# data[].attributes.body
What ten questions do you have about learning spaces?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Flexible Classrooms: Making Space for Personalized Learning

# data[].attributes.body
See the example of a 'play rich' learning experience linked here. What's a playful approach you would like to explore within a unit next year?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
NPR/Adam Cole

It's a little after 8 a.m. at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and Michelle Harris' AP Environmental Science class is getting right to it.

"All right, you guys got your brackets out?" Harris asks.

The class of mostly juniors and seniors ruffle through folders and pull out pieces of paper with brackets - 64 slots, four quadrants, and one central box to predict the championship. But there's something a little different about these brackets ...

"We're going to jump down to the fourth-seeded spider monkey against the 12th-seeded antelope squirrel," Harris says.

"Spider monkey better win!" one student shouts from the back of the class.

This is March Mammal Madness: Round 2. It's a competition that has been playing out online and in hundreds of classrooms over the past month. Real animals wage fictional battles, while students use science - a lot of it - to try to predict the winner.

March Mammal Madness was created five years ago by Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, though now, she says, the competition depends on a whole team of volunteer scientists and conservationists: biologists, animal behaviorists, paleoanthropologists, marine biologists.

Hinde's team meets every year for a Selection Sunday of its own. Team members pick the animals that will compete and even decide who will win, though they keep it a secret. That's because a whole lot of research has to be done.

Each scientist is assigned a specific battle, then studies up and writes a battle story based on facts.

"Then the battles are live-tweeted as a dynamic, play-by-play story, much like someone would watch a basketball game," Hinde says.

Those tweets link to scientific articles, videos, photos, fossil records - whatever the team can use to drop knowledge into the story. That's why so many teachers, including Michelle Harris, have begun using the brackets in class.

As in basketball, there are plenty of upsets and broken hearts - like the time a snow leopard and a flying squirrel faced off in the rain forest. The snow leopard overheated and lost. Or the time tourists used their human junk food to lure an adorable quokka off the playing field.

"Sometimes animals can displace one another. Sometimes animals can hide, animals can run away. Sometimes they get eaten. Sometimes they actually engage in contact aggression," Hinde says.

It's a little ridiculous, but she says the point is to have fun while also creating a learning opportunity.

"We really try to showcase animals that people might never have heard of," she says. "Like dhole and bandicoot and binturong and babirusa."

At Wakefield High, Michelle Harris is going over the tweets from one of the previous night's battles: the No. 6 seed tiger versus the No. 3 seed leopard seal.

"And apparently we need to bundle up," she tells the class, "because we're headed to the vast coastal ice flows of Antarctica!"

Near the back of the class, senior Jordan Simpson giggles with Tiara Jones, both looking at a computer screen. They've Googled the bilby, a tiny Australian marsupial with big, rabbitlike ears. Simpson says she picked it to go all the way.

"I thought it was cute," she says with a laugh. "I knew it had no chance, but I thought I'd give it a shot."

Jones bursts out laughing. The bilby was ousted in the first round by a Tibetan sand fox.

Harris says those fits of giggles are a big reason she uses the bracket in class.

"This time of year can be a little stressful as we're leading up to AP exams, so it's nice to have a little bit of fun along the way," she says.

That's Hinde's ultimate goal, too - to make science fun.

"I think it's a chance to return to that time when science was all about the imagination and the wonder at the natural world," she says. "Science is narrative, and that is incredibly salient to the human mind."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A March Madness Bracket That's Fun For Science Class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A March Madness Bracket That's Fun For Science Class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's a little after 8 a.m. at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., and Michelle Harris' AP Environmental Science class is getting right to it. "All right, you guys got your brackets out?" Harris asks.

# data[].attributes.body
To what extent is philosophy important for today's student?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Don't miss new Big Think videos! Subscribe by clicking here: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 If you assume there's no afterlife, Stephen Fry says, you'll likely have a fuller, more interesting life.

# data[].attributes.body
Are these 9 skills really the future for our students? What's missing? Where do these skills come across at our school?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leading futurist John B. Mahaffie looks at the personal and learning skills that will make our children successful in the future.
Please bring to mind a child of today, a boy or girl who is eight, nine, or 10 years old. Cast their life forward 20 years. It will be the year 2034. That child will be about 30 years old, making his or her way in a job somewhere. But what sort of job? What do we know today about how to prepare that child for the future?

The chances are the jobs you know best today will be different or may not even exist in 2034. What may take their place is uncertain. We work as parents, community leaders, educators, and policymakers, every day, making decisions to prepare children for their distant future lives. But we are working, in part, blind.

We must discover all we can know about what that world will be like in the future, and try to guide our policies and educational efforts from that. Instead, too many of our efforts stand, at best, in today. We guess or assume things about the future with too little foresight.

In this analysis, we look at: 1). What we know about our changing world and how it drives change in work, and 2). Personal and learning skills that will make our children successful in the future. This gives us not a design for new curricula, but a set of challenges to address as we build them.

What do we know with some clarity about the future?
Based on what is emerging and changing now, we can say that:
· Our lives and work lives will be swept by regular waves of change
· More work will involve international connections and citizenship will gain a more global focus
· More work will be multidisciplinary, involving new kinds of collaboration
· Far more jobs will mean working intimately with digital machines and intelligent systems
· More elements of work and life will use visual communications
· The world will be battling sustainability issues in ways that will affect most workers
· Citizenship responsibilities will only grow more complicated as societies confront new issues

Nine skills children need for their future
Preparing for uncertainty raises the question up from the specific to the more general, from workplace skills we can define today to skills that prepare a child for an uncertain range of possible futures and for steady change. What are those things?

1. Love of Learning - With no certainty about the skills and knowledge we will need. A desire to learn will give an individual greater success. That comes from experiences as a child in which learning is challenging, interesting, rewarding, and fun, and sometimes includes what the child wants to learn.

2. Skill at learning - Learning to learn is a teachable skill and should be at the core of the school curriculum. This includes iterative efforts at instilling and advancing learning skills, and giving students the chance to reflect and learn about how they learn best.

3. Self-knowledge - Self-knowledge is thus a central skill. A critical part of it is humility, but another is self-confidence. The self-aware child will grow to be someone who can and wants to talk to all sorts of people. To listen well and to continue to learn.

4. People sense - Children may be naturally self-focused and thus in practice, selfish. There is a way out. We can work with them to understand the situations others are in, the points of view that other people have. The child who develops people sense will be a strong collaborator.

5. Communication - Communication includes spoken, written, and increasingly, visual communication, and will be fundamental to most kinds of work. This is strengthened by people sense, and in turn improves and strengthens skill at collaboration.

6. Worldliness - Not all education happens in school. Consider the advantages of the child who has been to the capital city and has seen what's there compared with the child who has never left the village. Or, to be fair, also the child who lives in the city and has never seen a farm or village.

7. Comfort with complexity - The world is not driven by simple cause and effect and big questions are not black or white. Our world is full of subtlety and complexity. Examining it and understanding it that way is essential for success in work and in life.

8. Goal setting - Successful people learn how to set goals and meet them. For the employer, this means they are productive. For the individual, this can mean personal success and advancement.

9. Open minds - No success is possible if we don't raise children to become adaptable, thoughtful, open-minded adults. Theirs will be a world of constant challenge and change, and being strong and prepared means being able to change.

Innovative programs around the world put a focus on at least some of these nine skills, often with curricula that emphasize experiential learning, collaboration, and a focus on the learner's own interests, needs, and motivation. For example, many of the tenets of progressive education mesh with, or directly support, these critical skills and provide a philosophy and framework for addressing them even more. International Baccalaureate programs include core concepts of holistic learning, intercultural awareness, and communication. In the US, the Common Core drives a focus on readying children, even at the elementary level to understand how they learn.

But while this innovation continues, a "back to basics" push may overweigh interest in this kind of skills building. And that would mean a loss of the depth and strength we need to instill in young minds around the world.

What we can tell now about the long-term future indicates something clearly: literacy in old but also new forms and general education, are critical. But the pressures today for a focus on vocational education and on science, technology, engineering, and math ( STEM), could easily be overplayed, tipping the balance in our education systems too far from the core learning and learning to learn which will prepare students for the unknown.

Let's not allow deeper education to yield to the shorter-term needs of the workplace. Those jobs, which want to dictate curricula, right now may be gone and certainly will be changed within a few years. Specific job skill training is for the workplace. Education is for the schools.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nine Skills That Will Help Make Our Children Future-Ready - WISE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leading futurist John B. Mahaffie looks at the personal and learning skills that will make our children successful in the future. Please bring to mind a child of today, a boy or girl who is eight, nine, or 10 years old. Cast their life forward 20 years. It will be the year 2034.

# data[].attributes.body
If our students only watched ONE TED talk all year--which one should it be and why?

# data[].attributes.headline
Do we equip our students with better decision making skills?

# data[].attributes.subject
Do we equip our students with better decision making skills?

# data[].attributes.body
What happens in your course to help students become better decision makers? Is this explicitly addressed? What has shaped you as a decision maker?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Executive Summary

Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning-like those made by doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail-experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics. A simple, three-step procedure can help managers create rubrics that improve yes-or-no decisions. These rubrics can help judges decide whom to detain, tax auditors whom to scrutinize, and hiring managers whom to interview. Their approach offers practitioners the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning while stripping away needless complexity.

Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning, like doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail, experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics. This reluctance to adopt formal statistical methods makes sense: Machine learning systems are difficult to design, apply, and understand. But eschewing advances in artificial intelligence can be costly.

Recognizing the real-world constraints that managers and engineers face, we developed a simple three-step procedure for creating rubrics that improve yes-or-no decisions. These rubrics can help judges decide whom to detain, tax auditors whom to scrutinize, and hiring managers whom to interview. Our approach offers practitioners the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning while stripping away needless complexity.
To see these rules in action, consider pretrial release decisions. When defendants first appear in court, judges must assess their likelihood of skipping subsequent court dates. Those deemed low-risk are released back into the community, while high-risk defendants are detained in jail; these decisions are thus consequential both for defendants and for the general public. To aid judges in making these decisions, we used our procedure to create the simple risk chart below. Each defendant's flight risk is computed by summing scores corresponding to their age and number of court dates missed. A risk threshold is then applied to convert the score to a binary release-or-detain recommendation. For example, with a risk threshold of 10, a 35-year-old defendant who has missed one court date would score an eight (two for age plus six for missing one prior court date), and would be recommended for release.

Despite its simplicity, this rule significantly outperforms expert human decision makers. We analyzed over 100,000 judicial pretrial release decisions in one of the largest cities in the country. Following our rule would allow judges in this jurisdiction to detain half as many defendants without appreciably increasing the number who fail to appear at court. How is that possible? Unaided judicial decisions are only weakly related to a defendant's objective level of flight risk. Further, judges apply idiosyncratic standards, with some releasing 90% of defendants and others releasing only 50%. As a result, many high-risk defendants are released and many low-risk defendants are detained. Following our rubric would ensure defendants are treated equally, with only the highest-risk defendants detained, simultaneously improving the efficiency and equity of decisions.

Decision rules of this sort are fast, in that decisions can be made quickly, without a computer; frugal, in that they require only limited information to reach a decision; and clear, in that they expose the grounds on which decisions are made. Rules satisfying these criteria have many benefits, both in the judicial context and beyond. For instance, easily memorized rules are likely to be adopted and used consistently. In medicine, frugal rules may reduce tests required, which can save time, money, and, in the case of triage situations, lives. And the clarity of simple rules engenders trust by revealing how decisions are made and indicating where they can be improved. Clarity can even become a legal requirement when society demands fairness and transparency.

Simple rules certainly have their advantages, but one might reasonably wonder whether favoring simplicity means sacrificing performance. In many cases the answer, surprisingly, is no. We compared our simple rules to complex machine learning algorithms. In the case of judicial decisions, the risk chart above performed nearly identically to the best statistical risk assessment techniques. Replicating our analysis in 22 varied domains, we found that this phenomenon holds: Simple, transparent decision rules often perform on par with complex, opaque machine learning methods.

To create these simple rules, we used a three-step strategy, detailed here, that we call select-regress-round . Here's how it works.

1. Select a few leading indicators of the outcome in question - for example, using a defendant's age and number of court dates missed to assess flight risk. We find that having two to five indicators works well. The two factors we used for pretrial decisions are well-known indicators of flight risk; without such domain knowledge, one can create the list of factors using standard statistical methods (e.g., stepwise feature selection).

2. Using historical data, regress the outcome (skipping court) on the selected predictors (age and number of court dates missed). This step can be carried out in one line of code with modern statistical software.

3. The output of the above step is a model that assigns complicated numerical weights to each factor. Such weights are overly precise for many decision-making applications, and so we round the weights to produce integer scores.

Our select-regress-round strategy yields decision rules that are simple. Equally important, the method for constructing the rules is itself simple. The three-step recipe can be followed by an analyst with limited training in statistics, using freely available software.

Statistical decision rules work best when objectives are clearly defined and when data is available on past outcomes and their leading indicators. When these criteria are satisfied, statistically informed decisions often outperform the experience and intuition of experts. Simple rules, and our simple strategy for creating them, bring the power of machine learning to the masses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Creating Simple Rules for Complex Decisions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Executive Summary Machines can now beat humans at complex tasks that seem tailored to the strengths of the human mind, including poker, the game of Go, and visual recognition. Yet for many high-stakes decisions that are natural candidates for automated reasoning-like those made by doctors diagnosing patients and judges setting bail-experts often favor experience and intuition over data and statistics.

# data[].attributes.body
Read the post by Sonya terBorg and share thoughts on your 'Amy'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last week, I was at the American School in Warsaw as a Learning2Leader for the Learning2 Europe conference. Part of my job was to give an L2 talk. A short talk on a topic of my choosing that fit the theme of the conference: Include, Inquire, Inspire.

I was tossing ideas around when, like over 4 and a half million other people, I read Amy's column in the New York Post, You May Want To Marry My Husband. I was shocked and saddened beyond belief and I was also clear on what my L2 talk would be about. Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

I went to Warsaw with this idea firmly planted but my actual talk, very much in the air. I kept writing a eulogy that I didn't have the position or authority to write. I had to make it more about my connection to Amy while still engaging those in the audience who didn't know this amazing person.

After much drafting and editing and re-writing, The Yellow Umbrella was created. And I felt great about it. It was equal parts homage and inspiration and the most heartfelt thank you I could create for this amazing woman.

Amy made wishes. She wished for me "Endless Bliss". In turn, I wish that for her family who must be grieving her loss so much more deeply than anyone.

Here is the talk. The transcript is below. Who is your Amy?

It seems somewhat weird or maybe even selfish to grieve the loss of someone you never really knew. But the grief and the loss are both real and the knowing comes through the willingness of a maker with an umbrella to share her passion.

Maybe you know Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Maybe you have read one of her books? Or maybe you have your own "Amy" who inspires you with their magic. This is not a eulogy for Amy. In all honesty, I don't think I can do her justice. But it is my sincere wish that in sharing her story, a part of her maker spirit will live on in us all.

When I finished reading her book "The Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life" I felt like I had spent the afternoon with a good friend. I was convinced that she and I, at some yet to be determined point in life, would collaborate on a project together. I wasn't sure what that project would be and honestly, it didn't even matter, I was just inspired by her perspective and her vision and I wanted to be a part of that.

This isn't the collaboration I had imagined but with heartfelt appreciation of her generous spirit, let me share three pearls of Amy-inspired wisdom.

Amy was a maker. Among other things she made short films, salads, wishes and books. When asked, "Why do you write?" She would respond, "Because I can't not."

What is the thing that you "can't not" do? What is the thing you find yourself doing above all other things? For me, I "can't not" create. Whether it be doodles, a re-designed resume, a collection of art provocations, a book, or the slides behind me, I am constantly inspired to create and re-create. What is your "can't not"?

On the 8/8/08 Amy put a message out that at 8:08pm she would be standing under the Bean in Chicago and that anyone who wanted to make something with her, was welcome to join. She would be the one with the yellow umbrella. And the association between Amy and a yellow umbrella was born. Imagine an umbrella, yellow, hanging in your schools - in a shared space, a classroom, a teacher workroom. The umbrella would remind you that in this school, in this space, we

We have 'blue sky' thinking, why not "yellow umbrella living"? How would a yellow umbrella move you forward in the way you 'do' school? What would it amplify? What new things would arise?

More is a key word I associate with Amy. It is tattooed on her arm. It is in the title of one of her books. She believed that the more you looked, the more you would find. Her biggest more? Was that through her work she would connect with people.

Like all of us, I wear many hats and have a full schedule. To think of adding more seems near impossible. But then I think, what if I take some things away in order to add more things in? Less structure, more freedom. Less talk, more listen. Less work and more play. How would doing less make room for more?

This umbrella is new. I bought it a week or so after Amy died because I wanted something to hold on to that represented a great maker. Amy taught me to make.When I am stuck, when I am not sure, when in doubt, MAKE. Make good art. Make a connection. Make a difference. To be a maker was Amy's passion. It almost seems as if it were her destiny.

Who is your Amy? Who inspires you to make the most of your time here. What magic will evolve from the maker in you?

I have been teaching for 20 years in 7 countries, located in 4 continents. I am passionate about finding a significant opportunity to make a positive change wherever I am working. I enjoy learning more about the challenges and triumphs in education and believe in sharing ideas in order to deepen understanding. I look forward to sharing ideas and learning from you. View all posts by Sonya terBorg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last week, I was at the American School in Warsaw as a Learning2Leader for the Learning2 Europe conference. Part of my job was to give an L2 talk. A short talk on a topic of my choosing that fit th...

# data[].attributes.headline
What could we do to leverage the resource of our staff?

# data[].attributes.subject
What could we do to leverage the resource of our staff?

# data[].attributes.body
Read the post by Couros and list a few ideas on ways we could do more to take advantage of the amazing resource that is our staff

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You can have a shiny new vision and mission statement, school or district goals, and a myriad of things that say what your district does. But none of this happens without people. If you do not value the people that you serve, and more importantly, if they do not feel valued, all of those things were a waste of money, time, and resources.

People are your school.

People are the system.

People make things happen.

Not programs. Not initiatives. Not mission statements.

I have seen amazing schools with terrible mission statements, but I have seen incredibly forward-thinking mission statements that don't make a difference. Valuing our people doesn't mean we don't push them; it actually means that we do. We help them become the best version of themselves, but we start with their strengths, not their weaknesses.

To do work that matters, people need to know that they are the best resource your organisation will have, and they have to be utilised according to this belief. If you do not bring out the best in them, nothing you write on any document will matter. Those visions and mission statements can become important, but only people can bring them to life.

No mission or vision statement will ever make your school better in isolation. People do that. Focus on people.

Simple idea, yet often overlooked.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You can have a shiny new vision and mission statement, school or district goals, and a myriad of things that say what your district does. But none of this happens without people. If you do not value the people that you serve, and more importantly, if they do not feel valued, all of those things were a waste of money, time, and resources.