Because Play Matters - Game Design Portfolio for Scott Nicholson. Because Play Matters - Blog. 10 Teenage Girls Who Have Changed The World. Reading for emotional intelligence — Joanne Jacobs. Crowdfunding real-life, citywide choose-your-own-adventure stories. Sean Williams sez, "Best-sellers and award-winners Isobelle Carmody, Robert Shearman, Marianne De Pierres, Kim Wilkins, Mark Leslie, Mindy Klasky, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and many, many others, including me, have signed up to write choose-your-own-adventure stories that will play out in real life, in real cities via smartphones and QR codes. Rewards include guided tours, printed versions, tuckerizations, author-led adventures in their cities, and even the chance to have a CYOA written in a town of your choice, in person. " They're trying to raise AUD26,000. At AUD10, you get a pair of the adventures as PDFs. Rather than reading the CYOA in printed book form, imagining every detail, we will be creating maps so you can read your story in the location the adventure is happening.
Choose Your Adventure! The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids. New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue for parents is one of credibility. “Praise is important, but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing—some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well. Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. In one, students are given two puzzle tests. In another, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another school—they’ll never meet these students and don’t know their names.
Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. My son, Luke, is in kindergarten. Generation Gap. Learning through game-making–what the research says and doesn’t say. When we talk about learning and games, we usually mean students playing games that someone else has made up. But the process of constructing a game has its own potential benefits. Game-making represents an active and creative, rather than more passive, approach to technology. It’s a core practice of constructionism, the learning theory championed at MIT’s Media Lab that focuses on learners building their own relationship to knowledge. The research on this new topic is thin so far. Sample sizes are small, and what I found most disappointing in a quick review, is that researchers often don’t collect many, multidimensional measurements of outcomes instead relying on just a few, qualitative measures. A student-designed game from the National Cheng Kung University study. Games are currently being investigated as a way to increase engagement, mastery of topics, and higher-order thinking skills. 1) Game-making and critical thinking, achievement and concentration.
What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools? Finland’s education expert Pasi Sahlberg Finland’s Pasi Sahlberg is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?” In this piece he writes about whether the emphasis that American school reformers put on “teacher effectiveness” is really the best approach to improving student achievement. He is director general of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation and has served the Finnish government in various positions and worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. He has also been an adviser for numerous governments internationally about education policies and reforms, and is an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. By Pasi Sahlberg In the United States, for example, there are more than 1,500 different teacher-preparation programs.
For me the latter is right. Writers who don't read - Imprint. At the New Yorker Book Bench Macy Halford recently posed an important question: “What is wanting to write without wanting to read like? It’s imperative that we figure it out, because Giraldi’s right: It’s both crazy and prevalent among budding writers.” She was echoing a question asked by debut novelist William Giraldi who in the course of teaching writing at Boston University has noticed a growing number of aspiring writers disinclined to read.
This unfortunate trend inspired an open-ended analogy: Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to ____ without wanting to ____. The New Yorker commenterati — unsurprisingly, a clever bunch — came up with some great analogies but none of them touched on the bigger question: How can anyone claim to be interested in writing without being serious about reading? I have always loved to read. Reading, on the other hand, is not a struggle. As a kid I also wrote. Books about writers trying to write have been around for a long time. Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places.
It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame. So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete.
Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring. Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. Diana Laufenberg: How to learn? From mistakes. JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure. "We Prepare Children to Learn How to Learn" Fascinating piece in Smithsonian this month on the “success” of Finnish schools.
And I put “success” in quotes because for most American observers, Finland’s school system works because they score near the top on PISA tests. When you read the article, however, you see that test scores have little to do with it from a Finnish perspective. There’s a lot to learn from what the Finns do, but more than anything, it’s an attitude toward learning that makes the difference.
They’ll do “whatever it takes” to help a child be successful, whether that’s extra time, providing nourishing food and health care, or making play a focal point of the school day. School isn’t high stakes; as one principal said, “We are interested in what will become of them in life,” which is why 43 percent of Finnish kids go to vocational high schools and why there’s only one test in their senior years that they have to take.
But here are the three snips that really jumped out at me. What a concept, right? And this: The Role of Mistakes in the Classroom. As the school doors swing open to welcome the start of another year, both teachers and students will have goals: to inspire a class, to learn new things, to get good grades. What probably won't be on that list is to make a mistake -- in fact many. But it should be. Why? Because we're raising a generation of children -- primarily in affluent, high-achieving districts -- who are terrified of blundering. Of failing. Of even sitting with the discomfort of not knowing something for a few minutes. If students are afraid of mistakes, then they're afraid of trying something new, of being creative, of thinking in a different way.
They're as one teacher told me, "victims of excellence. " Why is this? I realize that parents play a crucial role in how their children view mistakes -- and I've written about that -- but here, I'm focusing on educators. Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has conducted groundbreaking research in this area. But it can be done. It's a big task. What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric.
He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and sweep of graying hair, makes you wonder, when you first meet him, if he might have played sax in a ska band in the ’80s. (The English accent helps.) He is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference, dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary, giving her the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters sat and remodeling the small outer reception area into his own open-concept work space, its walls covered with whiteboard paint on which he sketches ideas and slogans. Levin had believed in the importance of character since KIPP’s inception.
For Levin, the next step was clear. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity.