Todd Rose’s brilliant talk at TEDxSonoma expands on a startlingly simple point: When you design for the average, you design for no-one. He suggests instead we to need design for the extremes. For anyone who has worked with students, it is an intuitive enough concept, in theory. Yet in application, it has proven challenging, especially in a climate fixated on norm reference test … Read More
RSA of Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” Talk
In the video below, the clever folks over at RSA Animate give visual engagement to Steven Johnson’s brief talk on Where Good Ideas Come From, an excerpt from his TEDtalk. One of the things we love about this talk is that it confirms what we intrinsically know to be true — innovation is more about interaction and engagement than sitting … Read More
The Toll of High Stakes Tests on Non-Traditional Learners
This guest post by Bobbi Snow, co-founder of The Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, VA, exposes the impact high stakes testing has her school’s neuro-diverse students and the teachers who work with them. It was originally published on Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. He was already exhausted and had 58 questions to go. On the second problem of the 8th grade … Read More
11 Characteristic of Meaningful Work (and Learning)
In a recent repost of Shawn Murphy’s “11 Characteristics of Meaningful Work,” the editors at QED’s blog noted that, While this piece by Shawn Murphy is related to business practices and targeted to managers and business leaders, the parallels to education and student learning are striking. Teachers, curricula developers, and education leaders can find plenty herein to ponder, reflect on, and apply … Read More
Words that Ignite Learning
Below is a guest post by Kevin Washburn, Ed.D., author of “Architecture of Learning” and Executive Director of Clerestory Learning. His most recent recording at a Learning and Brain Conference can be found here. It seems like a ridiculous question: Can a teacher’s words influence student learning? Of course, we’d respond, how well a teacher explains new ideas naturally influences … Read More
How the Brain Retains (Infographic)
The folks over at mindflash developed this infographic about how and where the brain stores it’s information. While much of the brain’s information storage system remains a mystery, it is important to remember (see what we did there?) that memory is varied, nuanced, and often associative. Working memory is different than short or long term memory and what students take … Read More
Anxiety and the Mind
Below is an image from a Time Magazine article on the “Anatomy of Anxiety” from a few years ago. While the article is a bit dated, the relevance remains, especially for educators. Students need to feel relaxed, safe, and welcome in order to learn effectively. If we focus only on content and raise the stakes of assessments, we increase some … Read More
Language Learning and the Developing Mind
[brightcove vid=2104029225001&exp3=673439679001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=665003388001&pk=AQ~~,AAAAmtVKbGE~,pW41hkPiaotk7M2LC0HZ3RTjdL1UaDYv&lbu=http://projects.scpr.org/bilinguallearning/&w=480&h=270] Here is a short video from Southern California Public Radio station KPCC on the science behind bilingual learning. The site, Bilingual Learning, explores “the science, options, and dilemmas of dual language education.” Much appreciation to Marcela Summerville (@PreKlanguages) of Spanish Workshop for Children for pointing this out to us.
