“In a traditional college degree program, assessments and course requirements are typically decided by individual professors or within a department. Which can lead to wide variations in expectations, workload and grading… Freed of the credit-hour constraint, competency-based programs need to be a lot more rigorous and transparent about designing assessments. Otherwise, they risk turning into diploma mills.”
“Six critical elements during college jumped off the pages of our research as being strongly linked to long-term success in work and life after graduation. Three of these elements relate to experiential and deep learning… But the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support… If graduates strongly agree with these three things, it doubles the odds that they are engaged in their work and thriving in their overall well-being.”
“As educators, we increasingly recognize that our institutions are not immune to the technological forces that have influenced almost every other industry that serves us… we are more likely to think that technology means the end of our schools and all the characteristics of them that we hold dear. This will likely not be the case.”
“Seeing the problem through another discipline’s lenses gives one the permission to think outside the norms and boundaries of one’s own… In most large organizations, this is a fundamental challenge. Coming out of your functional silo to roll up your sleeves with colleagues from another one is often an exercise in defensive posturing, rather than constructive conflict… Organizations that cannot breach the silo walls when necessary are ill-equipped to achieve breakthroughs of any kind whatsoever.”
“I learned these things about math and the process of learning not in the K-12 classroom but in the course of my life, as a kid who grew up reading Madeleine L’Engle and Dostoyevsky, who went on to study language at one of the world’s leading language institutes, and then to make the dramatic shift to become a professor of engineering.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson