Posts by Guest Author
Student Entrepreneurship in Action
By: Esther Wojcicki. What does it take to get students interested in learning entrepreneurial skills? I can tell you what doesn’t work---teaching to the test, which is unfortunately is a national obsession today. Testing does not lead to real world skills.
Choosing Excellent Schools – Not Charter Versus District
By: Don Shalvey. Too often these days in schools, if you support charter schools you are seen as against the school district or even against public schools. Or, if you are a supporter of the district, you are often seen as anti-charter and against giving educational choices to parents.
Why Harbormasters Are Critical to a City’s Ecosystem
By: Kristoffer Haines. There is no greater lift a city will realize for its children than the moment its harbormaster sets out to be the gravity for the creation of high-quality options.
Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach to Innovation in Education
By: Sandy Speicher. We tend to think first about the needs of the system and create solutions from there. But what if we looked first to the needs of people, and then designed ways the system could meet its goals by serving these needs? This is the heart of how design thinking gets to innovative solutions.
New Study Reveals Trends in Professional Learning
By: Jason Lange. A 2013 Australian study conducted by the government-funded Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership and the nonprofit Innovation Unit examined 50 high-performing corporations, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations from around the globe to identify common features of professional learning experiences.
It’s Time: Connecting What Students Need & What Entrepreneurs Create
By: Stacey Childress. Pull mechanism refers to things like challenges, prizes, and advanced market commitments – ways of paying for innovations based on their actual performance. This in contrast to government agencies and philanthropists making upfront investments in design and development of solutions and then “pushing” them to (or some would say on) buyers and users. A key idea is that some sort of coordinated action on the demand side – in this instance from schools, districts, and states – will create compelling reasons for suppliers to behave differently, better, more responsively.
Got Game? How Play Enhances Learning
By: Delicia Sepulveda. For the past two years, I've had a hand in creating games that today reach hundreds of thousands of students, helping them learn math in a fun and engaging way. I get to see students playing with puzzles that I designed, and I get to experience first-hand the impact of these games on student learning.
Talent Is UNDERrated
By: Renee Hill. An intelligent, capable, results-driven pool of individuals who are willing to act interdependently and accountably, is essential for any school or school district to competently meet the needs of today’s students, parents, professionals, and communities. Talent is THAT important.
Collective Impact – Creating a Self-Sharpening Education System
By: George Tang. Over the last several years, collective impact has become common education vernacular and has generated as much buzz as Kimye. Ok, maybe not that much, but collective impact has become a household term for communities seeking to ensure children are effectively supported and seamlessly connected from early childhood to K-12 education to higher education to the workforce.
6 Ways to Promote Data-Driven Instruction in K-12 Schools
By: Jason Lange. The push for data-driven instruction has been widespread since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002. Yet the number of individual classrooms regularly practicing DDI remains startlingly low. It would be easy to blame teachers for the slow adoption rates, citing a supposed “fear of data,” but the true reasons are actually more complex.