Thinking outside of the box--the classroom box

In this Ed Week article, Arthur Wise takes a look at the way our facilities inhibit innovation and offers an interesting way of organizing our schools. Take a look and then think about how you might re-imagine your facilities to provide 21st century programming.

A New Model of Pedagogy

We are starting to see models of what a transformed school system might look like.

Here's another example:

A New Model of Pedagogy

More on technical change

Last week I posted a number of resources that examine the common core standards, assessments and the teacher accountability.  In the New York Times Room for Debate, several nationally known education experts examine teacher assessment and the role value added testing plays in the process.

On the surface, value added seems like a pretty good solution to the question of how to hold teachers accountable.  Yet, effective evaluation systems, most likely need multiple measures best illuminate both student progress and teacher contribution to that progress.

Complicating the matter, is the question of how to delivery high-quality instruction and the role of teacher in this process.  In this TED talk, Sugata Mitra presents his research where he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.  My favorite quote from the presentation:  "If children have interest, then education happens."  So, why don't we simply let students do interesting things?  

Mass Personalization

Lately, I have been asking school board members why kindergarteners and high school seniors need to attend school for the same number of days and minutes?  Further pushing the concept of mass personalization, why must the public education system be the only place you can get credit for learning?  This KnowledgeWorks blog posting challenges the notion of place-based education.

Today, many school boards are under pressure about budgets and are often chided to make better use of their financial resources.  How might mass personalization help with the budget crunch?