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But don't think you're safe as an accountant, either.

Mark Bohr, Intel's senior fellow for technology, explained to me that Intel's main workhorse microprocessor today is the 14-nanometer chip it introduced in 2014. It packs 37.5 million transistors per square millimeter. By the end of 2017, thanks to Moore's Law, Intel will begin producing a 10-nm chip that will pack "100 million transistors per square millimeter - more than double the previous density with less heat and power usage," said Bohr.

If you think machines are smart today ... wait a year. It's this move from 14-nm to 10-nm chips that will help enable automakers to shrink the brain of a self-driving car - a brain that has to take in sensor data from 360 degrees and instantly process whether it's a dog, a human, a biker or another car - from something that fills a whole trunk to a small box under the front seat, so these cars can scale.

When you get that much processing power, putting out that much data exhaust with ever-improving software, you create a world where we can analyze, prophesize and optimize with a precision unknown in human history. We can see trends we never saw, predict when engine parts will break and replace them before they do, with great savings, and we can optimize everything - from the most energy-saving flight path for an airplane to the ideal drilling path for a natural gas well.

I recently visited the control room at Devon Energy, a large oil and gas producer, in Oklahoma City. It's half a floor of computer screens displaying data coming out of every well Devon is drilling around the world.

At the bottom of each screen are two boxes that blew my mind. One box displays how much money was budgeted to drill that particular well per foot, and the other box displays - in real time - how much the drilling of that well is actually costing, as it bores through different rocks, and it's updated every foot!

A typical well might involve sending pipe two miles down and then turning horizontally for two miles east or west - with such precision it can hit a seam of gas as small as 20 feet wide!

If you're working on a Devon oil rig today, you're holding a computer, not just an oily wrench. And if you're getting a degree in auto mechanics at a community college today, it's not to be a "grease monkey." It's to be a repairman for a computer with wheels.

The notion that we can go to college for four years and then spend that knowledge for the next 30 is over. If you want to be a lifelong employee anywhere today, you have to be a lifelong learner.

And that means: More is now on you. And that means self-motivation to learn and keep learning becomes the most important life skill.

That's why education-to-work expert Heather E. McGowan likes to say: "Stop asking a young person WHAT you want to be when you grow up. It freezes their identity into a job that may not be there. Ask them HOW you want to be when you grow up. Having an agile learning mind-set will be the new skill set of the 21st century."

Some are up for that, some not; and many want to but don't know how, which is why the College Board has reshaped the PSAT and SAT exams to encourage lifelong learning.

"We analyzed 250,000 students from the high school graduating class of 2017 who took the new PSAT and then the new SAT," College Board president David Coleman told me. "Students who took advantage of their PSAT results to launch their own free personalized improvement practice through Khan Academy advanced dramatically: 20 hours of practice was associated with an average 115-point increase from the PSAT to the SAT - double the average gain among students who did not.

"Practice advances all students without respect to high school G.P.A., gender, race and ethnicity or parental education. And it's free. Our aim is to transform the SAT into an invitation for students to own their future."

So the tough news is that more will be on you. The good news is that systems - like Khan-College Board - are emerging everywhere to enable anyone to accelerate learning for the age of acceleration.

Step back from all of this and it's clear that thriving countries today won't elect a strongman. They'll elect leaders who inspire and equip their citizens to be strong people who can own their own futures.

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But don't think you're safe as an accountant, either. Mark Bohr, Intel's senior fellow for technology, explained to me that Intel's main workhorse microprocessor today is the 14-nanometer chip it introduced in 2014. It packs 37.5 million transistors per square millimeter.

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A Historic Literacy Effort in California - Napa Valley

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A Historic Literacy Effort in California - Napa Valley

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The country's first countywide digital early learning program can trace its roots back 26 years, to the day Barbara Nemko, now the Napa County, California, superintendent of schools, was listening to her young nephew have a conversation with an adult.

"At that moment, it occurred to me he was going to go to kindergarten with kids who didn't speak English," she tells The 74. "That disparity was daunting, but it was more of an observation that gnawed at me."

Two decades later, Nemko was able to turn that observation into action, partnering with Ilene Rosenthal, CEO of Footsteps2Brilliance, to bring a version of digital early learning literacy to students in Napa County.

A pilot personalized learning program in 2011 gave 16 English language learners iPads equipped with an app that contained more than 200 books and learning games in both English and Spanish, as well as full-color interactive stories. Kids could touch the screen and make things happen - prompting a cow to moo or having every word appear in red when it is said aloud to improve sound correspondence.

With around-the-clock access, students could share the learning and engagement with their parents and move through the app's reading levels at their own pace. A simple toggle button allowed kids, or parents, to switch between Spanish and English, improving comprehension in both languages for learners of all ages.

In just four weeks, reading comprehension scores among the students skyrocketed from 11 percent to 76 percent. The second year of the pilot program saw English learners identify words at a 79 percent success rate, up from 43 percent the year before.

That success prompted Napa County in 2014 to launch its Digital Early Learning initiative, a five-year evaluation study following 325 students from preschool through third grade. And in 2015, with 24 preschools across five districts engaged in the program, the U.S. Department of Education recognized it as the first countywide effort in the country.

And it continues to grow. With a public-private nonprofit helping to fund the effort, Napa offers the app free to anyone who lives in the county.

In the years since the pilot program launched, the app developers have added sequencing games and new animated stories, based on feedback from teachers working in the classroom. Students can stop language in real time while reading an illustrated story, progressing at their own pace through each page, book, or reading level.

Early on, animation ties words to images for easy contextualization. Rhyming and alliteration help with understanding, and questions at the end of each story encourage comprehension. Those assessments are geared for different levels too, ranging from simple questions with hint buttons to multiple-choice, inference, and open-ended queries.

Since typical English language learners come from homes where reading in any language isn't common, Nemko says, students enter school without exposure to many words or to written language. That uncertainty around English leads kids to remain reserved, reluctant to interact with classmates and teachers. "Now, the students come to school and they have a richer vocabulary," she says.

Because the students take their devices home, parents can join in, helping to bridge the word gap that exposes kids from lower-income homes to 30 million fewer words than children from upper-income households by age 3. "In addition to the incredible growth the kids are making in vocabulary, the parents have told us their English is improving," Nemko says. "That has been huge."

"Now parents can be reading to their children and also learn English," Rosenthal tells The 74.

A tracking system inside the app allows teachers to see what students have done - which books they have read, which phonics games they have played, and how they have progressed through the levels.

Nemko says that through ongoing federally funded research, they hope not only to highlight the success of the students involved in English language development, but also to try to correlate language improvements with cost savings by eliminating pricey remediation.

The data will come soon. Meanwhile, districts across the state and country have taken notice.

"The first message is, digital works," Nemko says. "Digital is engaging, and the one thing we know is that student engagement is the biggest measure of achievement. If you are engaged more - and this has a breadth and depth because of all the additional games and letter recognition - you are going to learn more."

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A Historic Literacy Effort in California Brings Personalized Learning to English Language Learners

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The country's first countywide digital early learning program can trace its roots back 26 years, to the day Barbara Nemko, now the Napa County, California, superintendent of schools, was listening to her young nephew have a conversation with an adult.

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The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.

"Simply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough," said Bruce Fuller, the lead author of the study, conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. "If you can combine creative play with rich language, formal conversations and math concepts, that's more likely to yield the cognitive gains we observed."

The study comes amid rapid expansions of taxpayer-funded preschool in cities like Washington, San Antonio and New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last month that he would eventually expand the program, now open to all 4-year-olds, to 3-year-olds as well.

The new wave of preschools provide playtime, but their major goal is academic "kindergarten readiness," and the study could provide ammunition for policy makers who want to keep on that course. It could also help officials like Mr. de Blasio make the case for even more public spending on prekindergarten programs.

Whether they will win over all parents is another question.

Many who are college-educated are wary of academic preschool, worrying it will quash the love of learning before their children make it past their holding-hands years. At one prekindergarten information session in the affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood last year, parents asked not about math or reading, but about how often their children would be exposed to art and music.

One mother worried that the curriculum would be "dictated by the Department of Education." The school's staff reassured her that they would not use flashcards.

Some child development experts question whether the goal of the new pre-K - putting all children on a path to read and do simple math problems by the end of kindergarten - is appropriate, and whether it might detract from the socialization value that preschools have been known for.

Many children "are not ready to do that without being put under a lot of stress and strain," said Joan Almon, an expert on play-based education with the Alliance for Childhood, an advocacy group.

Aware of the concern, the Berkeley study, which is being published this week in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, assessed the children's behavior, based on interviews with their parents. It found that students did not seem to be hurt socially or emotionally by attending the more academic programs.

Robert Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and an expert on effective teaching, said the new research, which followed 6,150 students nationwide and was controlled for income and home environment, confirmed smaller-scale studies from Tulsa and Boston showing that academic prekindergarten programs benefited both poor and middle-class children. "These effect sizes are substantial," Mr. Pianta said of the Berkeley paper.

Nevertheless, the study had limitations. It followed children for a relatively short time, and it remained unclear if the benefits of academic prekindergarten would extend beyond the end of kindergarten. Previous research has demonstrated a disappointing "fade-out" effect, in which early academic gains are lost over time, making it harder to fulfill one of the main objectives of publicly funded preschool, closing the achievement gap between poor and middle-class students.

The study defined "academic-oriented" prekindergarten programs as those in which teachers reported spending time most days on activities like sounding out words, discussing new vocabulary, counting out loud and teaching children to measure and tell time.

That is not to say that these schools are all letters and numbers. The de Blasio program requires two hours per day of play, which is typically broken into several smaller chunks.

After Ms. Rzonca's geometry lesson, she released her students for 30 minutes of free time. As they cradled dolls, drew and made collages, Ms. Rzonca moved around the classroom, pausing to kneel next to individual children. She prompted them to dictate simple narratives about their activities. "Baby sleeps," said Mohammed, whose collage featured a photo of a crib. Ms. Rzonca wrote the sentence down on a sticky note and attached it to his work.

Other methods of early childhood education will most likely continue to thrive, counting on devoted legions of parents. One example are Waldorf schools, which at the preschool level eschew academics in favor of play and do not begin formal reading instruction until first grade.

In Montessori schools, which occupy more of a middle ground, children are allowed to spend long stretches of the day in freely chosen activities, like painting or sorting colorful beads. Teachers generally do not lecture, but they do impart academic concepts, like how to sound out words, by inviting children to participate in one-on-one or small group lessons.

At the Aster Montessori School in Cambridge, Mass., what looks like child-directed play is referred to as "work time" and lasts for three uninterrupted hours - an eternity in little-kid minutes.

One Monday this month, a 3-year-old named Magnus began his morning at an easel, swirling blue watercolor paint. Other children counted wooden pegs and cut patterns into construction paper, largely without assistance from the classroom's two teachers.

Kanan Patel, the school's co-founder and a lead teacher, sat at a table with a boy named Thomas. She had arrayed a set of - yes, flashcards - in front of them. "I was thinking about something that begins with buh-buh-buh," Ms. Patel prompted. Thomas, grinning, picked up the card that depicted a bicycle.

Though Aster is a private school, costing $17,500 for the full-day program, some public preschools around the country have adopted the Montessori method. Aster's leaders will begin accepting state-funded students next year, as many private preschools in New York City now do.

Mr. Fuller, the Berkeley researcher, said a carefully constructed Montessori classroom could certainly encompass the effective teaching practices his study identified.

"I see it as emulating good parenting," he said. "We try to get them to use their words if there is a conflict. When we're baking, we have fun with measuring a half cup of flour. We're not heavily didactic and totally directive, but we are introducing new knowledge and rich language."

Amelia Sorensen, Magnus's mother, said that she and her husband, a transportation engineer, had chosen Aster Montessori because they wanted a stimulating but "gentle" pre-K for Magnus and their other son, Gustav, 5.

Ms. Sorensen, a stay-at-home parent, acknowledged that "there's not a lot of worksheets or stuff where you can look and say, 'This is what my child did today.' "

Still, she is thrilled with her sons' growing independence, from tying their shoes and zipping their coats to drawing. Her older son, who attends Aster Montessori for kindergarten, has begun to read, and she said she would not worry if Magnus took longer to reach the same milestone. "Kids can start formal education later," she said.

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Free Play or Flashcards? New Study Nods to More Rigorous Preschools

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The study found that by the end of kindergarten, children who had attended one year of "academic-oriented preschool" outperformed peers who had attended less academic-focused preschools by, on average, the equivalent of two and a half months of learning in literacy and math.

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High School Junior Offered 33 Scholarships

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High School Junior Offered 33 Scholarships

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As a kid, high school junior Jahmir Smith never had a dream college. But for a number of universities, he's their dream student.

The 17-year-old North Carolina native has already been accepted into all eight Ivy League schools and has received 33 full-ride scholarship offers, according to ABC 11 Eyewitness News.

While Smith has a 4.43 GPA at Lee County High School and an impressive ACT score, The News & Observer reported that he's also constantly being contacted by college football recruiters for his athleticism, receiving hundreds of texts from Division I coaches.

Smith, who started playing football in middle school, has a composite three-star rating out of five on the sports website 247sports.com. Additionally, he was chosen as 2016's News & Observer's Metro Football pick after scoring 41 touchdowns and running 2,130 yards in one season.

Smith told HuffPost that while he doesn't plan on making a career out of football, he's certainly willing to give the NFL a shot.

"It's fast money," he said. "But I don't want it as a career because it would take a toll on my body."

He added that if he doesn't make the NFL, he wants to explore the medical field, specifically anesthesiology. In whatever he pursues, Smith is aware he'll face challenges because of his race. But that's not stopping him in the least bit.

"I know the odds are against me because of my skin tone and all, but I don't really let it get to me," he said. "I just stay to myself and try to help those around me. I've always understood since I was little that people would see me different."

You can thank Smith's mom for his unyielding attitude.

"She raised me through all the hardships she faced and helped me stay on track to [get] where I am today," he said. "Without her I don't know where I'd be now."

For Smith, "now" happens to be a pretty good place. He's still considering all of the 33 schools and is hoping to receive a scholarship offer from Clemson University.

While Smith is clearly exceptional, he's also awfully humble.

"I mean, my mom tells me how rare it is, but I mean, it's whatever to me," he told News & Observer. "I mean, I know it's a big deal, but I don't brag about it.

Although Smith is only a junior, he has enough credits to graduate from Lee County High. He'll be disappointing 32 (and counting) colleges in June when he decides which school he'll attend.

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Outstanding High School Junior Already Offered 33 Full-Ride Scholarships

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As a kid, high school junior Jahmir Smith never had a dream college. But for a number of universities, he's their dream student. The 17-year-old North Carolina native has already been accepted into all eight Ivy League schools and has received 33 full-ride scholarship offers, according to ABC 11 Eyewitness News.

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TED Talk: Boyn Slat - How the oceans can clean themselves

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TED Talk: Boyn Slat - How the oceans can clean themselves

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How the oceans can clean themselves: Boyan Slat at TEDxDelft

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An international organization and curriculum

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Dialogue is at the heart of the programme. With Generation Global, teachers can transport their classes across the world in a single afternoon. Online and through videoconferences, students interact directly with their peers around the world, engaging in dialogue around issues of culture, identity, beliefs, values, and attitudes.

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KQED - How Cross-cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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KQED - How Cross-cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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Often adolescents hold strong opinions, but they don't always know where and how they came to those beliefs. When a teacher pushes them to think critically about why they feel the way they do, it's easy for students to ignore them. But, when video conferencing with a teenager from another country who genuinely wants to know the answer, students often respond more thoughtfully.
HOW IT WORKS
A teacher interested in using Generation Global must register the school with the program first. Then he or she can access free lesson plans to introduce the basics of dialogue. Davis said one of his favorite elements of the product is its flexibility. Teachers can modify the lesson plans easily while still maintaining the spirit of the lesson.

"They trust that you know your students best," Davis said. "The lessons are designed so you can get at the heart of the meaning of the lesson without following the lesson prescriptively."

Students practice dialogue skills like active listening and speaking from the "I" perspective with one another in class. Thus, not only do students have the ability to dialogue about the personal experiences, values and beliefs of peers across the world, but in the lead-up they do the same with students who they've sat next to for years, but still might not know very well.

After students have been introduced to the skills involved in productive dialogue, the teacher can set up various types of interactions with classes in one of the 20 countries where schools have signed up for Generation Global. This can be done through the site and is painless, according to Davis. Teachers can choose a one-to-one dialogue with another class or they can choose to participate in a multipoint dialogue, where up to four classes are participating. All the dialogues are moderated by a trained facilitator who keeps the conversation moving, helps move past the awkward beginning and makes sure that everyone feel safe within the dialogue. The dialogues are all in English.

Additionally, Generation Global has a secure online dialogue feature that allows two classes to commit to a longer dialogue on a series of questions. The site groups students for a more intimate experience and they respond to one another in writing. Teachers and facilitators can see all these interactions, and the technology offers teachers a dashboard on their students' participation, too.

"The great thing about dialogue is it enables you to get inside someone else's perspective," said Ian Jamison, head of education for Generation Global. "So you explore not knowledge, but experiences, values and beliefs."

He stresses that the dialogue topics are usually not about specific curriculum because, while there is some overlap in the curricula of different countries, it can also vary widely. Instead, the program staff at Generation Global are interested in how students can build empathy for one another by learning about personal experiences of culture and the world.

The goal is to make the exotic familiar. "One of the side effects of familiarity is it makes it very hard to hang on to prejudice," Jamison said. He described one video conference he facilitated between a class in Pakistan and a class in the U.K. In the course of the conversation one of the students in Pakistan said that Islam was illegal in the U.K. He was surprised to hear from a U.K. student of Pakistani descent that actually he was himself a Muslim and attended a mosque in Birmingham.

"That's the kind of misinformed comment that doesn't help people get on with one another," Jamison said. But when the students could look one another in the eye and hear a different narrative about a place they'd never been, it started to change their views about the world.

"One of the things we often take for granted is we often think of ourselves as ordinary and the other as exotic," Jamison said. But every person can be exotic to someone living in a different culture, and these global dialogues can have a huge impact on the many biases and stereotypes that get passed around almost unconsciously.
SAFETY AND SECURITY
Generation Global takes safety and security seriously both because its staff know that students must feel emotionally safe to open up about personal experiences, but also because they know parents worry about student safety online. The schools that participate have been vetted by Generation Global and the video conferences and online chats take place in a secure environment that is never shared.

In many ways this program asks students to do something that many adults aren't modeling well -- how to be respectful of someone with a different lived experience and opinion. The dialogue skills are particularly important when people disagree strongly.

"As a teacher it was so refreshing to have a facilitator make sure that safe space for dialogue and conversation was kept," Davis said. Conversations can still get heated, but if a student gets worked up the facilitator will stop the conversation, ask participants to take a moment, and then work to re-establish safety before continuing the conversation.

Jamison sees the online dialogue as an equally important element of helping adolescents to develop positive habits around interactions online, something that again many adults do not model well for students.

"What we want to end up with are young people who are able to take part confidently in dialogue," Jamison said.

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How Cross-Cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy

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Often adolescents hold strong opinions, but they don't always know where and how they came to those beliefs. When a teacher pushes them to think critically about why they feel the way they do, it's easy for students to ignore them.

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KQED - The Role of Metacognition in Learning and Achievement

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KQED - The Role of Metacognition in Learning and Achievement

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To illustrate the value of metacognition and how it actually plays a role in learning, we can consider an example from mathematics, where it has been shown that metacognition plays a central role in learning and achievement. Specifically, when novice students were compared to seasoned mathematicians, the students selected a seemingly useful strategy and continued to apply it without checking to see if the strategy of choice was actually working well. Thus, a significant amount of time was wasted in fruitless pursuits. The more experienced mathematicians on the other hand, exercised metacognition, monitoring their approach all along the way to see if it was actually leading to a solution or merely to a dead end.Being aware of how one is engaging with the process of learning influences how the student interprets the task at hand, and what strategies are selected and employed in service of achieving learning goals. It can help optimize the problem-solving experience at a very high level, and is thus applicable across a large range of contexts. These metacognitive strategies are powerful tools for any discipline, inter-discipline or for learning in general.

Of course, with such an abstract learning goal, it is important for educators to be precise with how they teach it. Traditional methods for improving students' learning strategies often focus on prescribed procedures (note-taking, self-testing, scheduling, etc.) and typically result in initial motivation and some short-term improvement, but ultimately a reversion to old habits happens. While these tactics may work in the short term (e.g., to cram for an exam), once the context changes, successful transfer of these methods is less likely to occur. More strategic methods that focus on metacognition for deeper learning- such as developing a growth mindset (discussed later), setting and monitoring one's learning goals, and growing one's capacity to persist despite difficulties-have been shown to result in more permanent learning gains.

It is important to note that since metacognition involves higher-level thinking overseeing lower-level thoughts, there is actually a range of mental processes that fall under its definition. Effects of metacognitive training vary based on what kind of lower-level thoughts are being overseen, and how they are being overseen. Research has identified three levels of reporting on metacognitive processes:

1. Verbalization of knowledge that is already in a verbal state (such as recalling what happened in a story).

2. Verbalization of nonverbal knowledge (such as recalling how one solved a Rubik's Cube).

3. Verbalization of explanations of verbal or nonverbal knowledge (such as explaining how one makes use of the rhetorical structures of a story as one reads).

Only this third level of metacognitive process has been linked to improved results in problem solving.

Metacognition can be developed in students in the context of their current goals and can enhance their learning of competenciesas well as transfer of learning, no matter their starting achievement level. In fact, it may be most useful for lower-achieving students, as the higher-achieving students are already employing strategies that have proven successful for them. For learning disabled and low - achieving students, metacognitive training has been shown to improve behavior more effectively than traditional attention-control training.

Students who have higher levels of self-efficacy (more confidence in their ability to achieve their goals) are more likely to engage in metacognition and, in turn, are more likely to perform at higher levels. This strongly indicates a positive feedback loop for high-achieving students-they are more successful by using metacognitive strategies, which increases their confidence and in turn leads them to continue to increase their performance. Metacognition is an integral part of this virtuous learning cycle, and one that is amenable to further improvement through instruction.

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The Role of Metacognition in Learning and Achievement

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To illustrate the value of metacognition and how it actually plays a role in learning, we can consider an example from mathematics, where it has been shown that metacognition plays a central role in learning and achievement.

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Carol Dweck Explains the "False" Growth Mindset

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Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort. Kids with fixed mindsets, on the other hand, believe they have a finite amount of talent that can't be altered and shy away from challenges that might reveal their inabilities.

Dweck believes educators flocked to her work because many were tired of drilling kids for high-stakes tests and recognized that student motivation and love for learning was being lost in the process. But Dweck is worried that as her research became more popular, many people oversimplified its message.

In an interview with The Atlantic , Dweck explained to reporter Christine Gross-Loh all the ways she sees growth mindset being misappropriated. She says often teachers and parents aren't willing to take the longer, more difficult path of helping students identify strategies and connect success to those strategies. Instead, her complicated psychological research has gotten boiled down to, "praise the effort, not the outcome." Dweck also explained what she means by a "false" growth mindset:

False growth mindset is saying you have growth mindset when you don't really have it or you don't really understand [what it is]. It's also false in the sense that nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time. Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait. Something really challenging and outside your comfort zone can trigger it, or, if you encounter someone who is much better than you at something you pride yourself on, you can think "Oh, that person has ability, not me." So I think we all, students and adults, have to look for our fixed-mindset triggers and understand when we are falling into that mindset.

I think a lot of what happened [with false growth mindset among educators] is that instead of taking this long and difficult journey, where you work on understanding your triggers, working with them, and over time being able to stay in a growth mindset more and more, many educators just said, "Oh yeah, I have a growth mindset" because either they know it's the right mindset to have or they understood it in a way that made it seem easy.

The interview is full of tips for parents and educators, including the differences between young children and older ones.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845/

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Carol Dweck Explains The 'False' Growth Mindset That Worries Her | KQED

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Carol Dweck has become the closest thing to an education celebrity because of her work on growth mindset. Her research shows that children who have a growth mindset welcome challenges as opportunities to improve, believing that their abilities can change with focused effort.

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Stories Teachers Share is a podcast about what it's like to be a teacher and what we can learn from them. Teaching is a deeply personal profession. Teachers give so much of themselves to their students, nurturing relationships and trust with students along the way. It's those intangibles that don't always show up on standardized...

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Love in the Digital Age

A series exploring how technology changes the way we experience love, friendship, intimacy and connection. Subscribe in iTunes | RSS | Website

MindShift: Stories Teachers Share

From the editors of the MindShift blog, a podcast that tells the stories about what it's like to be a teacher and what we can learn from them. Subscribe in iTunes | RSS | Website

KQED Podcasts

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A series exploring how technology changes the way we experience love, friendship, intimacy and connection. Subscribe in iTunes | RSS | Website From the editors of the MindShift blog, a podcast that tells the stories about what it's like to be a teacher and what we can learn from them.

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EdTech Review:  5 Videos to Watch on Giving Voice to Students

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EdTech Review:  5 Videos to Watch on Giving Voice to Students

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The facilitators in the classroom often need to ask the students and must address their views.

It is imperative to understand students' perspective, ideas, knowledge and expectations.

Watch out the 5 videos below to understand more about it and get the ball rolling.

Check'em out!

5. Student Voice and Choice: At Their Own Pace

The learning, the authority and the responsibility. The video talks of the shift where students must have a say in their learning choices and be given freedom to learn at their individual pace.

4. Student Surveys: Using Student Voice to Improve Teaching and Learning

The video shows the importance of student feedback. Watch out how students' opinions matter and have a direct impact on instruction.

3. Student Voice

This video is a description of the term "Student Voice". The video explains the importance of giving students a say in decisions related to their learning matter.

2. When Student Voice is Heard: Andrew VanderMeulen

When the voices of students are given both forum and power, the results can be incredible and inspirational. Andrew VanderMeulen talks on the same. He highlight what happens when educators give their students the chance to speak and when their voice is heard.

1. "I think it's important we get a say": KidsMatter and student voice

Watch kids expressing why they need to be heard. This is one amazing video where kids express their view on the concept of students' voice.

What are your views on the same?

The Latest EdTech News To Your Inbox

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5 Videos to Watch on Giving Voice to Students

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The facilitators in the classroom often need to ask the students and must address their views. It is imperative to understand students' perspective, ideas, knowledge and expectations. Watch out the 5 videos below to understand more about it and get the ball rolling. Check'em out! The learning, the authority and the responsibility.

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Mindshift: Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress to Change Student Mindsets

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Mindshift: Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress to Change Student Mindsets

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iStock

Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and its power to help people view challenges as opportunities to improve has helped many students understand their beliefs about themselves. When empowered with the understanding that intelligence is malleable, students can develop how they approach school and life. But the revelations around mindsets don't end there - they apply to other areas of education, including how students view and react to stress.

There is a lot of research about how stress negatively impacts health, cognitive functioning and self-control, but less often discussed are how those findings change when people see their stress as a positive motivator. "In a number of situations, accepting and embracing the stress instead of trying to calm down helped students to do better," said Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University at a Learning and the Brain conference on mindsets.

'If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth.' Kelly McGonigal, Stanford lecturer, author

McGonigal defines stress as "what arises in your body, in your brain and in your community when something you care about is at stake." She acknowledges that stress can make some people feel paralyzed and might lead them to underperform. She calls that reaction a "threat response" to stress, but says if educators can help students to have a "challenge response" to stress, which includes the realization that they have the resources to handle the situation, the stress can actually energize students to do better.

This more positive approach doesn't negate the very real effects on the brain from constant high levels of stress. McGonigal is clear that the first priority in any situation is to relieve suffering. She says it's useful to help students learn tactics to calm down in the moment, like mindfulness or other cortisol-reduction exercises, but those strategies aren't enough on their own. Life is stressful in big and small ways; rather than trying to erase stress from life, it may be beneficial to approach inevitable stress more positively.

"There is almost no relationship between the amount of stress you are under and your stress mindset," said McGonigal. Learning tactics to change one's outlook on stress can be beneficial for anyone. "How you think about stress seems to influence how you cope with stress," she said.

When people try to avoid stress or stressful situations, they often behave in escapist ways. They look for distractions or use coping mechanisms like drinking to deal with the stress they feel. Conversely, people who have a more balanced or welcoming approach to stress tend to be more proactive. When they start to feel stressed out, they are more likely to address the source of the stress, ask for help, talk about their stress or even find the humor in it.

Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case.

When students learn to think about stress in this more positive way, they can actually use it to improve learning, to find purpose and to form stronger emotional connections to others, McGonigal said. In her popular TED talk, McGonigal describes how the stress hormone oxytocin primes people to take action and makes them crave closeness. Even as the body is releasing adrenaline and cortisol that produce anxious feelings, it is also releasing oxytocin, which can help people build resiliency against that anxiety.

McGonigal views the dual nature of the body's stress response as an opportunity. She suggests three interventions to help students (or anyone) change their approach to stress and create resiliency in the face of anxiety.
#1 Caring for others builds resiliency against stress
To help people reset their mindsets about stress, encourage them to care for others. The biological reaction to stress naturally includes a desire to connect with others. Nurturing that inclination can dramatically reduce the harmful negative effects of stress.

A study done at Yale in 2015 asked 77 adults to report every stressful event that happened to them each day, including work, school, interpersonal or financial stresses. They also kept track of all the times they helped someone throughout the day. Finally, every day the subjects took a mental health well-being test because researchers wanted to see how caring behavior affected well-being. They found that on stressful days when the person had engaged in few acts of kindness, mental health tanked. But when the person experienced a lot of stress, but also helped others, often their well-being stayed even.

Another study done at the University of British Columbia and Northwestern with 106 10th-graders found that kids who were randomly assigned to offer acts of kindness throughout the day had lower levels of toxic stress. They had less inflammation, lower cholesterol, and better heart and metabolic health. In their summary of results, the authors write, "Preliminary analyses within the intervention group suggest that those who increased the most in empathy and altruistic behaviors, and who decreased the most in negative mood, also showed the greatest decreases in cardiovascular risk over time."

Even something as simple as a visual reminder, like a wristband, to be compassionate toward others can have surprising results. It reminds kids that their teachers and parents value caring as much as academics, and gives them a sanctioned reason to point out compassionate behavior in others, as well as practicing it themselves.
#2 Purpose in life reduces stress
At the University of Illinois researchers studied how purpose in life related to happiness and mood in 222 college students. They found that students with low life-purpose were satisfied with their lives when they were happy, but very unsatisfied when their mood was low. In contrast, students with high life-purpose were satisfied with their lives whether or not they were having a bad day. Their purpose created resiliency.

"People who have a meaningful life worry more and have more stress than people with a less meaningful life," McGonigal said. But that isn't necessarily bad. People feel stress around things they care about, so when they have a high sense of purpose they naturally experience more stress. "Stress and meaning go together," she said. She's convinced that how we think about stress in relationship to meaning will determine whether we're on the stress-induced heart attack side of stress or the energized, motivated side of stress.

To increase students' sense of purpose, McGonigal suggests teachers simply ask students to reflect on a series of questions that help illuminate their values.

What quality or strength do you value about yourself? (This is different than what a teacher or adult would value about you.)

What activity, role or relationship brings you meaning, satisfaction or joy? McGonigal says students often point out things like sports, art or being a sibling. The point is to get at something bigger than self.

What mission, purpose or community do you serve? This question expands the sense of self and gets at what a student cares about.

Why are these important to you?

Studies on simple self-affirmation exercises like this one can have dramatic impacts on how students view their ability to handle difficult situations. "It has been shown to increase students' ability to see the meaning when they face stress or adversity and have a sense of themselves as adequate to the challenge," McGonigal said.
#3 Focus on how stress can help students grow
Here's where growth mindset comes back into the story, because thinking of challenges - no matter the context - as learning opportunities can reframe even the toughest experiences.

'Typically, human beings learn and grow from even the experiences we'd want to protect them from.'

Researchers at the University of Southern California asked 564 alternative high school students about the worst experience of their lives. Many teenagers have already experienced really terrible things, including sexual abuse, cancer and homelessness. "Kids in the study had experienced real adversity, in additional to typical teenage adversity," McGonigal said. The students were then asked how that experience affected their personal strength, compassion, activities, closeness to others, spiritual understanding, handling difficulties, direction in life and appreciation for life. On every measure students reported a positive change because of the terrible experience.

"Typically, human beings learn and grow from even the experiences we'd want to protect them from," McGonigal said. Carol Dweck's work has shown how important this growth can be in the academic world, but it can be true about stressful life events, too.

A study at Hope College asked students to think about an experience that was personally painful, bothersome or embarrassing. An experimental group was told doing this was an opportunity to learn, grow and become stronger. "This was not hard for people to do, no matter what the experience was," McGonigal said. "And when they did it, they shifted into a different stress state, one that looked more like resilience."

The group that thought about that painful experience without the intervention, however, exhibited signs of toxic stress. All these studies demonstrate that how students think about and perceive their experiences are very important to how their bodies react to the resulting stress.

"If you are able to look back on your life and tell yourself a story about your stress that includes how you learned from it, it continues to create a narrative of strength, learning and growth," McGonigal said.

An easy intervention to help students build a growth mindset about stressful situations is to break into small groups and share stories of facing challenges and persevering through them. The stories don't have to be academic, but it should be a time when the student got better at that skill or learned something. Then students can write about the strengths they drew on, reflect on who or what supported them, and think about what they learned and how they grew. This is particularly powerful when adults share, too.

Sharing with a group can help students see that struggle is common to everyone. It can also help highlight different strategies people used in those moments of adversity and how productive challenges can be.

"The most effective mindset interventions start with a new idea, some science, and then you have people talk about it," McGonigal said. When students can relate the idea to their own experiences, it becomes much more powerful.

"When we are anxious, stop interpreting it as a sign we are inadequate and start seeing it as a way we can rise to the challenge," McGonigal said.

To her, the best of these three interventions is that they can help convert mindsets about stress, even when a person isn't conscious of it. Like mindfulness training, these strategies can shift the narrative and subtly color experiences of stress going forward.

How Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress Can Change Student Mindsets

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How Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress Can Change Student Mindsets

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Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset and its power to help people view challenges as opportunities to improve has helped many students understand their beliefs about themselves. When empowered with the understanding that intelligence is malleable, students can develop how they approach school and life.

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World Economic Forum: 8 Digital Life Skills All Children Need

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World Economic Forum: 8 Digital Life Skills All Children Need

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8 digital life skills all children need - and a plan for teaching them

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We need to teach our children these eight skills as part of their education in digital citizenship.

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Mindshift: Continuing to Support the Most Frustrating Students

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Mindshift: Continuing to Support the Most Frustrating Students

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How do we really feel about our most challenging students? Most of us will say "frustrated" as a first reaction. But after we dig a little bit under the layer of frustration, what's the next emotion, the truer emotion? I asked a room of educators this question at the Educon conference earlier this year. I heard: Worried. Hopeless. Lost. Powerless. Stuck. Many of us feel a deep sense of responsibility and care for "our kids." When we see a student struggling and believe that we can't help, the powerlessness can feel overwhelming. If we don't do the work to transform that emotion in a healthy way, it can instead become frustration and irritation, and begin to chip away at our empathy.

This frustration infuses all our interactions with and about that student, which in turn communicates a lack of care to the student and family, heightening what may have already felt like an insurmountable wall. We say we believe in every child, care for every child, support every child -- but when we let our challenging emotions fester, we struggle to communicate that to others -- or even believe it ourselves.

I've gotten stuck in this trap more than once. It was my student who jolted me out of this cycle when she said, "You don't really care about kids, you're just here for the money." My instinct was to laugh, but I quickly realized that what my student was trying to tell me was that she didn't feel like I cared about her. I was able to use that moment to let her know that I did indeed care, and we were able to have a great conversation about how teachers can feel frustrated sometimes and how we're all human. That conversation ended up strengthening our relationship and my work with her.

My most challenging student is not inherently challenging as a human being -- but I need to own that it's challenging for me to work with them. Once I take responsibility for my own emotions, I am now in a position to transform them.
WHAT CAN I DO TO CHANGE THIS?
It's not about not feeling hopeless, defeated and powerless in the face of challenging student behaviors. These are normal responses we can expect to have as humans in relationship with other humans who are struggling. Instead, we need to own the emotions and work to make meaning of them. This means taking the time to dig into questions like:

Why am I feeling this way?

Could this feeling give me insight into how my student is feeling?

What does it mean about me that I feel so frustrated, lost or hopeless? Does it change my conception of myself as a teacher, as a person?

What do my students' challenges bring up for me? How does my own history influence my responses?

What is the venue for these questions? In an ideal world, teachers would make space for grappling with these questions as part of their scheduled job responsibilities. At my school, we take time formally and informally to delve into our own emotional response to the work, to gain perspective, to check our assumptions and stay grounded.

Informally, this looks like maintaining a school culture where the students' strengths are at the center. We have an informal "no venting" policy, preferring instead to problem-solve. It's common to find teachers in each other's classrooms at the end of the day comparing notes and talking through a challenging situation: "Hey, was he upset in your class today, too? What did you do about it? Do you have any sense of what's going on for him?" We encourage this peer consultation and make time for it.

Formally, we have several mandatory and optional group opportunities for staff to focus on wellness and making meaning of the work. Once a month we have wellness groups where staff choose a personal wellness goal for the year and use the group to stay on track and get ideas. We also do periodic case conferences, focusing on one particular student, where we walk through what behaviors are coming up, what we understand to be at the root of those behaviors, how we're feeling working with that student, and what we should do going forward. We make the choice to invest our time as a school doing this rather than focusing staff meetings on other topics, and we see the benefit for students when teachers are on the same page about supporting them.
WHAT'S NEXT?
We will never lose the need for meaning-making, because working with humans will always be inherently complex and bring up emotions. However, there are some proactive things we can do to smooth the path for ourselves.

Proactively plan for being a person with emotions. Expect that the work will be challenging and that sometimes you will feel awful, and accept that this is a normal part of a human-centered job. What are some ways you do this?

Build in support systems. Find the people, groups or strategies that will proactively support you and will respond to you with kindness and understanding when the going gets rough. This might be nurturing your personal friendships or relationships, strengthening connections with co-workers, my supervisor or other folks at work, or going to my own counselor or therapist. If I'm worried about respecting my students' confidentiality, I remind myself to turn my focus back to my own emotions: I don't need to share my students' names or stories in order to talk about how frustrated or hopeless I'm feeling, and work through those emotions.

Develop understanding. We can better make meaning when we better understand the underlying issues at stake. Seek out information about trauma, chronic stress, the impacts of racism and discrimination, and other systems at play with your particular population. I incorporate these topics into my school's ongoing professional development (which staff design and facilitate), and also use my own personal learning community online to find these resources.

Forgive yourself: Above all, we need to be gentle with ourselves. This self-forgiveness serves to remind us that we also must be gentle with our students, offering a fresh start each day and providing opportunities to repair and rebuild our relationships after conflict

When I feel like I just don't have time to slow down and do this emotional work, I remind myself that an investment in this work pays off tenfold in my ability to stay grounded, not to get so stressed out, and most importantly, to be a better help to my students who need it most.

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A Mindset Shift to Continue Supporting the Most Frustrating Kids | KQED

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How do we really feel about our most challenging students? Most of us will say "frustrated" as a first reaction. But after we dig a little bit under the layer of frustration, what's the next emotion, the truer emotion? I asked a room of educators this question at the Educon conference earlier this year.

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Collection & Playlist Heave

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Show What You Know - Student Choice Menu with Tech

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Show What You Know - Student Choice Menu with Tech

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rubrics for self regulated learning - Google Search

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Eduardo Briceno's Talk on Growth Mindset

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The Power of belief -- mindset and success | Eduardo Briceno | TEDxManhattanBeach

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the power (and peril) of praising your kids

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new york magazine cover story  (how not to talk to your kids) on carol
dweck’s work

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the power (and peril) of praising your kids

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MindSet: A Book written by Carol Dweck. Teaching a growth mindset creates motivation and productivity in the worlds of business, education, and sports.

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The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids

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Sesame Street: Bruno Mars: Don't Give Up

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Characteristics of SRL: Primary and Secondary Ed

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Characteristics of SRL: Primary and Secondary Ed

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Formative Assessment & Self-Regulated Learning

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Formative Assessment & Self-Regulated Learning

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Implementation of The Good Project Lesson Plans

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The Power of Yet: A quick, fun way to teach growth mindset

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The Power of Yet: A quick, fun way to teach growth mindset

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Sesame Street: Episode #4520: J. Monae Power of Yet (HBO Kids)

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A district that has been implementing Visible Learning successfully.

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Surrounded by a video recording team from Corwin Press, Wood View Elementary School teacher Renee Calabrese talks with her first-graders about learning targets and how they learn in a classroom. The Visible Learning program is utilizing Valley View School District 365U as a model district for its nationwide training video.

BOLINGBROOK

Based on its recent efforts to implement Visible Learning instructional practices, Valley View School District 365U was asked to serve as a model district for other school districts across the country.

A team from Corwin Press visited three district schools to record interviews with students, faculty and administrators who have embraced the Visible Learning research, the news release said.

The release noted the video will be used in professional development as more school districts begin to recognize its impact on student growth and achievement.

"This means a lot for our district and community because we are truly being recognized as a Visible Learning school district," Karen Flories, VVSD executive director for 6-12 educational services, said in the release. "We are extremely proud to be able to help support the work ... throughout the country."

Visible Learning is a 2009 publication based upon research by John Hattie that compiles thousands of studies involving a quarter of a billion students to identify what has the greatest impact on student learning, according to the release. The goal is to create teachers who see learning through the eyes of their students, and students who see themselves as their own teachers.

"It was truly exciting to see the incredibly hard work and targeted development everyone has put into our Visible Learning journey captured on film," Flories said. "The footage they shot might serve as an example of a best practice in action. It might be an example of how we get kids to internalize what it means to be a good learner. It might be about how a teacher is reflecting on Visible Learning practices or how a building [administrator] has a vision for their staff. Even though Valley View is a national leader in Visible Learning implementation, we still have enormous opportunities ahead of us as we continue to grow."

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Valley View School District's Visible Learning program in national spotlight

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BOLINGBROOK Based on its recent efforts to implement Visible Learning instructional practices, Valley View School District 365U was asked to serve as a model district for other school districts across the country. A team from Corwin Press visited three district schools to record interviews with students, faculty and administrators who have embraced the Visible Learning research, the news release said.

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How Can Schools Identify Gifted ELLs? - Mindshift

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How Can Schools Identify Gifted ELLs? - Mindshift

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Of the 3 million students identified as gifted in the U.S., English Language Learners are by far the most underrepresented. And nobody knows that better than 17-year-old Alejandra Galindo.

"It's just kind of hard to not see people who look like me in my classes," she says. "I'm a minority in the gifted world."

Alejandra is a senior at North Canyon High School in Phoenix. Before she was identified as gifted, she was identified as an English Language Learner, or ELL. You know, those kids who are often assigned to separate classrooms while they learn English. That was Alejandra.

"She would cry and not want to go to school," says her mom, Norma Galindo. "She didn't want to be Hispanic. She didn't want to speak our language."

Norma Galindo is originally from El Salvador. Her husband, Arnulfo, is from Mexico. They've always known their daughter was bright beyond her years.

"I remember Alejandra coming to me and saying, 'Mom, I'm bored at school. Classes are so easy,' " says Norma Galindo. "And I said, 'You're not supposed to be bored at school. You need to be challenged.' So I talked to her teacher and asked, 'Can you do something for her?' "

Parents are usually the first ones to figure out that their child is gifted, but that message often doesn't get to the educators in schools.

Many schools don't even test ELLs for giftedness, and most teachers aren't trained to identify those students.

It doesn't have to be that way, says Alejandra.

"I think it's just all about letting those kids know that [they] have just as much potential as any other kid," she says, "regardless of your skin color or where your parents came from or what language you speak."

Alejandra was lucky. In fourth grade, a teacher singled her out and asked that she be tested. The results showed that her verbal reasoning skills were off the charts, a sign of giftedness not just in English but Spanish as well.

"Now that I'm older," says Alejandra, "I realize that being bilingual is very, very important. That in combination with being gifted, it's like so many doors have opened."

At North Canyon High, those doors have opened wide. Alejandra has excelled in just about every college-level course she has taken. Her academic success has motivated her to fine-tune her other gift, singing. She's a section leader on the school choir.

With graduation right around the corner, Alejandra has set her sights on college and a career in international studies, maybe doing humanitarian work.

It's not clear how many Alejandras there are out there.

Arizona has identified more than 80,000 gifted students statewide, but that number is not broken down by race or ethnicity. It's also impossible to know how many gifted ELLs are never identified and tested.

Nationally, 32 states, including Arizona, mandate gifted education, according to the National Association For Gifted Children. Only four fully fund gifted programs, the organization says in this report. Few, if any, require that ELLs be tested.

That's a problem says Chester Finn, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education and author of the recent book, Failing Our Brightest Kids.

"An awful lot of Latino kids are arriving with parents who are undocumented. They really do depend on schools to help them," says Finn. "[But] we're losing talent of kids from poorly educated parents who don't know their way around the American system."

Finn says schools must do more to reach out to non-English-speaking parents, and to train teachers to be more like talent scouts. Then, he adds, schools must give gifted ELLs as much academic enrichment as they can handle.

No argument there, says Peter Laing. He oversees gifted education for Arizona's Department of Public Instruction. Arizona currently does not provide any funding for gifted education. Laing says what little money gifted kids get has to come from local school districts.

He says that, with the ELL population growing so fast in Arizona, educators and policymakers need to better serve those students, especially the brightest among them: "This is a moral, ethical obligation on the part of schools."

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

How Can Schools Better Identify Gifted English Language Learners?

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How Can Schools Better Identify Gifted English Language Learners?

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Of the 3 million students identified as gifted in the U.S., English Language Learners are by far the most underrepresented. And nobody knows that better than 17-year-old Alejandra Galindo. "It's just kind of hard to not see people who look like me in my classes," she says.

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Developing Self Regulation through Formative Assessment

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Developing Self Regulation through Formative Assessment

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How to get better at the things you care about

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Eduardo Briceño: How to get better at the things you care about

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Working hard but not improving? You're not alone. Eduardo Briceño reveals a simple way to think about getting better at the things you do, whether that's work, parenting or creative hobbies. And he shares some useful techniques so you can keep learning and always feel like you're moving forward.

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Tools to help teachers assess student learning, such as using rubrics, designing effective test questions, and utilizing self-assessment and peer-assessment techniques.

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Can students learn more by assessing their progress?

Fifth grader Tacyana Thomas had put the finishing touches on a short paragraph. Now, she held her paper next to a model essay and compared her writing with her teacher's. Had she used evidence to back up her argument? Had she restated the thesis?

This was among the first of many times this school year that Tacyana will be asked to determine how her own work stacks up to a model. But she wasn't left to do so on her own. Tacyana and the rest of Maggie Martin's literacy class here at Gust Elementary School had just spent an entire lesson learning how to assess their own work using a rubric, a scoring guide that lays out what is expected of students.

Gust is one of a growing number of schools across the country where student self-assessment is one type of formative assessment that is woven into the school day. The idea is that just as teachers can teach more effectively if they check students' progress along the way, students can learn more effectively if they understand what they're working toward and where they are.

"You've heard lots about wanting student learning to rise," said Susan Brookhart, a Montana-based consultant and the coordinator of assessment and evaluation for the school of education at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania. "At some point, people said, 'Hey, wait a minute, kids have to be involved, too.'"

"Students aren't just empty heads to fill," Brookhart said. "They need to be aiming to learn something, not just aiming to comply with teachers' directions. Learning is much deeper if the student is thinking, 'I am doing this because it will help me learn this.' "

At its core, student self-assessment is driven by three basic questions, she said. Students are taught to ask themselves, "Where am I going, where am I now, and where to next?"

But equipping students with the tools to accurately answer those questions, and providing teachers with the tools to teach students how to answer them, is a more complex task.

Advocates of student self-assessment are careful to say what it is not. Students are not filling out their own report cards. Nor are they passively reflecting on their work. Ideally, they are in between; actively judging their work and progress toward a goal, and determining what steps to take to reach it.

Many of the tools of self-assessment are by now familiar to most teachers: Rubrics that clarify what level of work will earn which score, and objectives at the start of lessons that remind students what they're aiming to learn.

Making Assessment Goals Student-Friendly

But there is an art to creating just the right goals and models. Content standards are written for teachers, not students, so teachers must translate the content goals of a course into student-friendly language.

Perfecting that translation has been a focus of EL, formerly known as Expeditionary Learning, a school-design network that partners with 120 district and charter schools around the country, including Gust. The network refers to the goals as learning targets.

For instance, a standard that requires students to "understand the monetary value of coinage" might be translated into a learning target that says, "I can make change for a dollar using nickels, dimes, quarters, and pennies." That target is in more kid-friendly language and contains within it the content laid out in the standard.

Ron Berger, the chief academic officer of EL, said that those targets must be accompanied by models of high-quality work. He gives the example of a ballet dancer. A student studying ballet has, ideally, seen excellent ballet dancers perform. As the student is working on skills and routines, the excellent dancer is a model and inspiration.

Berger said that in this way, a model doesn't have to stifle creative or innovative work.

"The most important assessment that happens in any building is not the state assessment," Berger said. "It's the assessment that's going on in a student's head every day, before she turns in work, when she thinks: Is this good enough?"

Heidi Andrade, an associate education dean at the University of Albany in New York, said that student self-assessment can help improve academic achievement.

"When you ask students to monitor the quality of their work on standards and criteria, not surprisingly, they do better," Andrade said.

There is some debate about whether students' self-assessments need to be accurate. Some believe it's critical for students to be able to accurately mark their progress, while others believe the process of reflecting, thinking carefully, and revising is more important, said Andrade, who is in the latter camp. The idea is that students are being taught how to be metacognitive-to reflect on their own thinking-and to approach learning with the attitude that they can grow.

Andrade, who helped develop and popularize the use of the rubric in K-12 schools, said that she is concerned that some rubrics are either too vague or too hard to understand. She said it is also crucial that self-assessment is followed up with a chance for students to revise and improve their work. "Otherwise," she added, "what's the point?"

Incorporating Data

Student self-assessment has gained traction at the same time that new technology and new assessments have provided teachers and schools with access to previously unimaginable amounts of data about students' performance, attendance, behavior, and more.

At many schools, students are given access to much of the same data as their teachers.

At Gust, Julia Padilla, a 5th grade math teacher, said she has seen a shift in the school's approach over her eight years there. "Students haven't always been aware of their progress," she said. "But now, they aren't surprised by the end result, and they feel they're more in control of it."

"The expectation is that not only are teachers using data, students are owning data," said Padilla. In her class, she said, students track their progress as they learn the multiplication tables and see their scores on standardized tests. She said students can even use behavior-tracking programs like Class Dojo to assess their own behaviors.

In Ms. Martin's class, Tacyana said the rubric "helps us understand more about what we're learning."

Principal Jamie Roybal said the idea of encouraging students to assess their own learning has become part of the school's culture. Self-assessment goes hand in hand with the idea that students can learn and grow, she said.

"It gives ownership and control of learning and growth back to students," Roybal said. At a staff meeting, Gust recently self-assessed its own performance in making time for student self-assessment, she said. "That's how much we're focusing on it."

That's not by chance. One component of the Denver district's framework for evaluating teachers is whether their students have the opportunity to self-assess.

Padilla said it takes time to teach students how to read rubrics or use systems to track their progress. But, she said, the shift is worth it. "I think students tracking their own data is key to getting students invested in their education," she said. "If they don't see the direct results in that moment, it's hard for them to know where to go."

Published in Print: November 11, 2015, as Putting Students In Charge of Their Own Learning

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Students 'Self-Assess' Their Way to Learning

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Fifth grader Tacyana Thomas had put the finishing touches on a short paragraph. Now, she held her paper next to a model essay and compared her writing with her teacher's. Had she used evidence to back up her argument? Had she restated the thesis?

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Performance Assessment & Common Core | Exemplars

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Learn about Exemplars performance material, rubrics & anchor papers for assessment & instruction. Includes math, science & writing. Download sample tasks.

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Use these ideas to incorporate the voices of students into your conferences with families.

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Edutopia: Student Led Conferencing - Empowering Our Students

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Edutopia: Student Led Conferencing - Empowering Our Students

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"We started slow with student-led conferences," says eighth-grade teacher Brigid Jennings. "It was almost like a gradual release to full student-led conferences. It's important to remember that not all teachers are at the same level of comfort with giving over this time to the students. We spent a lot of time as a professional community discussing ways student-led conferences could work, and then found whatever format was best for us as teachers and also our students."

As they piloted the change, these teachers saw a big difference in the levels of engagement for both parents and students. The teachers also liked the new model better, saying that it felt less like they were defending the grades they gave students and more like a conversation about the students' learning. The pilot group's success convinced the rest of the teachers at Wildwood to keep building on the idea, and within a few years, it had become a school-wide practice.

Designating a Time

Conferences at Wildwood happen twice a year. Each conference lasts ten minutes, due to the number of families that teachers have to see. While that time seems like much, setting reasonable constraints can help the students feel more comfortable presenting.

"We never get through everything," says eighth-grade teacher Rebecca Braun. "We actually include more work than time allows. This helps the students feel less anxious and also keeps the conversation flowing."

Students know that it's OK if they don't get through everything, and teachers know that the conversation doesn't have to end after ten minutes. Parents are given the option of taking the students' presentation binder or folder home for the night to continue reviewing and discussing the work.

Teachers also work around the time limits by rearranging their schedule to allow for 15-minute conferences, or by making sure that the time blocked off for student-led conferences isn't usurped by other issues.

"If I have serious concerns and need to have a conversation with a parent," says Jennings, "I reach out to those parents and schedule separate times. I still keep their regular scheduled time for student-led conferences because I believe it is important for all students to present their learning to their parents and spend that vital time reflecting as a family."

Preparing the Work

The students prepare some kind of presentation, which differs by grade and is scaffolded to their skill level. For instance, the eighth grade classes prepare binders with their work and reflection sheets, while younger grades may prepare a poster board or packet to show their parents. But all students keep and manage a portfolio of their own work. (For examples and more information on portfolios, see the Resources section at the bottom of the article.) When students complete something that they're proud of or want to keep, they simply file that item in their portfolio. When it is time to start prepping for conferences, students can then go to that portfolio and choose what they want to include in the conference binders or folders to show their parents.

"When we begin to prepare for student-led conferences," says Jennings, "I have a conversation with students around what they feel should be included in their binders. We continue the conversation then through different lenses: What would you like to see as the student? What would your parents like to see? What would your teachers like to see? The student is the primary driver of what goes into the binders."

Some teachers set loose guidelines about what must go into the binder or folder, but the students are given a lot of freedom over what to include.

"We don't get too crazy about guidelines," says Jennings. "Each subject area must be included, and the reflection pieces also must be included. But it's important for the students to have choice in what goes into their binder. It's all about their learning and what's important to them. When students are given ample time to reflect, you would be surprised that they won't just fill their binder with every A+ paper they have. They'll include places where they struggled, places where they improved, and places where they need help. This doesn't always happen easily, but this is where teacher/student reflection and conversation come in."

Preparing Students to Lead

In addition to preparing their binders or folders, students spend the weeks before conferences talking about how to present and lead the conversation with their parents. Helping the students feel secure in talking about their learning makes their limited presentation time go much more smoothly, Wildwood teachers say.

"It's important to make sure the students understand they are in control of the conversation," says Braun. "It's not a 'got ya,' and their very best strengths are the highlight of the conference."

Teachers do this by setting expectations, facilitating student reflection, and going over the necessary elements of a successful conference.

"The teacher should be giving mini-lessons and having conversations about quality work, good conferences/bad conferences, planning, etc.," says fourth-grade teacher Georgia Melidis. "Teachers must build the capacity of their students. After all, students are in school, they are learning skills, and conducting a student-led conference is a skill that must be taught . . . We start prepping about a week before conferencing, and we practice 10-15 minutes per day. I got creative and made the prepping a station in my Daily Five reading centers."

Practice is a large component of their preparation, and students practice their presentations with each other, their teacher, and students from other grade levels. "Typically, what we do is we get with a buddy, and they can read to their friend," Melidis says. "They're giving each other feedback on their paper, so it's really an authentic way to design and conduct a student conference. And the shy ones are able to practice with people and feel prepared and then feel confident."

While preparing for conferences does take some class time, teachers find that it's just as valuable as curricular lessons. "We view the prep work as a critical time for reflection," says Braun. "Students look back on their work for the quarter and write about their areas for growth, their successes, things they'd like to work on. Kids have a tendency to forget about all the wonderful learning they've experienced in a quarter."

For teachers that may have the time flexibility to prepare, "I would say to get creative," suggests Melidis. "They can start two weeks prior to the conferences and practice for the first five minutes of class, or they can tie it into their daily journal, daily goal setting, reflection time, they can make it their exit ticket, etc."

Not only does investing time in conference prep ensure a successfully led conference, it also encourages student and parent attendance. Students are excited to tell their parents what they've learned, and parents are more apt to attend because their kids are excited. "This year, I had every parent and student show up for conferences," Melidis recalls. "Conference time was not taken as seriously before, but now the school is full and lively on conference night. I mean, let's face it -- no parent wants to let his or her own child down."

Resources

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"We started slow with student-led conferences," says eighth-grade teacher Brigid Jennings. "It was almost like a gradual release to full student-led conferences. It's important to remember that not all teachers are at the same level of comfort with giving over this time to the students.

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Edutopia: Simple Ways to Help Promote Collaboration

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Edutopia: Simple Ways to Help Promote Collaboration

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In his book Dropping Out, Russell Rumberger lays out the societal consequences, including:

. . . poor academic performance in middle school and even elementary school can decrease a student's motivation in high school, which can lead to failing courses and skipping school, . . . [and] dropping out.

Statistic Brain provides this information:

Total number of high school dropouts annually: 3,000,000

Dropouts in the largest 50 U.S. cities: 41 percent

U.S. crimes committed by high school dropouts: 75 percent

U.S. jobs for which a high school dropout is ineligible: 90 percent

Lifetime earning difference (high school graduate vs. dropout): $260,000

So what can be done?

Focus, Commitment, Reinforcement, Effectiveness, Fun

The goal: Students who respect their teachers, schools, peers, and the learning process.

The key: Student motivation.

Additional benefit: Meaningful service learning project for the high school students.

An effective student motivation strategy must include all of these five components:

Teachers must be ready, willing, and able to focus primarily on motivation. Many valuable supplemental educational and social programs are available. But classroom learning and supplemental programs will have greatly diminished value (or become completely valueless) if students are ambivalent or unwilling to participate. Unmotivated students are unlikely to embrace classroom learning or participate in tutoring, homework help, or traditional mentoring programs.

Teachers and administrators are mindful and even protective of curriculum time. However, a strategy requiring only 15 minutes per week can provide an excellent return on time invested. And considering the amount of time wasted on disciplining unruly, unmotivated students, a 15-minute-per-week investment in motivation will result in a net increase in actual teaching time.
3. Reinforcement Through Repetition
The Energizer Bunny may keep going and going. However, a motivation strategy for elementary and middle school students requires repetitive reinforcement. Teachers must include this piece of the strategy if they hope to be effective.
4. Effective Motivators
Any successful motivation strategy requires an effective motivator. A story circulating around the internet tells of a father bringing his daughter to a school function. The daughter, afraid of being embarrassed by her father, pleaded, "Dad, whatever you do, don't sing." The father was Billy Joel. Whether or not this story is true, the sentiment is certainly believable. No matter who the parents or guardians are, their admonitions or offers of assistance are often disregarded. If teachers and administrators are fortunate to have respectful, pliable students, a specific motivation strategy is unnecessary. However, in chronically unruly classrooms and/or those with unmotivated, underperforming students, the wishes of adult authority figures are disregarded. Unfortunately this often rises to the level of disrespect and defiance. However, academically accomplished high school students are powerful role models. By virtue of their being older, they are automatically "cool" and respected. They are viewed as older peers and are therefore easy to relate to -- particularly if they share common interests.

The not-so-secret ingredient for any motivational activity is making sure that it's fun. As we're about to see, video chatting (through Skype, Facetime, or other media) is fun. This is an activity that students look forward to participating in.

A Unique Motivational Program

These five components are at the core of a resource that I've developed for elementary and middle school teachers that also functions as a community service opportunity for high school students. The program, called On Giants' Shoulders, advocates a strategy for repetitively motivating underperforming elementary and middle school students to respect their teachers, peers, schools, and the learning process using 15-minute, once-per-week online chats with academically accomplished high school students who appreciate the value of education.

The students are paired according to interests (sports, music, art, dance, etc.). For example, a member of the high school football team is paired with a student who loves football. A group of three older/younger student pairs share a computer or tablet for the weekly online chat. With only five computers, 15 older/younger student pairs can be accommodated in 15 minutes, 30 student pairs in 30 minutes, etc.

The implementation process is simple. High school students start a branch of OGS in the same manner they would any other school club. The students are supervised by teachers or faculty members in each school, as is the case in any school activity.
Is 15 minutes per week really enough time?
The sole purpose of this program is to motivate students interacting with engaged older peers. As a result, the younger students will be more willing to put in the time required for more time-consuming activities, such as classroom learning, tutoring, homework help, or Big Brother/Big Sister type mentoring programs.
Benefits for elementary students and schools

Stimulates motivation

Teaches communication skills

Encourages respect for teachers and school

Encourages respect for the learning process

Provides recognition for success and attempts to succeed

Counters low self-expectations

Reduces time wasted on disciplining students

Teaches computer skills

Fun and exciting

Minimal time commitment

Easy to implement

Benefits for high school students and schools

Teaches leadership

Teaches responsibility

Provides a valuable community service

Provides a resume-worthy activity when applying to colleges and future employment

Provides potential positive coverage of the school or students by local television, radio, and other news media

Provides a dynamic new relationship between the partnered schools

Minimal time commitment

Easy to implement

On Giants' Shoulders is a nonprofit organization -- there are never fees or costs of any kind. Implementation forms, instructional videos, and emailed answers to specific questions are available through the site.

Some feedback from a middle school teacher indicated that the program provided something special for her kids which was so important, especially for the less motivated ones, because it gave them something to look forward to every week. And since this model is internet based, partner schools can be across the street or across the country. One teacher stated: "Our students loved meeting and talking with older students and from another area (of the country)". A high school student said, "We loved the chats and are so happy to restart OGS this coming year."

Of course, this isn't the only answer for engaging and motivating underperforming, unruly, and disinterested elementary and middle school students. We'd love to hear your strategies, too. Please share in the comments section below.

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A group of elementary or middle school students are unruly, disrespectful, and underperforming academically and socially in the classroom. They do not appreciate the value of education. The teacher, despite good intentions and passion, is viewed as an adversarial or irrelevant authority figure.

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5 Questions to ask yourself about student motivation

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5 Questions to ask yourself about student motivation

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5 Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Unmotivated Students | Cult of Pedagogy

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If we know what works to motivate students, why are so many students still unmotivated? These five questions will help you determine if your practice is really in line with research.

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The Psychology Behind Self Regulated Learning

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Overview

People are centrally concerned with motivation - how to move themselves or others to act. Everywhere, parents, teachers, coaches, and managers struggle with how to motivate those that they mentor, and individuals struggle to find energy, mobilize effort and persist at the tasks of life and work. People are often moved by external factors such as reward systems, grades, evaluations, or the opinions they fear others might have of them. Yet, just as frequently, people are motivated from within, by interests, curiosity, care or abiding values. These intrinsic motivations are not necessarily externally rewarded or supported, but nonetheless they can sustain passions, creativity, and sustained efforts. The interplay between the extrinsic forces acting on persons and the intrinsic motives and needs inherent in human nature is the territory of Self-Determination Theory.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) represents a broad framework for the study of human motivation and personality. SDT articulates a meta-theory for framing motivational studies, a formal theory that defines intrinsic and varied extrinsic sources of motivation, and a description of the respective roles of intrinsic and types of extrinsic motivation in cognitive and social development and in individual differences. Perhaps more importantly, SDT propositions also focus on how social and cultural factors facilitate or undermine people's sense of volition and initiative, in addition to their well-being and the quality of their performance. Conditions supporting the individual's experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are argued to foster the most volitional and high quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity. In addition, SDT proposes that the degree to which any of these three psychological needs is unsupported or thwarted within a social context will have a robust detrimental impact on wellness in that setting.

The dynamics of psychological need support and need thwarting have been studied within families, classrooms, teams, organizations, clinics, and cultures using specific propositions detailed within SDT. The SDT framework thus has both broad and behavior-specific implications for understanding practices and structures that enhance versus diminish need satisfaction and the full functioning that follows from it. These many implications are best revealed by the varied papers listed on this website, which range from basic research on motivational micro-processes to applied clinical trials aiming at population outcomes.

Meta-Theory: The Organismic Viewpoint

SDT is an organismic dialectical approach. It begins with the assumption that people are active organisms, with evolved tendencies toward growing, mastering ambient challenges, and integrating new experiences into a coherent sense of self. These natural developmental tendencies do not, however, operate automatically, but instead require ongoing social nutriments and supports. That is, the social context can either support or thwart the natural tendencies toward active engagement and psychological growth, or it can catalyze lack of integration, defense, and fulfillment of need-substitutes. Thus, it is the dialectic between the active organism and the social context that is the basis for SDT's predictions about behavior, experience, and development.

Within SDT, the nutriments for healthy development and functioning are specified using the concept of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To the extent that the needs are ongoingly satisfied, people will develop and function effectively and experience wellness, but to the extent that they are thwarted, people will more likely evidence ill-being and non-optimal functioning. The darker sides of human behavior and experience, such as certain types of psychopathology, prejudice, and aggression are understood in terms of reactions to basic needs having been thwarted, either developmentally or proximally.

Formal Theory: SDT's Six Mini-Theories

Formally, SDT comprises six mini-theories, each of which was developed to explain a set of motivationally based phenomena that emerged from laboratory and field research. Each, therefore, addresses one facet of motivation or personality functioning.

1. Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) concerns intrinsic motivation, motivation that is based on the satisfactions of behaving "for its own sake." Prototypes of intrinsic motivation are children's exploration and play, but intrinsic motivation is a lifelong creative wellspring. CET specifically addresses the effects of social contexts on intrinsic motivation, or how factors such as rewards, interpersonal controls, and ego-involvements impact intrinsic motivation and interest. CET highlights the critical roles played by competence and autonomy supports in fostering intrinsic motivation, which is critical in education, arts, sport, and many other domains.

2. The second mini-theory, Organismic Integration Theory (OIT), addresses the topic of extrinsic motivation in its various forms, with their properties, determinants, and consequences. Broadly speaking, extrinsic motivation is behavior that is instrumental-that aims toward outcomes extrinsic to the behavior itself. Yet, there are distinct forms of instrumentality, which include external regulation, introjection, identification, and integration. These subtypes of extrinsic motivation are seen as falling along a continuum of internalization. The more internalized the extrinsic motivation, the more autonomous the person will be when enacting the behaviors. OIT is further concerned with social contexts that enhance or forestall internalization-that is, with what conduces toward people either resisting, partially adopting, or deeply internalizing values, goals, or belief systems. OIT particularly highlights supports for autonomy and relatedness as critical to internalization.

3. Causality Orientations Theory (COT), the third mini-theory, describes individual differences in people's tendencies to orient toward environments and regulate behavior in various ways. COT describes and assesses three types of causality orientations: the autonomy orientation in which persons act out of interest in and valuing of what is occurring; the control orientation in which the focus is on rewards, gains, and approval; and the impersonal or amotivated orientation characterized by anxiety concerning competence.

4. Fourth, Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) elaborates the concept of evolved psychological needs and their relations to psychological health and well-being. BPNT argues that psychological well-being and optimal functioning is predicated on autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Therefore, contexts that support versus thwart these needs should invariantly impact wellness. The theory argues that all three needs are essential and that if any is thwarted there will be distinct functional costs. Because basic needs are universal aspects of functioning, BPNT looks at cross-developmental and cross-cultural settings for validation and refinements.

5. The fifth mini-theory, Goal Contents Theory (GCT), grows out of the distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic goals and their impact on motivation and wellness. Goals are seen as differentially affording basic need satisfactions and are thus differentially associated with well-being. Extrinsic goals such as financial success, appearance, and popularity/fame have been specifically contrasted with intrinsic goals such as community, close relationships, and personal growth, with the former more likely associated with lower wellness and greater ill-being.

6. Relatedness, which has to do with the development and maintenance of close personal relationships such as best friends and romantic partners as well as belonging to groups, is one of the three basic psychological needs. Relationships Motivation Theory (RMT), the sixth mini-theory, is concerned with these and other relationships, and posits that some amount of such interactions is not only desirable for most people but is in fact essential for their adjustment and well-being because the relationships provide satisfaction of the need for relatedness. However, research shows that not only is the relatedness need satisfied in high-quality relationships, but the autonomy need and to a lesser degree the competence need are also satisfied. Indeed, the highest quality personal relationships are ones in which each partner supports the autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs of the other.

Other Topics of Interest

As SDT has expanded, both theoretical developments and empirical findings have led SDT researchers to examine a plethora of processes and phenomena integral to personality growth, effective functioning, and wellness. For example, SDT research has focused on the role of mindfulness as a foundation for autonomous regulation of behavior, leading to both refined measurement and theorizing about awareness. The study of facilitating conditions for intrinsic motivation led to a theory and measurement strategy regarding vitality, an indicator of both mental and physical wellness. Work on vitality also uncovered the remarkable positive impact of the experience of nature on well-being. Some research within SDT has more closely examined the forms personal passions can take, with individuals being obsessive or harmonious as a function of internalization processes. Cross-cultural tests of SDT have led to an increased understanding of how economic and cultural forms impact the invariant aspects of human nature. Research on wellness has also led to new theory and research on the assessment of well-being itself, including the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic forms of living. Specific topics such as autonomy versus controlled motivation has led to greater understanding of internalized control such as ego-involvement and contingent self-esteem and of the differences between them and autonomous self-regulation. Indeed these few examples supply just a taste of how the generative framework of SDT has enhanced research on a variety of processes of interest to the field.

Applications

In addition to formal theory development, research has applied SDT in many domains including education, organizations, sport and physical activity, religion, health and medicine, parenting, virtual environments and media, close relationships, and psychotherapy. Across these domains research has looked at how controlling versus autonomy-supportive environments impact functioning and wellness, as well as performance and persistence. In addition, supports for relatedness and competence are seen as interactive with volitional supports in fostering engagement and value within specific settings, and within domains of activity. This body of applied research has led to considerable specification of techniques, including goal structures and ways of communicating that have proven effective at promoting maintained, volitional motivation.

The varied articles on this website demonstrate the many types of inquiry associated with the SDT framework, as well as its generative capacity with respect to practical issues in human organizations of all kinds. Relevant research reports and theoretical discussion are listed in the Publications section, organized by topic.

By focusing on the fundamental psychological tendencies toward intrinsic motivation and integration, SDT occupies a unique position in psychology, as it addresses not only the central questions of why people do what they do, but also the costs and benefits of various ways of socially regulating or promoting behavior. Overviews of the theory can be found in Ryan and Deci (2000) and in Deci and Ryan (1985, 2000), as well as numerous other articles and chapters identified here on our website.

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York, NY: Plenum.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55, 68-78.

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People are centrally concerned with motivation - how to move themselves or others to act. Everywhere, parents, teachers, coaches, and managers struggle with how to motivate those that they mentor, and individuals struggle to find energy, mobilize effort and persist at the tasks of life and work.

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Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab Presents: World of Work

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Join a group of middle schools students as they try and figure out what kind of jobs will best suit them. Qualcomm has developed tools to help students identify their strengths, interests and values so they can start thinking about their future in the world of work.

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Connecting the World of Work to K12 Education with Ed Hidalgo (Career Talk Audio) - UCSD-TV - University of California Television

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As the Director of the World of Work initiative at the University of San Diego's Mobile Technology Learning Center, Ed Hidalgo leads the exploration of ways to connect the world of work to K12 education. His current role reflects many of the initiatives he drove at Qualcomm over the past decade where he worked in staffing/HR and government affairs.

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Teaching Channel: Individualized Real World Learning

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Teaching Channel: Individualized Real World Learning

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Internships and real-world experience can be part of the high school experience. See how one school provides deeper learning through internships while maintaining quality classroom learning.

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Teaching Channel: Personalized Learning Plans

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Teaching Channel: Personalized Learning Plans

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Deeper Learning Through Personalized Learning Plans

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With personalized learning plans, students gain a sense of responsibility with what they will learn. Through setting goals, making a plan and achieving goals, students go through a Deeper Learning experience that better prepares them for the real-world.

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Teaching Channel: PBL and the Self Regulated Learner

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Teaching Channel: PBL and the Self Regulated Learner

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Student Profile: A Self-Directed Learner

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Teaching students to be self-directed learners means giving them skills that will carry them well beyond high school. Watch a video showing how a project based learning experience elevated the engagement and accomplishments of one student.

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“Theorists are in agreement that students have the capability to make use of standards to direct their learning, to set their own goals and sub-goals ... achievement effects are mediated by the self-regulatory activities that students engage to reach learning and performance goals.” Boekaerts and Corno (2005) page 201

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Why build opportunities for Self Regulated Learning in your classroom?

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Why build opportunities for Self Regulated Learning in your classroom?

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“Self-appraisal leads to a deeper understanding of learning. Analyzing personal styles and strategies of learning, and comparing them with the strategies of others, increases personal awareness of different ways of learning.” Paris and Winograd (2003)

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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Metacognition:  Nurturing Self Awareness in the Classroom

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Metacognition:  Nurturing Self Awareness in the Classroom

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.