When schools try to innovate, they often take a traditional top-down approach: devise a strategy, roll it out to teachers and support a high-fidelity implementation. The end result is often one that lacks teacher support or genuine enthusiasm — initiatives putter along and change is sporadic or modest.In education and beyond, innovation is usually the result of iteration rather than central planning. In schools that succeed in implementing real instructional improvements, teachers figure out how to improve teaching and learning by journeying through multiple passes of a cycle of experiment, reflection and adjustment.
Number one on their list is, what I feel, an important and overlooked aspect of education. Research and development is all too often replaced with, “the research says we should be doing this, so let’s implement this across the building or district, without doing any R&D”.
What do you do when you are stuck working the overnight shift at a hospital reception desk? You become an expert in Microsoft Paint. Turns out, sometimes our resistance to learn something new and master a new skill can lead to something pretty amazing. Pat Hines, who couldn’t be bothered to learn Photoshop and illustrated…
There will be times when scrapping what happened altogether may be the best plan and just starting over or moving on and then circling back at another time, but more often then not, it’s worth it to just pause and reflect. These moments can yield a great deal of learning for everyone, including us. Source:…
This can’t be great news for the owners of the ACT and the SAT college admissions exams, but the list of colleges and universities that no longer require scores from those tests to be submitted with a student application keeps growing. The list of test-optional schools maintained by the nonprofit National Center for Fair and…
When the Montgomery bus boycott electrified the struggle against segregation, it was all recorded in appeals bonds, court motions and $10 fines. A forgotten trove has turned up in a courthouse vault. Source: Found: Rosa Parks’s Arrest Warrant, and More Traces of Civil Rights History – The New York Times What a great source of information…
The water bottle flipping craze, in which a partially filled bottle of water is flipped and magically lands upright, swept the globe a couple of years ago. Now a group of Dutch scientists has designed a classroom demo version of the feat, described in a recent paper in the American Journal of Physics. It is…
A great deal has been written about the future and the importance of preparing students with the skills, mindset, and attributes necessary for success in a rapidly evolving world. Truth be told, this is quite the harrowing task and one that should compel us all to pause and critically reflect on not only where schools…
