Tag Archives: Society

Bring 21st Century Into High Schools

Here’s a quick summary of, and link to, a June USNews article about bringing the 21st Century into the High School classroom.

A recent Gallup research program interviewed 1,014 people ages 18-35 with varying levels of education, asking them to recall their last year of school.

They found that about 1 out of 2  or  2 out of 3 individuals were NOT presented with collaboration, real-world problem solving and critical thinking opportunities in their high school experience.

While students were techno-savvy, only 3 percent had used discussion boards, video conferencing, Skype or other collaborative tools in the classroom.

Students tasked with regularly using these 21st century tools were more likely to say they excelled at their jobs, and that these tools were crucial in today’s workplace.

The Common Core State Standards adopted by most states require teachers to incorporate collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking into their lessons.

Cull current events: Look at what is dominating the news cycle and think about how it can apply to lessons. Use severe weather outbreaks and environmental disasters to illustrate everything from climate patterns to the logistics of coordinating relief efforts. Use the never-ending campaign season to teach students about statistics, social studies, finance and big data.

Tap industry experts: Getting a CEO into a classroom can be a logistical nightmare. Getting them on a Skype call – now that’s another story.

Free online tools can open up a wellspring of opportunity for getting experts in front of students. Educators can set up a call or join one hosted by someone else, using resources such as Skype in the Classroom. Teachers can also turn the tables and have students present a project or pitch an idea to industry leaders,

Read the complete article    here.

Some notes on life lessons …

Got to thinking about a recent conversation with my wife about ‘what works in life.’

Between us we’ve done a bunch of life-trainings over the decades – est, Lifespring, Lifespring Leadership Program, Al-Anon, Verle Minto, Technologies for Creating, Busting Loose (taught seminars for 5  years), Unity Church, Science of Mind, … and we kind of came the to a discovery that it all boils down to a few principles or propositions:

  • Woody Allen said 80% of life is just showing up  (*)  so, show up for your life!
  • it really is your life; you really can ‘just make up’ a huge amount of it
  • and even ‘remake it’ on the fly if you really want to
  • think about ‘your word’ before, and as, you give it or declare it
  • then keep your word
  • if you can’t keep your word, know that you CAN renegotiate – but never just let it slip!

And three powerful questions for all kinds of situations (yes, the order is important):

  • In this particular situation, what is working?
  • In this particular situation, what is missing?
  • In this particular situation, what is next?

Interested in what you think …

(*)  Woody Allen full quote: “I made the statement years ago which is often quoted that 80 percent of life is showing up. People used to always say to me that they wanted to write a play, they wanted to write a movie, they wanted to write a novel, and the couple of people that did it were 80 percent of the way to having something happen. All the other people struck out without ever getting that pack. They couldn’t do it, that’s why they don’t accomplish a thing, they don’t do the thing, so once you do it, if you actually write your film script, or write your novel, you are more than half way towards something good happening. So that I was say my biggest life lesson that has worked. All others have failed me.”

Woody Allen WikiQuote link … cool.

One key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t

Great article from Quartz Daily News – qz.com                   [Read the whole article here.]

“I’m just not a math person.”

We hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career. Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math ability.

Here are some summary points:

For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence.

Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:

  1. Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
  2. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
  3. The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
  4. The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.

Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The idea that math ability is mostly genetic is one dark facet of a larger fallacy that intelligence is mostly genetic. Academic psychology journals are well stocked with papers studying the world view that lies behind the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy we just described.

Convincing students that they could make themselves smarter by hard work led them to work harder and get higher grades. The intervention had the biggest effect for students who started out believing intelligence was genetic. (A control group, who were taught how memory works, showed no such gains.)

But improving grades was not the most dramatic effect, “Dweck reported that some of her tough junior high school boys were reduced to tears by the news that their intelligence was substantially under their control.” It is no picnic going through life believing you were born dumb—and are doomed to stay that way.

While American fourth and eighth graders score quite well in international math comparisons—beating countries like Germany, the UK and Sweden—our high-schoolers  underperform those countries by a wide margin. This suggests that Americans’ native ability is just as good as anyone’s, but that we fail to capitalize on that ability through hard work. In response to the lackluster high school math performance, some influential voices in American education policy have suggested simply teaching less math—for example, Andrew Hacker has called for algebra to no longer be a requirement. The subtext, of course, is that large numbers of American kids are simply not born with the ability to solve for x.

One way to help Americans excel at math is to copy the approach of the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans.  In Intelligence and How to Get It, Nisbett describes how the educational systems of East Asian countries focus more on hard work than on inborn talent:

1. “Children in Japan go to school about 240 days a year, whereas children in the United States go to school about 180 days a year.”

2. “Japanese high school students of the 1980s studied 3 ½ hours a day, and that number is likely to be, if anything, higher today.”
3. “[The inhabitants of Japan and Korea] do not need to read this book to find out that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment are highly malleable. Confucius set that matter straight twenty-five hundred years ago.”
4. “When they do badly at something, [Japanese, Koreans, etc.] respond by working harder at it.”
5. “Persistence in the face of failure is very much part of the Asian tradition of self-improvement. And [people in those countries] are accustomed to criticism in the service of self-improvement in situations where Westerners avoid it or resent it.”

Besides cribbing a few tricks from the Japanese, we also have at least one American-style idea for making kids smarter: treat people who work hard at learning as heroes and role models. We already venerate sports heroes who make up for lack of talent through persistence and grit; why should our educational culture be any different?

Math education, we believe, is just the most glaring area of a slow and worrying shift. We see our country moving away from a culture of hard work toward a culture of belief in genetic determinism. In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined. We want to bring it back, and we think that math is the best place to start.

Read the whole article here.

Follow Miles on Twitter at @mileskimball. Follow Noah at @noahpinionWe welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

The Real Reasons Children Drop Out of School

A very insightful view of the challenges by Franklin Schargel, a Former Teacher, School Counselor and School Administrator, appeared in a recent Huffing Post. In it Schargel names and discusses 5 main reasons kids drop out of school:

  1. The students themselves
  2. The families they come from
  3. The community they come from
  4. The school they attend
  5. The teachers they have

Read the full article here.

 

 

The 6 killer apps of prosperity – 2011 TED Talk

The world is constantly changing, only now it’s changing ever more rapidly. This 21 minute talk can give you an idea as to how you, your children and grandchildren may be affected. Here’s a summary from the TED Talk page:

“Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture — call them the 6 killer apps — that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.  (My underlining)

History is a curious thing, and Niall Ferguson investigates not only what happened but why. (Hint: Politics and money explain a lot.)”

View the talk here.

This talk has been viewed 993,860 times.

Financial Education Paradox?

Great little article by economist David Laibson delves into, “Most Americans know they should save for retirement and pay off their debts. Yet they often don’t do those things. Why?”

And why it’s so difficult to consider and create effective “Financial Eduction” curricula and classes – and that’s frustrating because “finances” is such an integral part of everyone’s real-world experience!

His last couple of paragraphs, I believe, speaks volumes about what an effective education looks like:

What does this tell us about the best way to teach financial education? 

What this means is that you should get the financial education you need when you need it. If you enroll in a 401(k) plan today, you should take the 45-minute educational seminar on it during the enrollment process. The time to learn about credit cards, borrowing and compound interest is when students are 18 and starting adult life.

The human memory is so fallible. If I tell you something and expect you to remember it five years from now, that’s a big ask. So I would focus on teaching skills that translate immediately to practical application.

(My underlining – teach around ideas and stuff in a real-world-ish application context. Tie math and English and science into such things as, how do your folks buy and pay for your clothes, where in the world do they come from, what do your parents/guardians do for a living, how long do they have to work to pay for a pair of new shoes, why was a textbook written, by whom, how much does it cost, how much is that for the whole class, where does that money come from, …)

Read the whole article here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

From a letter to Benjamin Franklin from Mr. Benjamin Vaughn, January 31, 1783

“School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark; but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course In life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!  Influence upon the private character, late in life, is not only an influence late in life, but a weak influence.  It is in youth that we plant our chief habits and prejudices; it is in youth that we take our party as to profession, pursuits, and matrimony.  In youth, therefore, the turn is given; in youth the education even of the next generation is given; in youth the private and public character is determined; and the term of life extending but from youth to age, life ought to begin well from youth, and more especially before we take our party as to our principal objects.  But your biography will not merely teach self-education, but the education of a wise man; and the wisest man will receive lights and improve his progress, by seeing detailed the conduct of another wise man.  And why are weaker men to be deprived of such helps, when we see our race has been blundering on in the dark, almost without a guide in this particular from the farthest trace of time?  Show then sir, how much is to be done, both to sons and fathers; we invite all wise men to become like yourself, and other men to become wise when we see how cruel statesmen and warriors can be to the human race, and how absurd distinguished men can be to their acquaintance, it will be instructive to observe the instances multiply of pacific acquiescing manners; and to find how compatible it is to be great and domestic, enviable and yet good-humored.”

From The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Vaughn was born in 1751, and studied medicine in Edinburgh and was elected to Parliament.