Category: Learnings

More on competency-based learning. Recently, EducationWeek published an article titled “What Educators Have to Say About Competency-Based Education.” The educators’ remarks are mixed – some positive, some negative – but overall one has to wonder, based upon these comments, if competency-based education can ever replace “seat time” within our traditional K-12 public school system. The…

When it comes to assessing learning, it’s time for competency-based outcomes to replace seat time. It’s time for young learners to demonstrate skills – like reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development – versus knowing the 50 states of the United States or the first 20 elements on the periodic chart. As EducationWeek reported recently (“It’s…

When I was a public school leader, I would get really excited when I came across an innovative learning organization, hoping that either my team or others could replicate the idea and scale it. Philadelphia’s Building 21 would have been one of those learning organizations. According to a recent article appearing in The 74, “From…

Part of the problem with getting schools to improve their performance is their leadership’s inability to confront the brutal facts, as leadership guru Jim Collins wrote in his book Good to Great years ago. Instead of being brutally honest with each other, too many traditional school leaders choose to ignore facts that, if confronted, would…

I’ve written about Elliot Washor before in this column. Washor co-founded the Big Picture Company and The Met in Providence, Rhode Island. Both enterprises are considered cutting edge when it comes to thinking about learning in a different way. Most recently, he has become known for his thinking about out of school learning. Washor recently…

Recently, The 74 asked Margaret Raymond to reflect on the past 40 years of American public education, after the release of the report “A Nation at Risk.” Raymond’s conclusory essay to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution’s “A Nation at Risk + 40” research initiative spotlights insights and analysis from experts, educators and policymakers as to what…

Why aren’t our kids better readers? Most people guess that poverty is the culprit, but as The 74’s Chad Aldeman reported last month, ”According to the latest national results, low-income fourth graders read an average of two to three grade levels below their higher-income peers.” “It’s not new that students in poverty have lower scores…

A sign that our current K-12 system is in trouble is the fact that 1 million students who were enrolled in that system before the pandemic have disappeared. Oh, they’re still alive and kicking, but they aren’t seated in the schools they were in for the 2019-2020 school year. It’s difficult to know if those…

Another day. Another story about a school closure. This one comes from Vermont and was covered by Vermont Digger. This story begins: “On a cold, gray Saturday in March, about a third of all the people living in Windham [Vermont] crammed into the town’s more than 220-year-old white clapboard meetinghouse. One item in particular had…

Play has always been under-rated when it comes to learning, especially in this country. In the U.S., it seems like our children are either playing or learning. Surely, they can’t be doing both! The reality is that, as many countries around the world already realize, children learn deeply during play. The problem today is that…