FYI, a visiting group from PHP Bern will be on campus next Wednesday September 17th to see what 1-to-1 schooling looks like. As in previous years please welcome them into your classrooms during B block. The groups will be lead by student leaders, and be reminded to not stay too long or enter as large groups.
Thanks for your help!
If you wish to be part of the panel discussion about 1-to-1 school during lunch in the theater please let me know.
Once again, MIT Media Lab will offer a MOOC titled Learning Creative Learning. This massive open online course is full of fantastic resources about engagement, passion driven learning and tinkering.
If MOOC’s aren’t for you but you would like to explore a little more about this style of learning check out this TED talk by Gever Tulley: Life lessons through tinkering founder of tinkering school.
http://embed.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html
Check out this month’s Globe magazine section Focus Error Culture (starting on page 18) with articles like Failure allowed, To error is valuable, Dropping out is not the end of the world, Smarter through failure & Learning from mistakes.
A recent article in BBC magazine by Lucy Wallis, Is it good for people to fail occasionally? is yet another example of the rewards from culturally shifting towards learning from failure.
“There’s no point in failing and then dealing with it by pretending it didn’t happen, or blaming someone else, that would be a wasted opportunity to learn more about yourself and perhaps to identify gaps in your skills, experiences or qualifications. Once you’ve identified the learning you can then take action to make a difference.”
The article also mentions a week long event at Wimbledon High School focused on getting students comfortable with learning from failure. Here is what students, parents and faculty from Wimbledon had to say after their Failure Week.
In a recent NYTimes article (thanks for this one Amy) Thomas Friedman points out what may companies are looking for in future employees and it’s not degrees.
The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn.
https://vine.co/v/Mmt5IzWrXb0/embed/simple//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js
The next time you are designing an assessment ask yourself, could a student using Google glass or a watch like the one above leverage what can access to take their learning deeper or just in the old school sense “cheat?”
by Overbaugh & Schultz
Nice to know
On Monday, February 17th we will kick off our PD days with a Failure Festival. Below are a few pieces of information to help shape your thinking before the event. More details will be provided in the Friday Focus.
What is a Failure Festival?
An event where individuals share a problem that failed in a safe, supportive and learning focused environment.
How to participate:
What was the project?
What were you trying to do?
What was the fail/where did it go wrong?
What would you do differently next time (or never again!)?
What lessons can be learned?
FAIL_slam format:
Presentations should be no longer than 10 minutes to maximize learning and promote actionable lessons that can be embedded into future work. Each group will have a moderator.
Learn more about celebrating failure:
Tomorrow, September 18th the Upper School will be hosting an Open House with participants from the PHP Bern and a variety of international schools from Europe. B and D block are designated as “open” time where visitors will be in groups and lead around the school. Please welcome our visitors. If you are not teaching during B or D block, this is a great opportunity to see what your colleagues are up to and visit classrooms during this time.
Here is the outline for the visit in case you are interested.
Tech Tuesday 