It’s 10:42 a.m. on a Tuesday. A marketing director is meeting with their team to determine the target market for the company’s soon-to-be-launched product: solar-powered backpacks capable of charging mobile devices. You can sense a productive tension among the group. They know getting this right is crucial to the overall success of their brand. But
As I drove my 10-year-old daughter Halden to school one recent morning, we caught the end of a news report on the radio about the war in Ukraine. “Some Russian people are against the war,” Halden stated confidently. “It’s just that they don’t get to hear about what’s really happening in Ukraine.” As we talked,
Read More… from Research to Practice: Cultivating International-Mindedness in the Middle Grades
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This article is part two of an article series on an innovative approach to developing multidisciplinary curriculum that taps into student interest. You can read part one here. “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed.” ― Ken Robinson In June 2018,
Read More… from A Framework for Change: Foundations and Academy
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A genius project—also called genius hour (Davis, 2022; Mulvahill, 2018), enigma mission (George Lucas Educational Foundation, 2019), or passion project (Bowersox, 2020; Wormeli, 2018)—is a form of personalized learning in which students engage in sustained, self-directed inquiry for part of the school day. Genius projects are a natural fit for the middle grades because they
Read More… from Research to Practice: Implementing Genius Projects in the Middle Grades
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Career Exploration is possible in every school and for every student with the right playbook in hand. The middle school years — for good reason — are often called “the last best chance.” These are pivotal years for youth, as they develop rapidly in their critical, analytical, and creative thinking skills and desire to set
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COVID-19 has challenged us to re-envision education. Every aspect of “best practice” is currently up for re-examination and debate, from current academic practices to recommendations on how to best develop meaningful curriculum to how to cultivate meaningful relationships with students/families. In the process, we have also discovered that it is not enough to make education
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