This article on future visioning of schools that just appeared in Mindshift is perfectly timed for Tuesday's second meeting on ISHCMC's Principles of Learning. It raises questions about what school's should be teaching in the future and what and how students learn. On Tuesday you will read through research created Principles of Learning, decide which fit us best and create a short list that we will work with and eventually turn into ISHCMC's Learning Principles.
This exert from the article challenges some of our traditional thinking on learning, some of which we are already doing in our programmes.
"A group of progressive educators at the Educon conference discussed other qualities that successful future citizens will need and that a good education should offer. A successful student should be able to manage massive amounts of information, a crucial skill as life becomes more digital. Students should learn in ways that disregard traditional disciplines like English and math, instead focusing on real world problems that allow for crossover and interplay. The focus should be on providing student-centered experiences that bring out qualities in students that aren’t necessarily measurable. Students should learn to build and manipulate computers, not just use them. Perhaps most importantly students should be taught how to learn, especially since the content or specific skills needed in the future are as yet unknown."
The question is are we going to go beyond traditional Principles of Learning and create new ones that transform the Learning at ISHCMC and take teaching to a higher / different level? If you didn't watch this video from an earlier post now would be a good time because if you listen to what Logan emphasizes perhaps there is an important Learning Principle embedded in his thinking that we should be adopting.
This weekend Clara and Frank are in Hanoi at the Vietnam
Tech conference presenting their work that linked Math and IT and 3D printing.
Clara with Frank’s help transformed a traditional part of the Math curriculum, taking
content and applying it to an engineering investigation that eventually created
3D products from their mathematical learning. This was very different to the
normal delivery of such content.
This is our aim with the use of technology in the classroom
to transform the learning of students. The model that we are going to be using,
and you will hear more about and be able to read about for yourselves in the Developing
Professional Growth Handbook Section (I), is the SAMR model for implementation
and planning for IT in schools.
This week’s reading is an article that emphasizes this approach.
We at SLT Academic are discussing the important question what are the learning
outcomes that we expect from our 1:1 laptop programme and our present and
future investment in iPads for Primary school.
What Will It Take for
iPads to Upend Teaching and Learning?
“So
what does “transformative” mean to Burmeister? “I
no longer have to be the bottleneck of information for my students. I actually
can be the person in charge of creating incredibly deep and broad learning
experiences for kids and giving them the tools to find that factual information
themselves,” Burmeister said. “My job is to ask powerful questions. My job is
to create learning experience that gets kids engaged in a way that me just
pouring information into them so they can memorize it and regurgitate it back
to me is long gone. My job now is to get kids excited and give them the tools
to be able to access the knowledge to be able create, to be able to analyze, to
be able to compare and contrast, to be able to synthesize and to be able to
design new things out of the learning that they’re able to access via a touch
of a button on the iPad.” That’s
a tall order. Letting students take ownership of their learning may be at the
heart of what Hillview hopes to eventually achieve, but getting to that level
of transformational learning takes letting go of control on the part of
teachers and administrators. And that’s where it can be tricky, even for a
school like Hillview that’s committed to the idea of the iPad as a “positive
disruptor” — a force that will require them to think about change.”
In the Science and Math department there are already
students augmenting their learning by taking online university courses. In the
future thses should be common practice for our Grade 10-12 students. The vision
is that we will have more and more students following their individual passions
and adding to their learning by taking part in more of these courses and by creating
individual learning pathways that will
give them access to university material and courses.
Links to my Tet reading.....A Life That Matters By Dr Sanong Vora-urai.
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."
MSI is right that the TIME cover doesn't reflect the diverse range of athletes, of both genders and from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who practice mindfulness. Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Michael Jordan are just a few of the many professional athletes who say that they turn to meditation to reduce stress and improve their game. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/04/this-is-proof-that-mindfu_n_4697734.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
Dear all,
Hope you all had a good relaxing Tet and are ready to return fully energized for Semester 2.
In an earlier Food for Thought I referred to the work of Angela Duckworth on resilience and hence when I read this article I thought that I should share it because it is a piece of research that many of us teachers have read about or referred to when we are discussing or thinking about how self-control and delaying gratification are markers that have been shown to point to students being successful in their futures.
We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.
“In a series of famous experiments in the 1960s and ’70s conducted by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, preschoolers were invited to sit alone in a room furnished only with a small desk. On the desk sat two marshmallows (or equivalently tempting treats) and a bell. The researcher told each child that he had to leave, but that when he returned, she could eat both marshmallows. If she wanted one marshmallow before then, however, she could ring the bell and eat one, but not both. Then the researcher shut the door, leaving the child alone with the forbidden marshmallows.
Some children gobbled a marshmallow the minute the door was closed, while others distracted themselves by covering their eyes, singing and kicking the desk. One resourceful child somehow managed to take a nap. But here’s the part that made the experiment famous: In follow-up studies, children who had resisted temptation turned out years later to be not only skinnier and better socially adapted, but they also scored as much as 210 points higher on their SATs than the most impatient children in the studies did.”
