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“Nursery Fields Forever” Reconnects Early Childhood Education with Nature — Over Grow The System. How Finland broke every rule — and created a top school system. Spend five minutes in Jussi Hietava’s fourth-grade math class in remote, rural Finland, and you may learn all you need to know about education reform – if you want results, try doing the opposite of what American “education reformers” think we should do in classrooms.

How Finland broke every rule — and created a top school system

Instead of control, competition, stress, standardized testing, screen-based schools and loosened teacher qualifications, try warmth, collaboration, and highly professionalized, teacher-led encouragement and assessment. Is year 9 the worst school year for students and teachers? Should people get paid more to be head of year 9?

Is year 9 the worst school year for students and teachers?

How Parents And Teachers Can Nurture The 'Quiet Power' Of Introverts : NPR Ed. When Susan Cain wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking in 2012, it was a big success.

How Parents And Teachers Can Nurture The 'Quiet Power' Of Introverts : NPR Ed

The book made the cover of Time magazine, spent weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list and was the subject of one of the most-watched TED Talks, with more than 13 million views. From that grew The Quiet Revolution, a company Cain co-founded that continues to produce and share content about, and for, introverts. The site offers an online training course for parents and stories submitted by readers about being introverted. Rich school gets richer, poor schools get poorer. Poor school: Government funding is up six per cent at Noble Park Secondary College.

Rich school gets richer, poor schools get poorer

Junior school captains (from left) Laiba, Bryce, Huy and Kavika. Photo: Penny Stephens Some of Victoria's wealthiest private schools have reaped huge government funding increases, while disadvantaged public schools have been hit with cuts. The average public funding of some of Victoria's most elite private schools increased at eight times the rate of the neediest public schools, a new analysis reveals. Korowa Anglican Girls' Schools has emerged as one of the biggest winners of Australia's "incoherent and unfair" funding system, according to an analysis of the most recent My School data by Trevor Cobbold, a former Productivity Commission economist and convenor of public education lobby group Save Our Schools.

Rich school: Government funding is up 38 per cent at Korowa Girls School in Glen Iris. Public funding per student at Korowa increased by 38 per cent over this time. This is What Happens When Kids’ Creative Strengths Are Leveraged. 82 2Share Synopsis More than ever today, it is essential that we look at all students individually to try to understand their strengths, abilities, interests, and motivations.

This is What Happens When Kids’ Creative Strengths Are Leveraged

“Motivating, inspiring, and hard.” These are the words that my former student turned entrepreneur, Nicolas LeBrock, used to describe his recent venture into fashion design. Education Week. Why kids — now more than ever — need to learn philosophy. Yes, philosophy. Vatican City, Vatican Museum, Vatican Palace, Room of the Segnature.

Why kids — now more than ever — need to learn philosophy. Yes, philosophy.

A group of philosophers and scholars within a building. (Getty Images) We hear a lot about things kids “must” learn. Indeed, President Obama just announced he was going to ask Congress for $4 billion to fund an initiative to bring computer science to more students. The Truth about School. Kathy Margolis: Teacher’s Facebook post on why she quit goes viral. Teacher Kathy Margolis says she fears for the mental health of her colleagues and their students.

Kathy Margolis: Teacher’s Facebook post on why she quit goes viral

The educational strategy that’s turning students into unimaginative robots. Science and math dominate the contemporary educational landscape in the United States.

The educational strategy that’s turning students into unimaginative robots

Almost everyone agrees that the country needs to shape workers with the skills to combat global problems like climate change, cancer and ailing infrastructures. There’s just one problem: a single-minded emphasis on STEM risks turning our young people into robots. Our intense focus on science, engineering, technology and math may have forced these subjects into a vacuum rather than tying them together with the humanities, according to Jamie Gillooly, a biology professor at the University of Florida. What Will Education Look Like in a More Open Future? By David Price In my book, OPEN: How We’ll Work, Live And Learn In The Future, I argue that a relentless focus upon high-stakes accountability — through student testing and teacher evaluation — has done little to improve outcomes, and has de-professionalized and demoralized teachers.

What Will Education Look Like in a More Open Future?

Penn & Teller's Teller on How to Be an Effective Teacher. Education, at its most engaging, is performance art.

Penn & Teller's Teller on How to Be an Effective Teacher

From the moment a teacher steps into the classroom, students look to him or her to set the tone and course of study for everyone, from the most enthusiastic to the most apathetic students. Even teachers who have moved away from the traditional lecture format, toward more learner autonomy-supportive approaches such as project-based and peer-to-peer learning, still need to engage students in the process, and serve as a vital conduit between learner and subject matter.

Teachers are seldom trained in the performance aspect of teaching, however, and given that every American classroom contains at least one bored, reluctant, or frustrated student, engagement through performance may just be the most important skill in a teacher’s bag of tricks. I asked Teller, a former Latin teacher and the silent half of the magical partnership known as Penn & Teller, about his years as an educator, and the role performance played in his teaching. If children lose contact with nature they won't fight for it. 'One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow". That radical green pressure group PriceWaterhouseCoopers warns that even if the present rate of global decarbonisation were to double, we would still be on course for 6C of warming by the end of the century. Confining the rise to 2C requires a sixfold reduction in carbon intensity: far beyond the scope of current policies. Don't Underestimate The Power of OER - Reinventing K-12 Learning.

Why Kids Need to Move, Touch and Experience to Learn. When students use their bodies in the learning process, it can have a big effect, even if it seems silly or unconnected to the learning goal at hand. Researchers have found that when students use their bodies while doing mathematical storytelling (like with word problems, for example), it changes the way they think about math. Combatting a Culture of Learned Helplessness.

I led a training last week on blended learning and asked teachers to brainstorm the biggest challenges they face in the classroom. Why Slowing Down Stimuli to Real Time Helps a Child’s Brain. By Eric Westervelt, NPR Our “Tools of the Trade” series is taking a look at some of the iconic objects that form a vital part of our educational lives. For an upcoming piece, I’m reporting on how young children learn through that most basic of preschool education tools: simple wooden blocks. Dr. We must move education from an age of confusion to ambition. In one sense a responsible democratic government has every right to ask schools to deliver the world.

And in an ideal world, schools would be only too happy to respond. But even if allowance was made for context, modern governments have so exceeded what is reasonable that Alan Bennett was on the money in criticising it as having “close to a totalitarian attitude”. After the second world war an educational ambition for Britain was set based on RA Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which settled the respective roles of central government, local government (through local education authorities (LEAs)), churches and schools. How to Reinvent Project Based Learning to Be More Meaningful. Flip This: Bloom’s Taxonomy Should Start with Creating. Chris Davis, Powerful Learning Practice LLC. Do We Have to Send Our Kid to a Bad Public School? Photo. Times tables 'to be tested by age 11' How do Unschoolers Turn Out? Peter Gray has studied how learning happens without any academic requirements at a democratic school. The Boston College research professor also wrote about the long history and benefits of age-mixed, self-directed education in his book Free to Learn.

When School Leaders Empower Teachers, Better Ideas Emerge. Teachers are increasingly being pushed into new roles as their ability to connect online opens up new opportunities. How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning. Parents Wonder: Why So Much Homework? What Happens When Homes Have No Books. 52,000 students and 1,050 classrooms: inside the world's largest school. 'How can students become independent learners if their teachers are held responsible for all their results?' 'We are entering educational death row. Human bodies cannot sustain the impact of teaching in its current form' Sir Ken Robinson: Creativity Is In Everything, Especially Teaching. Place-Based Learning: Using Your Location as a Classroom. Secret Teacher: even on maternity leave, teaching doesn't stop.

When Schools Resemble Prisons. A Curriculum Staple: Reading Aloud to Teens. Why We Should Teach Less, Not More. Small Changes in Teaching: The Minutes Before Class. Amazon.co. Secret Teacher: I can't bear Ofsted so I'm going back to teach in Australia. How to Help Kids Get on Track—and Stay There: Eight Tips Revealed! No Cookies. How Do Academically Gifted Students Spend Their Time and Why Does That Matter?

How to Teach in an Age of Distraction. These kids were geniuses — they were just too poor for anyone to discover them. How to teach a young introvert. Ramsey Musallam: 3 rules to spark learning. What’s Going on Inside the Brain Of A Curious Child? 10 Provocative Quotes from Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" The Dot: Sparking Creativity in Classrooms Worldwide. Produce Thinkers, Not Docile Workers. Next Time Someone Mocks Teachers For Making Less Money, Show Them This. Politics and The Future of Education.