Jeff Piontek is an author, keynote speaker and teacher (most importantly). He has worked with many at-risk school districts nationally and is a thought leader in on-line and blended learning.
No matter their cultural background, no matter their economic situation, kids will always find imaginative ways to have fun. Their wild imaginations and magical childhood moments, when captured on camera by talented photographers, can make for truly wonderful photos. These 33 images we collected will prove that childhood can be wonderful no matter where you go.
Many in the Western world fear that technology is making today’s children lose touch with nature and with their own creativity, and while there are arguments to be made for the intellectual stimulation that apps and programs for children can bring, there’s also something to be said for simply playing with a stick in the mud or chasing dandelion seeds though an open meadow.
For better or worse, the children in these photos seem entirely content making their own fun. For us adults, it’s important not to let our world-weary and jaded experience stifle our childish hopefulness and imagination!
“Anyone who’s read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden knows the meaning of the word ‘unplugging.’ Sometimes I feel like living in a cabin in the woods would be just the thing for me, and I know many others who share this sentiment. But it’s not out of a desire to escape or to avoid but rather just to simplify, because let’s face it—as Confucius admonished, we love complicating our lives. The thought of moving away from hyper-connectivity is something a teacher in Nashville recently challenged her students with when she taught them about Walden. This is the story as told in the following MindShift article by Holly Korbey.”
Nashville English teacher Elizabeth Smith introduced Thoreau’s Walden by asking her AP juniors if they were ever truly alone in a hyper-connected world — even without a smartphone. In doing so, she wanted to emphasize how Thoreau’s Transcendentalist experiment living alone in the woods might be nearly impossible to replicate in modern, plugged-in lives — at least not without some effort.
“One student said that he gets panicked if he goes an hour without a text message,” she said, “and he has to blow up his friends’ phones with messages to make sure they are still out there.” Other students, she said, bristled at the idea they were sheep in the digital herd, and liked to think of themselves as being able to manage a healthy balance between solitude and digital connection.
But for both adults and kids — parents, teachers, and students — because we have the luxury of being instantly and constantly connected, “Being alone feels like a problem to be solved,” said MIT Professor Sherry Turkle in the moving TED Talk based on her book, Alone, Together. Based on her research, Turkle argued that relationships maintained through texting and social media might make kids feel connected, but because the phone is always buzzing, they may miss valuable opportunities to experience real solitude, which is vital for self-reflection. “If we don’t teach our children how to be alone,” she said, “they will only know how to be lonely.”
Some teachers say there has never been a more exciting time to teach Thoreau’s ideas of solitude, time in nature, and deliberate living, because students are hungry for self-reflection. Sandy Stott, who has been teaching Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass., for 20 years, said his students today are both constantly plugged in, and eager for a different experience.
“My classroom, like many, is fully wired,” he said. “I can get the whole web on screen in a few clicks. But because this has been their world all along, it’s a so-what world.” While he’s happy to use the tech available to get business done, Stott wants students to experience what Thoreau experienced without any tech help. It also doesn’t hurt that Walden Pond is nearby, and the students can walk the same paths that Thoreau walked nearly 200 years ago.
“Because [the digital world] has been their world all along, it’s a so-what world.”
Part of students’ responding to the serenity and beauty of the pond, Stott said, is letting it retain its mystery — something students don’t experience often. “I hold [going to] the pond until the late part of the course. Then, after students have read most ofWalden, we go there,” he said. “We go before dawn so that, when the sun comes up, when morning arrives, we are at the pond and at the house site. There is no one else there, save an angler or two. Though we are there only for a short time, the effect is often pronounced — they are at Henry’s pond at the time of day he saw as most alive, and, despite their usual preference for sleeping late, they too are alive.”
While the reading and the writing are essential, Stott supposes that the morning at Walden Pond, or the other nature walks he’s incorporated into the course, sticks with students longer, and he emphasizes to students the point of Thoreau’s solitude, and the importance of spending time alone: having time to think for yourself.
In his essay “Nature,” which heavily influenced Thoreau, “Emerson asks, ‘Why should not we also enjoy an original relation with the universe?’ In other words, why take someone else’s word for it? Why rely on tradition and religion and professors and parents and other interpreters to tell you what’s what?” he said. Stott made Emerson’s question the central one that frames the course. And he believes to really answer that question — for each student to begin to carve out her place in the world — they need to go out in it, not explore it from behind the door of a classroom.
Stott said when he began teaching Thoreau, he focused on good reading and writing, a practice to which he’s still dedicated. But he realized that students saw Walden as another in a series of texts they worked on their way to college, and knew they needed more.
“Walden aims at more than that, aims in fact at possibly derailing this sort of lockstep. And it asks the student out of the classroom, out of the usual box and into a world that demands more,” he said.
Of course connection and collaboration with peers, both face-to-face and with technology, is invaluable to teens’ learning and social development, and some research suggests social media time is even beneficial. But when time spent focused on outward tasks far outweighs time for daydreaming — a virtue Thoreau named an “incessant good fortune” — digital natives might find Thoreau’s solitude novel, even refreshing, and may want to try it themselves. Even if it’s only to discover they can last an hour without receiving a text.
On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities.
1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.
An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn’t the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. “With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes,” the researchers found.
“We cannot escape the conclusion that more is at work here than simple market processes that place people according to their means,” their report stated. Along with residential segregation, the study notes, comes access to fewer resources for those in minority neighborhoods.
2) There’s a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.
White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country’s wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country’s wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.
4) The Great Recession didn’t hit everyone equally.
Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families’ wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families’ by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.
5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.
The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.
“For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk,” the authors of the report wrote.
This wasn’t a new phenomenon. HUD data from 1998 also showed that predominantly black neighborhoods at every income level had a much greater share of subprime refinance mortgages than predominantly white neighborhoods.
6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.
An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:
7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.
“A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending,” a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.
8) School segregation is still widespread.
80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools — ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.
9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.
“Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,” a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.
10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.
When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:
Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.
11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.
This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.
13) A clean record doesn’t protect young black men from discrimination when they’re looking for work.
Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records, a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.
The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers’ chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.
15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.
Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”
When your kids tell you you’re mean, take it as a compliment. The rising generation has been called the laziest, rudest, most entitled kids in history. Don’t give up. They may think you’re mean now, but they’ll thank you later.
Once, I walked out of the store without giving into my child’s tantrum for a cookie. A woman stopped me in the parking lot and told me I was the best parent in the shopping center. My daughter wasn’t so sure. When your kids tell you you’re mean, take it as a compliment. The rising generation has been called the laziest, rudest, most entitled kids in history. The stories about spoiled rotten kids scare the best of moms. Newsflash: it’s not just the kids, it’s the parents. It’s easy to want to throw in the towel with your own kids. After all, don’t we all want to be the cool mom? Don’t give up. They may think you’re mean now, but they’ll thank you later.Here are 12 ways to be the meanest mom in the world: (Moms shouldn’t have all the fun. Here are 13 ways to be the most annoying dad on the planet.)
1. Make your kids go to bed at a reasonable time
Is there really anyone who hasn’t heard how important a good night’s rest is to a child’s success? Be the parent and put your kid to bed. No one ever said the kid had to want to go to bed. They may put up a fight at first, but with consistency, they’ll learn you mean business. Now enjoy some quiet me or couple time.
2. Don’t give your kids dessert every day
Sweets should be saved for special occasions. That’s what makes them a “treat.” If you give in to your child’s demands for goodies all the time, he won’t appreciate the gesture when someone offers a sweet gift or reward. Plus, imagine the dentist and doctor bills that may result from your over-indulgence.
3. Make them pay for their own stuff
If you want something, you have to pay for it. That’s the way adult life works. To get your kids out of your basement in the future, you need to teach your children now that the gadgets, movies, video games, sports teams and camps they enjoy have a price. If they have to pay all or part of that price, they’ll appreciate it more. You may also avoid paying for something your child only wants until he has it. If he’s not willing to go half with you, he probably doesn’t want it that badly.
4. Don’t pull strings
Some kids get a rude awakening when they get a job and realize that the rules actually do apply to them. They have to come on time and do what the boss wants. And, (gasp!) part of the job they don’t even like. If you don’t like your child’s teacher, science partner, position on the soccer field or placement of the bus stop, avoid the temptation to make a stink or pull strings until he gets his preference. You are robbing your child of the chance to make the best of a difficult situation. Dealing with less than ideal circumstance is something she will have to do most of her adult life. If children never learn to handle it, you’re setting them up for failure.
5. Make them do hard things
Don’t automatically step-in and take over when things get hard. Nothing gives your kids a bigger self-confidence boost than sticking to it and accomplishing something difficult for them.
6. Give them a watch and an alarm clock
Your child will be better off if he learns the responsibility of managing his own time. You’re not always going to be there to remind her to turn off the TV and get ready to go.
7. Don’t always buy the latest and greatest
Teach your children gratitude for, and satisfaction with, the things they have. Always worrying about the next big thing and who already has it will lead to a lifetime of debt and unhappiness.
8. Let them feel loss
If your child breaks a toy, don’t replace it. He’ll learn a valuable lesson about taking care of his stuff. If your child forgets to turn in homework, let him take the lower grade or make him work out extra credit with his teacher himself. You are teaching responsibility — who doesn’t want responsible kids? They can help remind you of all the things you forget to do.
9. Control media
If all the other parents let their child jump off a bridge, would you? Don’t let your kids watch a show or play a video game that is inappropriate for children just because all their friends have done it. If you stand up for decent parenting, others may follow. Create some positive peer pressure.
10. Make them apologize
If your child does something wrong, make her fess up and face the consequences. Don’t brush rudeness, bullying, or dishonesty under the rug. If you mess up, set the example and eat your humble pie.
11. Mind their manners
Even small children can learn the basics of how to treat another human with respect and dignity. By making politeness a habit, you’ll be doing your kids a huge favor. Good manners go a long way toward getting someone what they want. We’ve all heard the saying, “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
12. Make them work — for free
Whether it’s helping grandma in the garden or volunteering to tutor younger kids, make service a part of your child’s life. It teaches them to look outside themselves and realize that other people have needs and problems, too — sometimes greater than their own.
With all the time you spend being mean, don’t forget to praise and reward your children for their stellar behavior. And always, make sure they know you love them. Here are 10 things a mom should tell her kids every day. With a little luck, your kids can turn the tide and make their generation one known for its hope and promise.
We love to make decisions and form strategies based on statistics. It’s why we A/B test and how we change directions on our social sharing.
Who doesn’t love a good statistic, especially one that has an actionable next step?
You’re likely to find a sea of statistics for social media–I know I’m amazed at how many are out there. My favorite finds are those that are just a bit surprising or unique or even counterintuitive.
I’ve saved some of the best social media stats I’ve found over the past few months and I’m happy to share them here with you. Keep reading to see some fun, surprising, and (you guessed it) actionable stats for how you can better share on social media. Got any stats that you’ve found helpful? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
1. Your biggest advocates have the fewest followers
When looking at your social media monitoring strategy, note that your brand/company mentions on social will likely not come from social’s biggest players. Very few, in fact, will.
Social monitoring website Mention analyzed over 1 billion social mentions from the past two years, and in their analysis they found that 91% of mentions come from people with fewer than 500 followers.
And these are potential brand advocates–only 6% of the mentions in this study were deemed overtly negative.
What you can do with this stat: Putting this stat another way, fewer than 1 out of every 10 mention will come from a power user. You can prioritize these power users if you want, but it’s also important to give a quick and delightful response to those with few followers–the vast majority of those talking about you.
2. Twitter has 6 distinct communication networks
The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation combined on a report that analyzed thousands of Twitter conversations to come up with six distinct communication networks. Which of these six do you most closely identify with?
What you can do with this stat: Tight crowds and community clusters seem like apt groupings for brands interested in a lot of engagement. Support networks, too, can be a type of communication network for brands, especially if you are doing customer support on Twitter. Analyze your own place in these Twitter networks to see where you fit and if you need to change your strategy to mix with a different group.
3. Marketers say written content trumps visuals
Social Media Examiner’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 marketers leads to a ton of insights into how marketers think about social media and sharing.
Interestingly enough, in a social landscape dominated by visuals, it is written content that most resonates with marketers. Over half of marketers (58%) claim written content is their most important form of social content. Visual content came in second (19%.)
What you can do with this stat: Original written content can be a great opportunity for thought leadership, authority, and brand awareness. When you’re creating new content to share, keep in mind the power of storytelling. If you’d rather zig while the others zag, this stat shows you some fertile ground for developing lesser practiced strategies, like focusing on visual content.
4. You have less than an hour to respond on Twitter
Consumers expect a lot from you on Twitter, as recent research by Lithium Technologies confirms. The real-time nature of Twitter has led to incredible expectations. According to Lithium, 53% of users who tweet at a brand expect a response within the hour. The percentage increases to 72% for those with a complaint.
What you can do with this stat: Tools like Must Be Present can help you track your response time on Twitter, or you can invest in software like Spark Central to stay on top of your customer support tweets. At the very least, consider the timeliness of your response to your Twitter followers: Either grab a monitoring service to manage your timeline or get really good at checking your Twitter email alerts.
5. Late night is the best time for retweets
TrackMaven analyzed over 1.7 million tweets to come up with data behind the best practices for earning a retweet. The best time of day to tweet for a retweet? After-hours, between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. ET.
This advice follows the Late-Night Infomercial Effect (share when share volume is lower, and your content has a greater chance to stand out), so it makes sense to see that engagement after hours would be highest. Track Maven also found that Sundays are the best day of the week to get retweets and that tweeting with the word “Retweet” or with all caps or exclamation points leads to more retweets.
What you can do with this data: Test out the after-hours theory with some of your own tweets and see how engagement changes based on the time of day and day of week that you tweet. If you’re feeling particularly bold, you can try all caps and exclamation points, too.
6. Fridays are Facebook’s best day for engagement
The Social Intelligence Report from Adobe analyzed over 225 billion Facebook posts from the past two years to come up with some data-backed recommendations for Facebook marketers. Their research on the best day to post pointed to a clear winner: Fridays, which receive more comments, likes, and shares than any other day of the week.
What you can do with this stat: Be sure that your posting schedule includes a Friday post, and you might even consider saving your best stuff for the end of the week.
7. Photos drive engagement on Facebook pages
It’s likely that a stat about the power of visual content is not surprising to you, but how about a stat of this magnitude? According to Social Bakers, 87% of a Facebook page’s interactions happen on photo posts. No other content type receives more than 4% of interactions.
What you can do with this stat: The obvious takeaway here is to post more photos–and not just any photos. Choose photos that support your post or tell a story on their own. Certainly, Facebook pages are already embracing photos as posts: 75% of page updates are photos.
8. Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter drive the most traffic
Social sharing site Shareaholic revealed an interesting split in the way that social media sites refer traffic back to a website. Turns out, the data points to social being a source of either quantity or quality.
In terms of quantity, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are the top three referrers of traffic. The Shareaholic study looked at a four-month period of data (December through March), covering more than 300,000 websites. In their study of engaged traffic, the lowest-performing sites for referral volume came out on top for engagement.
YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn ranked as the top three sources for referrals in terms of time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate. Social referrals engaged What you can do with this data: Get involved in social media accordingly. If you’re after a big reach and spreading brand awareness, go with Facebook and Twitter, and think long and hard about joining Pinterest, too. If you’re interested in more qualified traffic, then be sure to invest time in Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. These stats recommend a broad social strategy, if you have the time and resources to pull it off.
9. Aim for 28, 118 or 385 interactions per post (it depends on your total fans)
As Facebook page reach has declined, we marketers are left wondering what constitutes good engagement these days. Earlier this year, Social Bakers analyzed more than 40,000 pages to see exactly where the average engagement lies for pages of all sizes. Pages with 1 to 9,999 fans: 28 interactions per post 10,000 to 99,999 fans: 118 interactions per post.100,000 to 499,999 fans: 385 interactions per post.
Interactions represent the total of comments, shares, and likes. In addition to the benchmark data above, Social Bakers also found that interactions on a particular post are directly correlated to a post’s reach. The more engagement a post gets, the more people will see it.
What you can do with this stat: Measure your Facebook page’s success against the benchmarks in this Social Bakers study. As time goes on, reach and interactions may continue falling, so these targets could be great to aim for but not the end of the world if you miss.
10. There’s a best day for everything on Pinterest
What you can do with this data: If possible, create a Pinterest board that touches on each of these seven topics, then build this sort of specific sharing into your Pinterest schedule.
Recap
Data and statistics like these can give you a good starting point for testing out your own action steps and strategies. Start with these stats, test them for yourself, and find the best system that works for you. Then come back and share! I’d love to hear how it goes for you.
It was 50 years ago this spring that LBJ, in just his first year as president, announced during a college commencement address his plans for what became known as “The Great Society.” One of its major planks was America’s cities and their troubled schools.
It is jaw-dropping that half a century–and billions of dollars and endless reforms–later we still don’t have a single high-performing urban school district. Remember, JFK, in 1961, had challenged the nation to send a man to the moon and bring him home safely within a decade…and we did it just eight years later. This nation can accomplish unbelievable feats, but only if it is willing to be bold.
If we want to truly revitalize our cities, we have to dramatically improve K12 urban schooling. If we’re to dramatically improve K12 urban schooling, we have to end the traditional district’s tenure as the dominant, default delivery system of public education. It is hard to name a government structure that has so consistently failed at its core responsibility for so long and so badly.
Our attention must focus on the district apparatus–the central administrative unit that owns and operates scores of schools, controlling virtually every aspect of their daily functioning. It is this organization that has proven itself completely unable to develop open-admission high-performing high-poverty schools.
This stands in stark contrast to the charter school sector, which in city after city (according to rigorous studies form Stanford’s CREDO research center) is producing student-learning gains that far outpace the district.
The solution is a “true portfolio” approach, one that I outline in my book The Urban School System of the Future. We start by seeing the district as nothing more than one of many school operators in the city, placing it on the same playing field as the city’s charter school operators. Then we apply the systemic innovations of chartering across the entire K12 portfolio. We close persistently failing schools, we expand and replicate the cities best schools, we continuously start new schools in the charter sector, and we empower families with choice.
This “sector-agnostic” approach will enable us to continuously grow the number of high-quality schools in our cities, ensuring that low-income urban kids are able to select from among a range of high-performing school options.
The combination of the demotion of the district, the elevation of school quality above school provider, and complete fidelity to smart portfolio management has the greatest chance of developing dynamic, high-performing, self-improving systems of schools that will put underserved kids on a trajectory taking them to the moon and beyond.
“Be kind, always smile, and be the first one to introduce yourself with a firm hand shake.” These were my thoughts while driving one morning for my first day at my first internship. I was granted the opportunity to complete my high school internship at the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan. I was thrilled by everything around me. While walking up Allegan street I was anxious to find out what I might experience that week: what I was going accomplish, who I might accidentally run into, and what I would take away from this experience. Little did I know at the time that what I would take from it was a realization of how much I had learned in high school.
One thing I already knew from my journey in high school was that I was interested in TV broadcasting and politics, so when thinking about how I was going to complete my 40 hour internship I thought, “Why not go big?” It didn’t take long for my success. I contacted my second cousin, Craig Ryan who’s the Senior Advisor for the Speaker of the House asking if I could come in a few days a week to work with him. He agreed and I was off to brag to my fellow classmates!
On my first day, I made my way to the House of Representatives building. Craig got me all settled in and explained to me my job for the week: I was to write a research paper that explains the pros and cons to a proposal for raising the minimum wage. At first I was hesitant. Writing wasn’t my expertise; my talent was filmmaking. However, I thought to myself, that’s why New Tech Schools are pushing their students to complete internships: to test their interests.
When writing my paper I was confused on what to do first. Craig gave me some guidelines but for the most part I had to create the paper from scratch. I made myself a checklist and started completing items one-by-one. I created a short outline. I underlined all my main topics and researched the supporting points, which was actually the most interesting part. I was an investigator looking through documents and reports that helped prove my thesis. I never would have pictured myself actually enjoying writing a research paper.
Although my internship was all business, Craig wanted me to get the most out of my experience and explore the Capitol through deeper learning. He took me around to important sessions and introduced me to people that I would recognize. I got introduced to my Senator, Joe Hune, and my Representative, Bill Rogers, who invited me to go on the floor of the legislature with him. I spent 3 hours witnessing a portion of what happens within our Michigan Government! While sitting next to Representative Rogers I was thinking to myself how well I was prepared for this experience. Coming in I knew how to introduce myself to adults and have a conversation with them. For many teenagers, introducing themselves and shaking hands is hard to do.
That week, I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but New Tech had prepared me for that. New Tech High School has greatly influenced me. Going on this internship I realized how much I have learned: meaningful skills I used throughout my internship that had been so driven into my brain, I didn’t even realize they were there. Getting a job done with detailed preparation without being told by a teacher, being able to work independently, and connecting with people I normally wouldn’t communicate with. I started practicing these skills freshman year, perfecting them to get to this point in my life. New Tech encourages deeper learning; when you’re able to understand through engagement and action, then you are able to apply your knowledge, not just pass a test. I believe that because I did my internship I will be better prepared for my future.
About the Author: Christine is a senior at Pinckney New Tech High School. She has been involved in her high school’s dance team for 4 years, being the captain of both Junior Varsity and Varsity. Her hobbies include coaching for the middle school dance team and creating short documentaries which have been viewed state wide. Christine is planning to attend Western Michigan University in the fall of 2014 to complete a double major in Journalism and Political Science.
Schools and districts across the country are redefining the goals of K-12 education and reimagining the very nature of teaching and learning. This activity is spurred by the implementation of college- and career-ready standards and the promise of a new generation of online assessments. As calls for improving achievement and increasing personalization of student learning echo across the nation, new professional development learning models are creating the potential for personalized preparation pathways for teachers. Teacher preparation and professional learning should evolve similarly in order to offer teacher control over time, place, path and/or pace; balanced goals; meaningful integration and competency-based progression.
The “Competency-Based Teacher Preparation & Professional Development” infographic outlines how the role of teachers is changing amid broader shifts to personalized, blended and Deeper Learning. This infographic complements the white paper “Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning: Competency-Based Teacher Preparation and Development” written in partnership between Digital Promise and Getting Smart.
Chefs Know More Than Just Recipes: How Experts Differ From Novices first appeared on the DreamBox Math Learning Blog, on April 15, 2014
Many years ago I surprised my wife by cooking a new meal. I read through our entire Betty Crocker cookbook to find just the right recipe and went to the store for the ingredients we didn’t have: ground cayenne pepper, white vinegar, and ginger root. These items are forever stuck in my memory because they were unfamiliar to me and therefore seemed unusual. At the time, I didn’t know there were different colors of vinegar, and ginger root looked so bizarre that I boldly asked the clerk at the register, “How many people actually buy this thing?” In hindsight, it was an embarrassing question to ask for a number of reasons; the least of which is because as it turns out, fresh ginger is delicious. Looks can be deceiving.
The great thing about cookbooks is that they are designed so that culinary novices—like myself—can accomplish one narrow task (prepare a recipe). Culinary experts can certainly use cookbooks too, but they’re not typically designed for expert chefs. And importantly, cookbooks are not designed to enable and empower novices to become experts, but rather to provide explicit instructions for what to do in the kitchen. I’ll discuss more about novices and experts in a moment because it’s as important for learning cooking as it is for understanding mathematics, and really any subject area. And if you’d like to learn more, the second chapter of the book How People Learn is actually entitled “How Experts Differ from Novices.”
Thanks to the clear instructions in the cookbook, I was able to follow the recipe. The meal was amazingly delicious and over the years I’ve cooked it dozens of times. In fact, I’ve cooked it often enough that I now know it from memory, and I don’t even need to review the recipe. I never specifically sat down and memorized the ingredients or steps word for word, but through repeated use, the recipe has become a part of my acquired knowledge. The key to the recipe seems to be the sauce, where chicken broth, sugar, soy sauce, cornstarch, white vinegar, and ground cayenne pepper are mixed together.
As an educator, I can’t help but reflect upon what my knowledge of this recipe and the ability to create the meal from memory indicates about my deeper understanding of food and chemistry. Does the fact that I can execute this recipe perfectly every time from memory serve as evidence of understanding, or is it simply a skill that I’ve acquired through repetition but without comprehension? Exactly what do I understand about cooking, ingredients, and their interrelationships within the recipe? Truthfully, as an assessor, I believe that the answer is, “Nothing.” I’m very much a novice in the kitchen in general, and even though I can repeatedly recreate this one specific recipe with ease and delicious results, I am by no means an expert.
For example, using sugar, chicken broth, soy sauce, and cayenne as ingredients makes sense to me because I know what they taste like individually. But I don’t understand why they need to be added in the ratios called for in the recipe. Or why—when combined with garlic, ginger root, cornstarch, and white vinegar—they taste so good. Over the years I’ve been told by others that cornstarch thickens the sauce. I can see that the sauce does thicken, but how do I know that’s not a result of the soy sauce or sugar? I’ve never tried making the recipe without cornstarch, so to believe the “cornstarch thickening hypothesis” I just trust what others tell me. I didn’t ever make sense of the “thickening theory” on my own, so I can’t really understand it. Also, of all the ingredients, the white vinegar makes the least sense to me. To begin with, I don’t really know what vinegar is or even how it’s made. And until I read this recipe, I didn’t even know there were different kinds and colors of vinegar. Would the dish taste different if I used a different color of vinegar? Or would red vinegar change the color of the sauce?
Ultimately, I don’t really comprehend anything about the recipe, except how to follow the steps. And although I don’t understand the reasons for the steps, I trust them because they are coming from a reliable source, and I can observe that they work when I follow them. Based on my rote knowledge of the recipe, I can demonstrate skill in executing it, but I have no true comprehension or understanding of the relationships between the ingredients or any reasoning behind the processes or order of the steps. If I were attending a culinary school, what might be done to help me deepen my expertise as a chef? I would expect that it would be something different than simply more practice following recipes.
Many students feel the same way about math as I do about cooking. Though they probably don’t think an expert chef is someone who has simply memorized a stack of cookbooks, they likely believe that mathematical expertise is demonstrated by knowing multiple algorithms and remembering an ever-increasing list of confusing procedures. Their understanding of the multiplication algorithm or quadratic formula is often at the same novice level as my understanding of cooking; their typical questions are: What’s a placeholder? Why am I carrying a 2? What would happen if I went left-to-right instead? Why do I take the square root? Why must that b value be negative?
It’s not enough for our students to be novices in mathematics, because the goal of learning is transfer and independent use in new situations. I imagine that’s why cooking reality shows and competitions don’t simply give a group of contestants the same recipe and ingredients and ask them all to prepare the same dish. Instead, contestants are presented with complex challenges and restrictions without instructions that require critical thinking and expertise.
Novice cooks follow instructions and execute with knowledge and skill. Expert chefs do that, too, but they also invent new recipes based on their understanding of ingredients and methods. We need all students to be “expert chefs” with numbers, algebra, and mathematical reasoning. Which means they’ll need more than a “math cookbook.” No amount of isolated skill practice or following procedures without understanding can cause these critical learning outcomes. Students need thought-provoking challenges, sense-making experiences, and the opportunity to develop understanding that will empower them to cultivate true expertise in mathematics.
Today, Google announced that using Google Apps for Education is going to get even easier to manage- this September,Classroom, the new learning management system developed by Google themselves will be available. It is intended to help ”teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease.” On the flip side, it will also allow students organize their work, complete it, turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and each other in a more streamlined manner.
Some of the expected features include:
teachers can create and collect assignments, paperlessly
choose to share a single document, or make a copy for each student
will automatically create Drive folders for each assignment and each student
students will have an assignment page, where they can manage timelines and due dates
improve teacher/student communication allowing teachers to make announcements and ask questions
Teachers and professors can apply for a preview of Classroom. Google says Classroom will be available in the fall to any school using Google Apps for Education.
If you’re a developer or partner, sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom.
