students must first define problems themselves through observation, research, and dialogue. After, students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another in the stage of “ideation.” Next, by means of prototypes, students make sketches and three-dimensional models of potential ideas to iterate continuously. Lastly, students make the final touches on a finished prototype.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 education. From extracting water for irrigation in Burma to supplying solar lanterns for the poor in rural India and Africa to building infant warmers in Nepal, these students are certainly making their mark on the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>CASE STUDY: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning. Their research program is “focused on inventing a better future through creative applications of innovative digital technologies.” Instead of lectures, grading, and tests, roughly 25 groups of graduate student researchers and a few undergraduate researchers work with faculty members and scientists on a research topic. Due to its non-linear and collaborative process, fascinating innovations are born from Aida, a dashboard-mounted robot for cars and trucks to a trillion-frame-per-second video to Huggable, a robot teddy bear companion for pediatric hospital patients.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignleft\">\n\u003cp>“If you go into a [traditional] classroom where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>How can we evaluate projects? We can’t grade them the same way as tests. Gever Tulley offered me a very relevant hypothetical situation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development. If the teacher thought the task was too easy for us, he or she might add a twist — the boat needs to have two masts or sail power. Half a day, a few times a week, you and I would work on this project and we have a deadline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Suppose then we build the boat, drop it in the Hudson River, and it sinks. No one has to tell us that our boat is not working. We don’t need the ‘F.’ Its unnecessary and inappropriate. That first version of the boat could have been a hypothesis. We learned from the experience and the next version will be more well thought out. So after going back to drawing board and making tweaks, we test the final version. We find that the boat sails well downwind, but cannot sail upwind.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What grade should a teacher give? Is that a ‘C’ because it only went in one direction? Or is that an ‘A’ because we tried a bold idea but we neglected 3,000 years of sailing history and would have been able to sail it in both directions if we had done our research? You can’t decide. The feedback from the boat is its own incentive to improve our thinking for the next project.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point is that evaluation is no longer about giving a single number, but rather a documented process from start to finish. At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term. Plus, portfolios and publishing your work online is one of the biggest motivators for kids. When she was teaching at the Science Leadership Academy, Diana Laufenberg said that if you Googled her students’ names, you would find an entire web history linked to them. Couple that with the fact that in project-based learning, kids are working on something they have a passion for, thus they have a stake in the outcome and will keep trying even when something isn’t working. That’s true in life as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_24421\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 300px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/7566329228_4d5377458b_z.jpg\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-24421\" title=\"7566329228_4d5377458b_z\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2012/10/7566329228_4d5377458b_z-300x198.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"198\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\"> \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IS MESSY\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.” Get over compliance and control!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a summary published on Edutopia, Brigid Barron and Linda Darling-Hammond reviewed numerous studies and found that:\u003c/p>\n\u003col>\n\u003cli>Students learn more deeply when they can apply classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems, and when they take part in projects that require sustained engagement and collaboration.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Active-learning practices have a more significant impact on student performance than any other variable, including student background and prior achievement.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ol>\n\u003cp>As the old adage goes, “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.” Harvard Professor Howard Gardner said to me that schools should incorporate the best of two models of learning: a hands-on children’s museum, which encourages open-ended exploration, and an apprenticeship, which provides a more structured environment for practicing meaningful skills in an authentic, real-life context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bottom line is that you don’t have to learn the boring stuff before you start applying it. Start rolling around in the dirt from the get go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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