Mindshift : Ideas for Child Centred Learning
How to Incubate Creativity in School Through Making and Discovery
10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom
How to Incubate Creativity in School Through Making and Discovery
10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom
Let the children learn; you can't do it for them!
Diana Laufenberg shares three surprising things she has learned about teaching — including a key insight about learning from mistakes.
Diana Laufenberg shares three surprising things she has learned about teaching — including a key insight about learning from mistakes.
Infosavvy21
Making Tomorrow HappenOur mission is to make a difference in lives of children by helping transform how teachers teach and how learners learn.
Making Tomorrow HappenOur mission is to make a difference in lives of children by helping transform how teachers teach and how learners learn.
The 9 Learning Essentials Every Child Needs
1. Intrapersonal Skills
Intra-personal Skills are internal skills, perceptions and attitudes that occur within a person’s own mind. Art Costa called these the habits of mind. Skills that individuals use to work through real world situations. Skills that allow individuals to respond using awareness, thought, and intentional strategy in order to gain positive outcomes.
Examples of intra-personal skills include such things as self-esteem, open mindedness, being aware of your own thinking, the ability to learn, being able to understand and manage your own emotions, self-confidence, self-discipline, self-motivation, being able to overcome boredom, being patient, being a self starter, being able to take initiative, working independently, being persistent, having a positive attitude, and being a good manager of time, to name but a few.
Intra-personal Skills can be learned in the same way that we learn math and language skills. And they are the absolute foundation of everyday life. The problem is that these skills aren’t typically introduced to students in any kind of organized manner.
16 Habits of Mind
16 Strategies for integrating habits of mind in the classroom
Resilience: The Other 21st Century Skills
2. Interpersonal Skills
One of the vital differences between intra-personal and interpersonal communication is that Intra-personal skills are inward focused, whereas interpersonal skills are outward focused. Interpersonal abilities have to do with understanding and comprehending external situations and being able to communicate with people. Interpersonal Skills are the life skills we have to use every day to communicate and interact with other people, both individually and in groups.
Interpersonal skills include such things as non-verbal communication, being able to conduct a conversation, being able to give positive feedback, the ability to listen, being able to persuade, debate, convince, sell, or defend a position, the ability to ask questions, being able to communicate respectfully, social and cultural awareness, being able to accept criticism, and personal assertiveness. Having a well-developed repertoire of interpersonal skills allows individuals to handle challenging situations more effectively.
Teaching Your Students How to Have a Conversation
Say What? 5 Ways to Get Students to Listen
Skills You Need: Assertiveness - An Introduction
70 Ways to Make Others Feel Special
3. Independent Problem Solving Skills
Independent Problem Solving involves students learning a structured mental process that will allow them to independently solve complex problems in real-time. The world is in desperate need of analytical thinkers who are able to compare, contrast, evaluate, synthesize, and apply their analyses in order to answer difficult questions or solve problems in real time – independently without instruction or supervision. In other words, people who can the higher order thinking skills that we talk about all the time. Independent Problem Solving requires students to learn clear steps – unconscious habits of mind that can be explained, learned, practiced, applied, internalized and most importantly, be improved upon over time. This model originally known as the 4 D’s (but now expanded to 6 D’s – Define, Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver, and Debrief), was originally developed by Ted McCain back in the 1980‘s.
Describing the process is too much to do in such a brief overview but, in general, the D’s parallel the structured mental process of Scientific Method, the Writing Process, or what videographers do in creating film. Independent Problem Solving is a process that must be embedded into every subject, at every grade level – and the responsibility of every teacher.
60 Ways To Help Students Think For Themselves
Team Building Activities That Support Maker Education, STEM, and STEAM
Questioning, Challenge & Engagement
Challenge Based Learning
4. Interdependent Collaboration Skills
Being able to work with others on a project has always been an important skill. Collaboration is based on the idea that the power of we is greater than the power of me. In the fast-paced, high pressure, online world of today, individuals and businesses must use every competitive advantage available to them. Today, even competitors are collaborating with each other when it is mutually beneficial. With the development of global online communications and shared productivity tools such as Skype, Go-To-Meeting and Google Docs, being able to collaborate both physically and virtually has become an essential skill for all.
Interdependent Collaboration skills include such things as planning and facilitation skills, being able to organize functional teams with members who complement one another, the ability to take on a role within a group, being able to criticize ideas without criticizing individuals, negotiating within a team, group brainstorming, group problem solving, eliciting and listening to feedback, and taking responsibility for designated tasks
Today digital online tools have greatly expanded the scope of collaboration. Collaboration skills can now be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration happens in real-time, where collaborative partners are simultaneously working and communicating as they work. Online collaborative tools now mean that this real time collaboration can also take place with virtual partners who are not physically in the same place. Asynchronous collaboration happens where partners are working and communicating using collaborative software, but they’re not necessarily communicating at the same time.
10 Collaborative Technology Projects Your Students Will Love
The Jigsaw Classroom: A Cooperative Learning Technique That Works
Facilitating Collaborative Learning: 20 Things You Need to Know From the Pros
20 Tips On How To Work With Students Who Have a Hard Time Collaborating
5. Information Investigation Skills
We don’t want students who simply consume and regurgitate theoretical knowledge without questioning and validating the reliability of what they have read or seen. Rather, we want students who can differentiate between reliable and unreliable information sources in order to determine the credibility of a wide range of digital and non-digital materials.
We want students to be information investigators who are able to apply a structured mental process we call the 5A’s (Ask, Access, Analyze/Authenticate, Apply, Assess) to solve information problems. Once again, describing the process is way too much to do in such a brief overview as this, but suffice it to say that the 5A’s is a structured mental process for being able to answer any information problem.
6. Information Communication Skills
This is a message that everyone reading this needs to hear. The world has moved beyond text. Visual communication through graphic design or presentation became the standard quite some time ago – it’s a given. But now today the world has moved even further. Kids today are growing up in the YouTube era. We have moved beyond still images to a new video standard. Messages are being constructed using an audiovisual standard that not only requires an understanding of graphic design but also of video production tools that as little as 10 years ago cost millions of dollars to purchase are now free or inexpensive.
They have allowed students to move from being consumers of media to prosumers of media where they not onlyconsume but produce media. In an increasingly visual world, visual communication design must be an everyday part of the curriculum at every grade level and in every subject. Students must be able to communicate as effectively in multimedia formats as we, the older generations were taught to communicate with text and speech. Every student and every teacher needs to know how modern readers read, they need to understand the principles of graphical design and typography, the principles of color use, the principles of photo, the principles of sound production and the principles of video composition as well as how to use this knowledge to effectively communicate information to others. Information Communication skills are absolutely foundational in a modern world.
7. Imagination Creativity Skills
The next I is Imagination Creativity. Imagination Creativity skills are about how you imaginatively communicate ideas. For example, when we were growing up, if we wanted to make a comment about race relations, the standard way of communicating this was through words in the form of an essay. But for many people, this was stifling. It put them in a straight jacket because there are so many other ways to creatively communicate your thoughts on race relations to be limited to a single form.
The school system has a very narrow academic focus that does not acknowledge the wide spectrum of possible ways of communicating. For example, in addition to writing an essay, you could also write a song, create a poster, write a play, short story or poem, paint a picture, or create a sculpture – all of these alternative modes of communication could greatly enhance how your message is conveyed.
Further, Imagination Creativity is how you can add meaning through design. For example, it’s what Apple does with the exterior shape of their technology, or what fast food restaurants do this with the creative packaging and presentation of hamburgers and pizza, or what Levis does with the style of their clothing, and Ford does with the styling of their cars and trucks. imagination creativity is what changes people’s perceptions of products. For example, there are lots of companies that make computers, but only one company that makes Apple computers.
Imagination Creativity goes even further than this. It is also about creating beauty and value purely from its shape and form. This is why people buy a sculpture or piece of art – this is beauty for beauty’s sake. It doesn’t have to serve a function – its value can come purely from its shape, its colour, its texture or its sound. Imagination Creativity involve two processes: conceiving, then producing. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. To be imaginatively creative. you need to both generate an idea as well as find a creative ways to communicate that idea.
8. Innovation Creativity Skills
While imagination creativity deals with the form of something, innovation creativity deals with its function. The whole idea of innovation is that we are going to do something that is improved or new. Many people think that the ability to innovate is genetic – that some people can do it and others can’t – this is patently untrue.
Have you ever owned a product and thought that if they just put some velcro here or a button there that it would work better. Have you ever seen people unloading a truck and thought that if they just did it a different way, it be so much better – that’s innovation skill. You’ve just thought of a way to improve a product or process – you may have even thought, “Hey, someone should invent something to do this or that.” That is true innovation of how to produce a new product or process.
The first key to sparking innovation is to have students examine products or processes they are familiar with. For example, have students consider how announcements are made, or how food is sold in the cafeteria, how chemicals are stored in the chemistry lab, how textbooks are distributed, how the bus schedule works, or how to teach fractions. Things from students’ everyday school life. Snd ask them to come up with alternatives. Ask them to come up with better ways to do things.
The important factor is not for their ideas to be successful, but to get them to start thinking about how they can improve something that already exists. This kind of thinking is greatly valued in the world today. Successful companies will tell you that they want their research and development departments to generate hundreds if not thousands of ideas because all they need is one great idea to make millions of dollars. The key here is that a culture of looking for new and improved ideas is encouraged because it’s ideas that make the world go round – that’s what sparks innovative thinking. The point here is that in getting students to generate innovative thinking that leads to original ideas for improved or new products and processes. That’s what Innovation Creativity is all about.
9. Internet Citizenship Skills
You wouldn’t give the keys to your car to a kid without first showing them how to drive, having them obtain a driver’s license, outlining your expectations and identifying the consequences for inappropriate actions. Yet we give kids access to the internet, smartphones and other digital devices without proper guidance and some of them inevitably do stupid things. Why in the world would we do that without first providing comprehensive internet education?
That’s what Internet Citizenship is all about. Internet Citizenship is about protecting yourself in the online world, protecting others in the online world, and protecting the work of others in the online world. Internet Citizenship is about a set of ever-changing social conventions about how people should act using digital technology. Internet Citizenship includes online etiquette, basic courtesy and privacy considerations; common rules and practices for email, messaging, web browsing, social networking as well as behavioral expectations for any online tool. As students grow as global citizens, they must develop a system of ethics and accountability that starts with the individual and expands to the global level.
Digital Citizenship: Resource Roundup
Helping Students Become Better Online Researchers
8 Tips and Tools for Teaching Digital Citizenship
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore
1. Intrapersonal Skills
Intra-personal Skills are internal skills, perceptions and attitudes that occur within a person’s own mind. Art Costa called these the habits of mind. Skills that individuals use to work through real world situations. Skills that allow individuals to respond using awareness, thought, and intentional strategy in order to gain positive outcomes.
Examples of intra-personal skills include such things as self-esteem, open mindedness, being aware of your own thinking, the ability to learn, being able to understand and manage your own emotions, self-confidence, self-discipline, self-motivation, being able to overcome boredom, being patient, being a self starter, being able to take initiative, working independently, being persistent, having a positive attitude, and being a good manager of time, to name but a few.
Intra-personal Skills can be learned in the same way that we learn math and language skills. And they are the absolute foundation of everyday life. The problem is that these skills aren’t typically introduced to students in any kind of organized manner.
16 Habits of Mind
16 Strategies for integrating habits of mind in the classroom
Resilience: The Other 21st Century Skills
2. Interpersonal Skills
One of the vital differences between intra-personal and interpersonal communication is that Intra-personal skills are inward focused, whereas interpersonal skills are outward focused. Interpersonal abilities have to do with understanding and comprehending external situations and being able to communicate with people. Interpersonal Skills are the life skills we have to use every day to communicate and interact with other people, both individually and in groups.
Interpersonal skills include such things as non-verbal communication, being able to conduct a conversation, being able to give positive feedback, the ability to listen, being able to persuade, debate, convince, sell, or defend a position, the ability to ask questions, being able to communicate respectfully, social and cultural awareness, being able to accept criticism, and personal assertiveness. Having a well-developed repertoire of interpersonal skills allows individuals to handle challenging situations more effectively.
Teaching Your Students How to Have a Conversation
Say What? 5 Ways to Get Students to Listen
Skills You Need: Assertiveness - An Introduction
70 Ways to Make Others Feel Special
3. Independent Problem Solving Skills
Independent Problem Solving involves students learning a structured mental process that will allow them to independently solve complex problems in real-time. The world is in desperate need of analytical thinkers who are able to compare, contrast, evaluate, synthesize, and apply their analyses in order to answer difficult questions or solve problems in real time – independently without instruction or supervision. In other words, people who can the higher order thinking skills that we talk about all the time. Independent Problem Solving requires students to learn clear steps – unconscious habits of mind that can be explained, learned, practiced, applied, internalized and most importantly, be improved upon over time. This model originally known as the 4 D’s (but now expanded to 6 D’s – Define, Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver, and Debrief), was originally developed by Ted McCain back in the 1980‘s.
Describing the process is too much to do in such a brief overview but, in general, the D’s parallel the structured mental process of Scientific Method, the Writing Process, or what videographers do in creating film. Independent Problem Solving is a process that must be embedded into every subject, at every grade level – and the responsibility of every teacher.
60 Ways To Help Students Think For Themselves
Team Building Activities That Support Maker Education, STEM, and STEAM
Questioning, Challenge & Engagement
Challenge Based Learning
4. Interdependent Collaboration Skills
Being able to work with others on a project has always been an important skill. Collaboration is based on the idea that the power of we is greater than the power of me. In the fast-paced, high pressure, online world of today, individuals and businesses must use every competitive advantage available to them. Today, even competitors are collaborating with each other when it is mutually beneficial. With the development of global online communications and shared productivity tools such as Skype, Go-To-Meeting and Google Docs, being able to collaborate both physically and virtually has become an essential skill for all.
Interdependent Collaboration skills include such things as planning and facilitation skills, being able to organize functional teams with members who complement one another, the ability to take on a role within a group, being able to criticize ideas without criticizing individuals, negotiating within a team, group brainstorming, group problem solving, eliciting and listening to feedback, and taking responsibility for designated tasks
Today digital online tools have greatly expanded the scope of collaboration. Collaboration skills can now be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous collaboration happens in real-time, where collaborative partners are simultaneously working and communicating as they work. Online collaborative tools now mean that this real time collaboration can also take place with virtual partners who are not physically in the same place. Asynchronous collaboration happens where partners are working and communicating using collaborative software, but they’re not necessarily communicating at the same time.
10 Collaborative Technology Projects Your Students Will Love
The Jigsaw Classroom: A Cooperative Learning Technique That Works
Facilitating Collaborative Learning: 20 Things You Need to Know From the Pros
20 Tips On How To Work With Students Who Have a Hard Time Collaborating
5. Information Investigation Skills
We don’t want students who simply consume and regurgitate theoretical knowledge without questioning and validating the reliability of what they have read or seen. Rather, we want students who can differentiate between reliable and unreliable information sources in order to determine the credibility of a wide range of digital and non-digital materials.
We want students to be information investigators who are able to apply a structured mental process we call the 5A’s (Ask, Access, Analyze/Authenticate, Apply, Assess) to solve information problems. Once again, describing the process is way too much to do in such a brief overview as this, but suffice it to say that the 5A’s is a structured mental process for being able to answer any information problem.
6. Information Communication Skills
This is a message that everyone reading this needs to hear. The world has moved beyond text. Visual communication through graphic design or presentation became the standard quite some time ago – it’s a given. But now today the world has moved even further. Kids today are growing up in the YouTube era. We have moved beyond still images to a new video standard. Messages are being constructed using an audiovisual standard that not only requires an understanding of graphic design but also of video production tools that as little as 10 years ago cost millions of dollars to purchase are now free or inexpensive.
They have allowed students to move from being consumers of media to prosumers of media where they not onlyconsume but produce media. In an increasingly visual world, visual communication design must be an everyday part of the curriculum at every grade level and in every subject. Students must be able to communicate as effectively in multimedia formats as we, the older generations were taught to communicate with text and speech. Every student and every teacher needs to know how modern readers read, they need to understand the principles of graphical design and typography, the principles of color use, the principles of photo, the principles of sound production and the principles of video composition as well as how to use this knowledge to effectively communicate information to others. Information Communication skills are absolutely foundational in a modern world.
7. Imagination Creativity Skills
The next I is Imagination Creativity. Imagination Creativity skills are about how you imaginatively communicate ideas. For example, when we were growing up, if we wanted to make a comment about race relations, the standard way of communicating this was through words in the form of an essay. But for many people, this was stifling. It put them in a straight jacket because there are so many other ways to creatively communicate your thoughts on race relations to be limited to a single form.
The school system has a very narrow academic focus that does not acknowledge the wide spectrum of possible ways of communicating. For example, in addition to writing an essay, you could also write a song, create a poster, write a play, short story or poem, paint a picture, or create a sculpture – all of these alternative modes of communication could greatly enhance how your message is conveyed.
Further, Imagination Creativity is how you can add meaning through design. For example, it’s what Apple does with the exterior shape of their technology, or what fast food restaurants do this with the creative packaging and presentation of hamburgers and pizza, or what Levis does with the style of their clothing, and Ford does with the styling of their cars and trucks. imagination creativity is what changes people’s perceptions of products. For example, there are lots of companies that make computers, but only one company that makes Apple computers.
Imagination Creativity goes even further than this. It is also about creating beauty and value purely from its shape and form. This is why people buy a sculpture or piece of art – this is beauty for beauty’s sake. It doesn’t have to serve a function – its value can come purely from its shape, its colour, its texture or its sound. Imagination Creativity involve two processes: conceiving, then producing. If you have ideas, but don’t act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. To be imaginatively creative. you need to both generate an idea as well as find a creative ways to communicate that idea.
8. Innovation Creativity Skills
While imagination creativity deals with the form of something, innovation creativity deals with its function. The whole idea of innovation is that we are going to do something that is improved or new. Many people think that the ability to innovate is genetic – that some people can do it and others can’t – this is patently untrue.
Have you ever owned a product and thought that if they just put some velcro here or a button there that it would work better. Have you ever seen people unloading a truck and thought that if they just did it a different way, it be so much better – that’s innovation skill. You’ve just thought of a way to improve a product or process – you may have even thought, “Hey, someone should invent something to do this or that.” That is true innovation of how to produce a new product or process.
The first key to sparking innovation is to have students examine products or processes they are familiar with. For example, have students consider how announcements are made, or how food is sold in the cafeteria, how chemicals are stored in the chemistry lab, how textbooks are distributed, how the bus schedule works, or how to teach fractions. Things from students’ everyday school life. Snd ask them to come up with alternatives. Ask them to come up with better ways to do things.
The important factor is not for their ideas to be successful, but to get them to start thinking about how they can improve something that already exists. This kind of thinking is greatly valued in the world today. Successful companies will tell you that they want their research and development departments to generate hundreds if not thousands of ideas because all they need is one great idea to make millions of dollars. The key here is that a culture of looking for new and improved ideas is encouraged because it’s ideas that make the world go round – that’s what sparks innovative thinking. The point here is that in getting students to generate innovative thinking that leads to original ideas for improved or new products and processes. That’s what Innovation Creativity is all about.
9. Internet Citizenship Skills
You wouldn’t give the keys to your car to a kid without first showing them how to drive, having them obtain a driver’s license, outlining your expectations and identifying the consequences for inappropriate actions. Yet we give kids access to the internet, smartphones and other digital devices without proper guidance and some of them inevitably do stupid things. Why in the world would we do that without first providing comprehensive internet education?
That’s what Internet Citizenship is all about. Internet Citizenship is about protecting yourself in the online world, protecting others in the online world, and protecting the work of others in the online world. Internet Citizenship is about a set of ever-changing social conventions about how people should act using digital technology. Internet Citizenship includes online etiquette, basic courtesy and privacy considerations; common rules and practices for email, messaging, web browsing, social networking as well as behavioral expectations for any online tool. As students grow as global citizens, they must develop a system of ethics and accountability that starts with the individual and expands to the global level.
Digital Citizenship: Resource Roundup
Helping Students Become Better Online Researchers
8 Tips and Tools for Teaching Digital Citizenship
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore
