CASEL promotes the development of five interrelated sets of cognitive, affective, and behavioral competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. The result: A shift from being  predominantly controlled by external factors to acting with internalized beliefs and values, caring and concern for others, making good decisions, and taking responsibility for one’s choices and behaviors.

He asks why would a decision about entering kindergarten hinge on age. A student born one minute before midnight on the cutoff date may be far ahead of the student born one minute after the cutoff date. Glines details numerous instances of such incongruities and offers remedies.

Using the war metaphor, he calls upon all of us to refuse continuation of learning atrocities. This is a powerful piece by one of the world’s leading educational thinkers and practitioners.

A report recently released outlines eight strengths of character that can helpboth students and schools achieve ethical and productive futures.

http://www.cortland.edu/character/highschool/chapters/SnGReport.pdf

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-25-senioryear25foronline_st_N.htm

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/a-diploma-in-10th-grade/

http://www.nga.org/Files/pdf/0910ACHIEVINGGRADUATION.PDF

http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?knlgAreaID=450020&subsecID=900201&contentID=254746

Some say tests can’t assess important characteristics such as responsibility, autonomy, engagement, affiliation, hope and other aspects of major school outcomes. For a huge sample of tests see Compendium of Assessment and Research Tools and the newly developed Hope Survey (see products).

The first article deals with the effects of technology on students throughout their education. Lenovo to Research Tech’s Effect on Learning: Global Education Research project will study how technology affects education in and after school, from kindergarten through higher education.

Another article Google Wave has Great Potential for Education, a new online collaborative tool combines eMail, instant messaging, and file sharing in a dynamic environment and outlines how Google is moving further into communicating and collaborating on the web.

A recent US Dept. of Education report, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning finds that students learn more with online learning and even more with blended programs (both classroom and online) in elementary, secondary and higher education. The differences are not great but consistent and promising.

Cell phones appear to have considerable potential for learning. Early adopters combine the power of cell phones, social networks, websites and software. Student engagement and motivation increased. This early in the movement approach is generating excitment over the possiblities. Lift the Cell Phone Ban describes dealing with both the distraction factor and the interest.

Supported by IALA, this comprehensive 161 page paper aims at persuading American urban public classrooms and schools to become more democratic. In doing so, he encourages public schools to enter solidly into the 21st century by questioning, rethinking and providing alternatives to 20th century concepts particularly for under-served children and youth.

Brady is one of the most thoughtful and clear educators writing today. His article appeared in Educational Leadership (Feb., 2008, pp 54-67). The issue contains other thoughtful articles calling for schools to ramp up thinking skills–in my view, a terrific objective but unlikely to be achieved in today’s environment.

This image and the text comes from an English website Kathy Sierra’s blog.
“If you studied math, science, or engineering at a four-year college in the US, much of what you learned is useless, forgotten, or obsolete. All that money, all that time, all that wasted talent. If all we lost were a few years, no big deal. But the really scary part is that we never learned what matters most to true experts in math, science, and engineering. We never really learned how to DO math, science, and engineering.

“Toward the end of his life, legendary mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked 100 of the top scientists of his time how they did whatever it was that they did (math, physics, etc.) Hadamard’s survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work. The majority of his contemporaries apparently claimed that using the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work was NOT how they did their work. These were simply the tools they used to communicate it. What they used to do the works was much… fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation (Einstein talked of a kinesthetic element). Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors.

“We are in sooooo much trouble.

“What experts use to do their work are the things we don’t teach. We focus almost exclusively on how to talk about the work. Obviously this doesn’t mean nobody learns to do it… we have plenty of expert engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who become great either in spite of faulty teaching or because they lucked out and had excellent, clueful instructors and mentors. But we also hear more and more teachers, experts, and employers railing against the sorry state of our advanced technical educations today. The problem is, many of these same teachers, experts, and employers have a tough time articulating what’s wrong, let alone how to fix it.

“And what do we do to try and improve things? We just do MORE of what’s wrong. We redouble our efforts. We drill and test students even harder in facts and rote memorization. We work and test them even harder on using the tools for communication (e.g. code) rather than the tools for thought (e.g. intuition, visualization, etc.)

“Our educational institutions–at every level–need drastic changes or we’re all screwed. The generation of students we’re turning out today need skills nobody really cared about 50, 40, even 20 years ago. Where we used to prepare students for a “job for life”, now we must prepare students to be jobless. We must prepare them to think fast, learn faster, and unlearn even faster (“yes, that drug was the appropriate way to treat the XYZ disease, but that was so last week. THIS week we now realize it’ll kill you.”)

“The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning.

“Three of the many people who’ve been leading the charge on this are Roger Schank, Dan Pink (his “Whole New Mind” book is a must-read), and computing/learning guru Alan Kay. One of my favorite Alan Kay notions is something like this, “If you want to be a better programmer, take up the violin.” He claims that the more time he spends playing music, the fresher and better his approaches to engineering become. He’s an outspoken critic of engineering students focusing too early in their education, because he believes that with a more liberal arts education, you get metaphors and ways of thinking and seeing that are vital to your later engineering work.

“I’ll end this with two quotes:

From Jason Fried:
“Hire curious people. Even if they don’t have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything.”

“And from Jacques Hadamard:
” Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition.”

“If intuition is the heart of what true experts do, then shouldn’t we be trying to teach that? Or at the least, stop stifling and dissing it? And yes, I do believe that we can teach and inspire all those fuzzy things including intuition and even curiosity. But we are running out of time.

“[UPDATE: Martin Polley brought up the TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson, and if you haven't seen it already--I urge you to check it out ASAP!

"Mark Fowler was surprised that I didn't bring up the book What the Best College Teachers Do, and I can't believe I left it out of the post. I believe it is the single best book on helping someone learn. When we had our most recent author's bootcamp, it was the one book we gave to all attendees. Thanks Mark.

"I highly recommend the comments to this post -- they're insightful on all sides, agreement and disagreement and all points in between. And before you tell me I'm advocating for throwing out fundamentals, memorization, facts, logic, etc... PLEASE look again at my venn diagram ; ) This is about brain balance, and addressing much more of the brain than just the narrow channels that are the parts of the brain that actually "talk." ]

Posted by Kathy Sierra on November 2, 2006 | Permalink

I read both books years ago and was inspired by the paradigm shift this approach represented for treating delinquent and expelled students. I was equally dismayed by the lack of interest by special education staff when I recommended the books. The article appeared in a highly recommended journal, Reclaiming Children and Youth (spring, 2007) published by Crisis Prevention Institute which is dedicated to

The implications of these ideas for education and society mean a shift in the conventional paradigm about the roles for youth in our culture. Epstein has further detailed these ideas in his new book, The Case against Adolescence. Epstein writes lucidly and documents thoroughly. His ideas are highly recommended as foundational to rethinking schooling and certainly for offering educational alternatives!

Epstein does not stand alone on this issue. Dr. Ruthanne Kurth Schai in an earlier marvelous article, The Roles of Youth in Society: a Reconceptualization (Educational Forum, 52(2): 113-132, 1988) said much the same thing, also with careful documentation. From her website, click on Scholarship and scroll down to the article.