Category: Learnings

I recently read another article stressing the importance of media literacy as an essential skill young learners must have moving through the 21st century. Nate Noorlander, a teacher since 2012, writes in a recent EducationWeek post: “You can read this essay in a number of ways.” “You might skim it and forget it – the…

This past July, ASCD, a national curriculum organization, dedicated their monthly publication, EL, to strategies addressing student absenteeism and disconnection, with a focus on engaging learning experiences and open communication with families. ASCD’s Editor-in-Chief Sarah McKibben introduces the issue with this short article: “’Can we talk about chronic absenteeism?’ This title of a recent Reddit…

Read these words and think about what “might be” when it comes to creating a new system of learning for our kids: “So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with…

Opening day for traditional K-12 campuses is right around the corner. Some schools have already started. The opening of a school year is a good time to examine the importance of motivation when it comes to making young learners smarter and stronger. Recently, EducationWeek bundled a group of articles together suggesting how teachers inside traditional…

I’m back. I used to be a big fan of “grit,” and how important it was to a young learner’s ability to become smarter and stronger. Angela Duckworth, a professor at The University of Pennsylvania, first termed the phrase “grit” back in the 2010’s, referring to a learner’s ability to persevere and become passionate about…

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth. Baldwin was an African-American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. In an article written in October of 1963, Baldwin addressed the challenges of education to prepare to grapple with the myths and realities of U.S. history. An excerpt of this article follows: “I began…

How do you get young learners smarter and stronger when places called schools aren’t available? Back at the turn of the century, in the year 1999, an Indian software engineer named  Sugata Mitra realized that there was no way India was ever going to build enough brick and mortar schools to meet the needs of…

Americans love their brick and mortar schools. It’s part of the traditional public education system. But in other parts of the world, leaders have learned to adapt to their environments by creating learning spaces anywhere and everywhere. Most recently, Getting Smart’s Nate McClennen sat down with Mohammed Rezwan, who has spent over 20 years increasing…

There are millions of kids in the world who do not go to brick and mortar schools (think of rural India and China). Instead, these young learners work on their reading, writing, and problem-solving skills wherever they can find a place to learn. Instead of thinking of these global microschools as strange, like many Americans…