2013 Big Ideas in Education

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"It might feel overwhelming to keep track of the latest education trends, jargon, and ed-tech products. But for many educators — and most MindShift readers — the topic of focus that stays top-of-mind above the chatter is learning. A look through the most popular MindShift posts this year reveals that, despite all the news about iPad rollouts and Common Core, the strongest thread of interest for our readers remains the topic of learning: student-directed learning, inquiry-based approaches to teaching, and the desire to help students learn how to learn in a changing world.

POSITIVE CONDITIONS FOR LEARNING
Adults can make a big impact on how students view their own learning process and capabilities, as described in the article Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick. Research by Stanford professor Carol Dweck has shown that students who demonstrate a “growth mindset” about their abilities fare much better than those who believe their abilities in any given area are fixed — that either they’re smart or they’re not. Educators and parents can help encourage a growth mindset by praising the effort children put into their work, not the byproduct.
“What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not,” Dweck said. “It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.” Her research also shows that girls are more susceptible to the fixed mindset than boys, especially when it comes to math. Dweck’s research asks educators and parents to think carefully about the messages they’re sending to children, even at a young age. The praise a parent gives her child between the ages of one and three affects that child’s ability to overcome challenges five years later."

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/12/mindshifts-big-ideas-of-2013-focus-on-learning/

Should Mindfulness be part of our curriculum at ISHCMC?

 

2014 has been called the "year of mindful living," and talk of a mindful revolution seems to be everywhere from Davos to Silicon Valley. Most recently, mindfulness was the subject of a controversial cover of TIME Magazine.
TIME's "Mindful Revolution" cover in January stirred up debate among the online mindfulness community, in part for featuring a beautiful, white blonde woman meditating on the cover. As some commentators pointed out, this wasn't the first time that the magazine has portrayed mindfulness this way: Its last cover on the "science of meditation" also featured an image of a beautiful white model.
"It's one thing to feature a young, fertile white girl on the cover of TIME and promote it as 'mindfulness,'" wrote Joanna Piacenza, web manager of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, in a HuffPost Religion blog post. "It's another to do it twice over the course of a decade."
It's undeniable that there is a mindful revolution going on, and that more people than ever before are embracing the well-documented physical and mental health benefits of meditation. But unfortunately, a homogenous representation of mindfulness practices isn't uncommon in the media -- especially in the case of yoga, which is often depicted by a thin white woman with a "Gwyneth Paltrow body." But the image of the serene, young white woman closing her eyes and breathing deeply doesn't come close to telling the whole story of how mindfulness is beginning to transform lives.
Despite the often-exclusionary media representation of mindfulness, the "mindful revolution" is spreading everywhere.
"Everyone benefits from meditation," Russell Simmons, who is on the board of the David Lynch Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to bring Transcendental Meditation to in-need populations, told CNN. "This idea of letting your mind settle is in every religion, but is also in every spiritual teaching. But also everyone needs to look inside for reflection in order to work outside. Operating from a calm space has gotten to be the greatest gift that anyone can be given... all happiness comes from inside."
Here's proof that mindfulness is for everyone, and that it's transforming both individuals and communities across lines of gender, race, socioeconomic status and cultural background.
Meditation is helping students, especially in low-income areas.

Meditation has been proven to have a number of benefits for students: It can boost focus, attention and memory, lower stress levels and improve sleep quality, and some studies have even found mindfulness training to improve test scores. An increasing number of schools, both private and public, from elementary to high school, are beginning to integrate mindfulness into their curriculums.
At Patterson High School in Baltimore -- a school with a number of at-risk students and has a four-year graduation rate of only 86 percent -- the Holistic Life Foundation's "Mindful Moments" program is working yoga, meditation and breathing into the students' daily schedules. As part of the program, faculty and students take part in a 15-minute yoga and mindfulness practice at the beginning and end of each day.
"It's our hope that by bringing Mindful Moments to our school, students will improve their self-esteem and self-awareness, and develop a better way of making decisions," said Patterson principal Vance Benton.
Veterans and soldiers using meditation to cope with PTSD.

Meditation is becoming increasingly common among a population that's at high risk for stress and stress-related health problems: Soldiers and veterans. Through Operation Warrior Wellness program, the David Lynch Foundation is bringing Transcendental Meditation to over 10,000 veterans with PTSD and their families. The program is helping to promote resiliency and well-being among soldiers, empower the families of veterans, and relieve symptoms of PTSD, which as many as one in eight returning soldiers may suffer from.
"The research... found about a 50 percent reduction in symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The research shows a reduction in heart disease, which is a byproduct of PTSD, as well as anxiety and sleep disorders," Bob Roth, executive director of the David Lynch Foundation, told CNN on Veteran's Day in 2012. "It's medically sound and scientifically-tested."
Mindfulness is transforming end-of-life care.

Meditation has been shown to have significant health and well-being benefits for the elderly. Mindfulness meditation can combat loneliness among adults and Transcendental Meditation has been shown to boost longevity in elderly practitioners.
More generally, mindfulness can help all of us to better cope with aging and death. Two Zen Buddhist monks, Koshin Paley Ellison and Robert Chodo Campbell, are starting a movement to transform end-of-life care through mindfulness and other Buddhist principles. They founded the New York Zen Center For Contemplative Care to help both the terminal ill and their families and friends come to a more peaceful acceptance of death.
Our culture has a tendency to fear and push away death, says Ellison. Oftentimes when a person is dying, the people around them become so uncomfortable with what's happening that they try to avoid facing the reality. But the more accepting and intimate we become with death -- an attitude that mindfulness can help us to cultivate -- the more we're able to accept it.
"We need to move into the fear," Ellison told the Huffington Post. "We need to say, 'I can be here, I'm scared out of my mind, but I can breathe and be with it.'"
Mindfulness has become part of a revolution in mental health care.

The potential for mindfulness practices to revolutionize mental health and psychiatric care is enormous, and it's already well underway. With his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, meditation expert and MIT medical professor Jon Kabat-Zinn helped to bring mindfulness into the world of psychiatry. So far, the research has proven meditation to be an effective, low-cost, side effect-free intervention that can reduce anxiety and depression, as well as lowering stress levels and boosting emotional well-being. Mindfulness has even been used in addiction treatment and has been shown to help smokers kick the habit.
“Get out of our heads and learn to experience the world directly, experientially, without the relentless commentary of our thoughts," Mark G. Williams, John D. Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal and Kabat-Zinn wrote in The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself From Chronic Unhappiness. "We might just open ourselves up to the limitless possibilities for happiness that life has to offer us.”
Mindfulness is slowly beginning to transform the medical profession.

Burnout may affect up to 60 percent of doctors, according to Association of American Medical Colleges estimates. But recent studies have found that mindfulness prevents burnout and boosts compassion among physicians, which may improve the doctor-patient relationship. And some hospitals have actually started bringing mindfulness into their facilities.
At the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, a new emergency alert, "Code Lavender," has been introduced to address cases of emotional or spiritual stress and burnout. The Code Lavender program aims to support nurses and physicians during emotionally troubling or exhausting times, often after experiencing the death of a patient. The Healing Services Team utilizes holistic methods including spiritual support, counseling and therapeutic massage, while the Clinic also offers yoga classes and mindfulness training for its staff in an effort to promote "compassion-based care."
"[Compassion-based care] does go against an old style of medicine where it was just, 'Go go go, stay tough, don't be impacted by it, keep moving,'" Amy Greene, director of spiritual care at Cleveland Clinic, told the Huffington Post. "We're seeing that this is long-term not sustainable. Doctors and nurses are human beings."

Athletes -- from at-risk youth to NBA stars -- are improving their game through meditation. The Mind + Sport Institute (MSI), a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to helping athletes (including at-risk youth) reach their highest potential, wrote that the TIME Magazine mindfulness cover "said one thing to the male athlete (possibly of color) that we work with in the Bay Area: Mindfulness is not for you."

 

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/04/this-is-proof-that-mindfu_n_4697734.html?utm_hp_ref=tw 

Out of School: Globalization's Children Are Being Abandoned

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Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Great Britain, is the UN Special Envoy for Global Education.

LONDON -- The seeds are being sown for waves of social unrest more threatening to authority than the Arab Spring and more widespread than the Occupy movement.

If world leaders thought that they could relax as the demonstrations of 2011, 2012 and 2013 petered out, today's launch of the Education For All Global Monitoring Report compiled by Pauline Rose reveals the shocking disparities in opportunities for young people that are already fuelling the next generation of discontent.

The inequalities faced by 'globalization's children' -- children born just before and after the millennium -- make for grim reading.

It is heartbreaking that in 2014 -- a year before we were to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal education -- 57 million boys and girls across the world won't even get a first day at primary school, and 500 million of today's school age girls will be forever denied the chance to complete their schooling.

But it is also bad economic news for developing countries that even in 2030, one billion men and women out of a 3.5 billion global labor force will be without the most basic employment skills.

Indeed, despite the world's promise that by 2015 every child would complete a basic education, today half the world is still being deprived and cheated of its dreams.

Today just 36 percent of children in the poorest countries complete their lower secondary education. By 2030 it will have risen -- but only to 54 percent. And 23 percent, one child in every four, will not even have completed primary schooling.

It will take until 2069 for universal primary education to reach all poor boys in sub-Saharan Africa and 2086 for it to be offered to all poor girls.

And on present trends, it will take almost a century for universal lower secondary education to be achieved by all poor girls in sub-Saharan Africa.

The gender divide is not the only problem. Only one in four poor rural girls complete primary education today and even in 2030 half will still miss out. Ninety percent fail to complete secondary education today -- and still 70 percent will be missing out in 2030.

The chance of getting a school place is so unequally distributed between rich and poor that in at least 11 African countries it could take until 2120 or later before girls from poor families enjoy the same rights just to lower secondary education as wealthier boys.

Being at school does not mean you have a decent education. We invest just $400 on a typical African child's education from infancy to 16 compared with the $100,000 spent on the education of a typical western child.

The gap between the promise of globalization -- opportunity for all -- and the reality young people experience is already creating a restless and rebellious youth tension.

A report by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung studied recent protests and found that: "The main reason why people around the world are protesting is because of a lack of economic justice. Overall, 488 such episodes are found in the period 2006-2013, 58% of total protests were counted in the study. They reflect people's outrage... The majority of global protests for economic justice and against austerity manifest people's indignation at the gross inequalities between ordinary communities and rich individuals and corporations."

In future years, these young people will be increasingly aware through mobile devices and the Internet that they are poor and uneducated not because of what talents they have but because of where they live and who they are born to. Tension will increase because young people in the developing world will no longer be prepared to accept a world where your birth determines your fate, your rights are what others ascribe to you and opportunities are what your father or grandfather determine you can have.

It is in support of their rights to a fair chance in life that young people, business, faith groups, parents and teachers will come together over the next two years to demand a massive expansion of educational opportunities. By reinstating the political will to expand education for all by 2015 and by closing the inequality gap, we can change course for the next generation. And we should start by making sure that the 57 million children who are denied schooling are released from child labor, child marriage and discrimination and be provided with teachers and classrooms so that they can begin to learn.

www.educationenvoy.org

or

http://gordonandsarahbrown.com/2014/01/gordon-brown-warns-world-leaders-about-global-unrest/

Tools that make you smarter

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"Can a calculator make you smarter? The QAMA calculator can. You use it just like a regular calculator, plugging in the numbers of the problem you want to solve—but QAMA won’t give you the answer until you provide an accurate estimate of what that answer will be.

If your estimate is way off, you’ll have to go back to the problem and see where you went wrong. If your estimate is close, QAMA (developed by Ilan Samson, an “inventor-in-residence” at the University of California, San Diego) will serve up the precise solution, and you can compare it to your own guess. Either way, you’ll learn a lot more than if you simply copied the answer that a calculator spit out.

Ever since journalist Nicholas Carr posed a provocative question—“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—in a widely-read 2008 Atlantic magazine article, we’ve been arguing about whether the new generation of digital devices is leading us to become smarter, or stupider, than we were before. Now psychologists and cognitive scientists are beginning to deliver their verdicts. Here, the research on an array of technological helpers:

Calculators. Cognitive scientists long ago identified the “generation effect” — the fact that we understand and remember answers that we generate ourselves better than those that are provided us (by a calculator, for instance). But a study published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that adults who tried to solve arithmetic problems on their own but then obtained the answer from a calculator did just as well on a later test as those who didn’t use calculators at all. If you don’t have a QAMA calculator around, you can approximate its effects by holding off using a traditional calculator until you’ve tried to come up with a solution yourself.

Auto-complete. Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest. Maybe too used to it, in fact. This handy function seems to make adolescent users faster, but less accurate, when responding to a battery of cognitive tests, according to research published in 2009 in the journal Bioelectromagnetics.

Texting. A study led by researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain surveyed a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds about their texting habits, then asked them to write a sample text in the lab. The scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none. But those children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations (like “c u l8r” for “see you later”) tended to score higher on a measure of verbal reasoning ability—likely because the condensed language of texting requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English.

Search engines. The ready availability of search engines is changing the way we use our memories, reported psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University in a study published in Science in 2011. When people expect to have future access to information, Sparrow wrote, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” It’s good to know where to find the information you need—but decades of cognitive science research shows that skills like critical thinking and problem-solving can be developed only in the context of factual knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to have knowledge stored in your head, not just in your computer.

Email. Email is a convenient way to communicate, but trying to answer messages while also completing other work makes us measurably less intelligent. Glenn Wilson, psychiatrist at King’s College London University, monitored employees over the course of a workday and found that those who divided their attention between email and other tasks experienced a 10-point decline in IQ. Their decrease in intellectual ability was as great as if they’d missed a whole night’s sleep, and twice as great as if they’d been smoking marijuana. For every technological trap, however, there’s a technological solution: When you need to get work done, use Freedom or another such program that will shut down your access to the Internet for a predetermined period of time.

Websites. Back in 2001, reading specialists Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich reported in the Journal of Direct Instruction that scores on a test of general knowledge were highest among people who read newspapers, magazines and books, and lowest among those who watched a lot of TV. Watching television, they noted, is “negatively associated with knowledge acquisition” — except when the TV watching involved public television, news, or documentary programs. Cunningham and Stanovich didn’t look at Internet use, but the same information divide exists online: high-quality, accurate information, and, well, fluff.

So does technology make us stupid, or smart? The answer is “both,” and the choice is up to us."
Annie Murphy Paul <anniempaul=gmail.com@mail20.atl51.rsgsv.net>

What we should value in students.

From Jackie Gernstein’s resource-rich site comes this sweet infographic depicting the skills we’d like to instill in our students. The post also includes a long, helpful list of resources for everything from how to help students develop hope, to encouraging empathy and social and emotional skills, to how to foster grit, tenacity and perseverance: an educator’s guide.

http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/the-other-21st-century-skills-books-for-kids/

What Do Students Need Most? More Sleep

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"When I travel around to schools to speak to students, I deliver one line in my talk that kills, each and every time. The students do not simply laugh, they whoop and holler, throw their heads back in open-mouthed guffaws and shake their heads in disbelief. I would love to lay claim to the funniest educator joke of all time, but sadly, I don’t have that kind of comic game. I’m not even aiming for their funny bone when I proclaim, “In order to function at your mental and physical best, adolescents should be getting at least nine hours of sleep a night.”

For many students, nine hours of sleep is so far beyond their reality that their only logical response is laughter. Four out of five adolescents are getting less than that, and more than half of them know they are getting less sleep than they need to function well.
Surveys conducted by the National Sleep Foundation reveal that teenagers are getting nowhere near nine hours of sleep a night. The average weeknight sleep duration for 13-year-olds hovers around 7 hours 42 minutes and decreases to 7 hours 4 minutes in 19-year-olds. And if you think your teenagers are getting enough sleep, think again. Ninety percent of parents say they believe their children are getting sufficient sleep, and yet when asked, 60 percent of teenagers report extreme daytime sleepiness.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/what-do-students-need-most-more-sleep/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=2&

The importance of play for children

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"I’m a research bio-psychologist with a PhD, so I’ve done lots of school. I’m a pretty good problem-solver, in my work and in the rest of my life, but that has little to do with the schooling I’ve had. I studied algebra, trig, calculus and various other maths in school, but I can’t recall ever facing a problem – even in my scientific research – that required those skills. What maths I’ve used was highly specialised and, as with most scientists, I learnt it on the job.
The real problems I’ve faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests), and emotional ones (coping with grief when my first wife died or keeping my head when I fell through the ice while pond skating). Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorised answers of the type learnt in school. They require the judgement, wisdom and creative ability that come from life experiences. For children, those experiences are embedded in play."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/give-childhood-back-to-children-if-we-want-our-offspring-to-have-happy-productive-and-moral-lives-we-must-allow-more-time-for-play-not-less-are-you-listening-gove-9054433.html