A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
21st Century Skills
Blog Entries
Like everyone else, Rick O'Sullivan thinks we're all in for a rough ride--perhaps even through 2010. The noted economist recently spoke with me about the causes and consequences of our current economic unpleasantness.
According to O'Sullivan, the causes of the downturn lie deeper than corporate greed, individual excess and widespread financial ignorance. The decline in the numbers of young people--who buy houses and plump the workforce--has stalled two of the nation's major economic engines: the housing and financial markets. And this decline will have a profound impact on the work and finances of public schools.
So what are the major "growth markets" for American schools? Lifelong learning, world languages and education about other countries, O'Sullivan argues.
Listen to about five minutes of highlights from this interview:
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In his recent U.S. News & World Report commentary on twenty-first century skills, Andy Rotherham creates a bit of a straw man. He writes:
Schools, the 21st-century skills argument goes, focus too much on teaching content at the expense of essential new skills such as communication and collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, and concepts like media literacy and awareness.
Is that really how the argument goes? I'm not so sure. Most 21st-century skills advocates, including those in the Partnership for 21st-Century Skills (P21), see content knowledge and 21st-century skills as closely linked, even mutually dependent. ...
About this time each year, public schools face a "December dilemma": What to do about the religious content of the holidays? In a new interview, First Amendment scholar Charles Haynes offers some guidance on how public schools and school districts can avoid common pitfalls.
Of course, public schools should not turn their holiday assemblies into the kinds of devotional events one would expect to find in a church. Such assemblies violate the First Amendment. Nor should public schools banish all mention of religion. Attempts to create anodyne, content-free holiday events often anger religious parents and create more problems than they solve.
Instead, Haynes argues, public schools should use their holiday assemblies as opportunities to teach students about a variety of religious holidays. Such assemblies can help schools fulfill their mission to educate students about the diverse religions and cultures represented in their communities and the nation as a whole. Haynes is careful to point out that school districts can avoid all manner of heartache if they fully engage their communities in finding solutions to the December dilemma.
According to Haynes, the stakes of controversies over holiday assemblies are higher than many realize: "These kinds of controversies are really about...what kind of country we are going to be.... It's extremely important that public schools take the lead in helping us understand one another so we can live together as citizens in one country.
Download the entire interview here or listen to five minutes of interview highlights:
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The evidence is clear-and should be profoundly disturbing: we are failing to impart to today's students the information and skills they need to be responsible citizens. Yet only an educated citizenry can insist that our nation's commitment to liberty be upheld, and the promise of our Constitution fulfilled.
A recent survey by the National Constitution Center demonstrated that more American teenagers could name the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of government. Such statistics highlight a trend with troubling implications for the future. We must do a better job of educating young people to become active and informed participants in our democracy.
At least a partial answer lies in a paradigm shift in the way that civics is taught in our schools. A thorough civic education creates citizens who have a grasp of history and the fundamental processes of American democracy, an understanding and awareness of public and community issues, and the ability to think critically and enter into dialogue on those issues with others who have different perspectives.
Fixing How We Teach Civics: Assessing the Problems ...
Editor's Note: Ambassador Akbar S. Ahmed, a distinguished professor at American University, first submitted this posting to Public School Insights in March 2008. Ambassador Ahmed's comments on education about Islam are particularly timely during this presidential election, which has stirred ugly anti-Muslim sentiment in some quarters. We're pleased to publish this contribution by a man the BBC described as "the world's leading authority on contemporary Islam."
As a Muslim professor teaching on campus, nothing is more important to me than the education of the young generation, who represent the future of this planet. In the United States, the world's only superpower, knowledge of the rest of the world is often startlingly lacking, and misperception, intolerance, and hatred against "others," especially Muslims, are far too common. Popular media conceptions of Muslims as evil or Islam as an inherently violent doctrine are widespread. Prominent media figures and government officials have referred to Muslims as "ragheads" and "satan-worshippers." Muslims have been the target of cross-burnings and widespread intimidation. An atmosphere of fear dominates life in America and rabid Islamophobia runs just below, or indeed often above, the surface. It is in this environment that thousands of young Americans out of high school are sent to places like Iraq to fight wars in cultures they don't understand. ...
For parents, staff and students at the John Stanford International School, it's never too early to go global. The diverse public elementary school in Seattle holds classes in Japanese, Spanish and English, focuses on world cultures, and even allows some students to attend school in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. All the while, students maintain impressive scores on Washington State assessments. (See our full story about the John Stanford School here.)
I recently caught up with three teachers from John Stanford, Maria Buceta Miller, Margretta Murnane and JoAnne Uhlenkott. They shared some of the secrets of their success.
You can download the entire 20-minute conversation here. You can also read through a transcript of highlights below.
Alternatively, you can download any of the following excerpts from the full interview: ...
In the past few years, we've heard a great deal about the religious and ethnic intolerance tainting school curricula in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. We hear less about the growing push in countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to promote tolerance in schools.
I had the privilege of speaking with His Excellency Dr. Hanif Hassan, the UAE's Education Minister, when he was in Washington about two weeks ago. (For those of you who don't know, the UAE is a small, prosperous and progressive country on the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia.) ...
Like many others, I've been wondering what lessons educators and students can draw from the current financial crisis. Certainly, schools should do more to teach financial literacy: Americans could stand to know much more about credit. Schools could perhaps also do more to instill character in students: Financial wizards could have done much more to rein in their greed.
But the crisis offers a third--and I would argue larger--lesson, a real teachable moment: We're all in this together.
This fact seems lost on some people who readily understand the first two lessons. One generally thoughtful education blogger argued against big financial bailouts on the grounds that borrowers who lived well beyond their means should experience a chastening dose of failure. Many others have rejected bailouts on the grounds that Wall Street hucksters shouldn't profit from their sins. ...
In the Washington Post today, Jay Matthews offers a thought-provoking challenge to uncritical purveyors of critical thinking programs. "As your most-hated high school teacher often told you," Matthews writes, "you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject--facts, concepts and trends--before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good."
To some extent, Matthews is states the obvious. If you don't have anything to think about, critical thinking will likely elude you. Critical faculties atrophy when starved of content knowledge. (Unfortunately, too many low-income students must in fact survive on an academic starvation diet when basic reading and mathematics crowd out important content areas.) ...
A few weeks ago, we were excited to learn that Crook County Middle School's Michael Geisen, a forester-turned-science teacher, was named by the Council of Chief State School Officers as the 2008 National Teacher of the Year. Selected for an innovative teaching approach that focuses on the individual needs of students, school/community connections, and collaboration with his colleagues, Geisen is now spending a year traveling nationally and internationally as a spokesperson for education.
He recently spoke with Public School Insights about a variety of topics including what he hopes to achieve as teacher of the year, his belief in the need to redefine "basic skills" and "intelligence," the support teachers receive (or should receive), and how he personalizes teaching to foster a life-long love of learning while increasing standardized test scores.
Listen to 5 minutes of highlights from our interview (or read through the transcript below): ...
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