So my advice for teachers is that next time you feel the need to convey information via a lecture, create or find a story that illustrates those concepts and tell learners that story.  Matthew James Friday in his Edutopia article, Why Storytelling in the Classroom Matters describes the benefits of storytelling in the classroom:

Inspires purposeful talking, and not just about the story — there are many games you can play.
Raises the enthusiasm for reading texts to find stories, reread them, etc.
Initiates writing because children will quickly want to write stories and tell them.
Enhances the community in the room.
Improves listening skills.
Really engages the boys who love the acting.
Is enjoyed by children from kindergarten to the end of elementary school.
Gives a motivating reason for English-language learners to speak and write English. 

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee

Bloodletting to keep the "humors" in balance was a leading medical treatment from ancient Greece to the late 19th century. That's hard to believe now, in the age of robot-assisted surgery, but "doctors" trusted lancets and leeches for centuries.

To Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, the college lecture is the educational equivalent of bloodletting, one long overdue for revision.

"It's a very good analogy," the Stanford professor says. "You let some blood out and go away and they get well. Was it bloodletting that did it, or something else?"

A Picture of 21st Century Learning 

 If you can, imagine a 21st century learning environment. Learners buzz about a classroom working on a project to improve local water quality. They are working within and across small groups with a staggering variety of media, from essays and reports to quick videos and social media streams, to understand the scale of the problem. 

They revisit old research from earlier in the year saved in Google Docs, review resources curated in Pearltrees during research for another project, and start concept-mapping potential approaches using Mindo. 

Rather than compliance or letter grades, designing elegant solutions to address important problems is what motivates them—little social entrepreneurs exploring through own interdependence with one another and community with digital tools. Among their challenges? Not only the problem itself, but collaboratively identifying the best way to present their ideas to diverse audiences that may or may not use technology. 

To accomplish this, they use Evernote to take quick notes, YouTube to better understand the water cycle, conversations with teachers to explore possibilities they might be missing–often anchored in a project-based learning framework. 

 They demonstrate a consistent pattern of reflection, deconstruction, and evolution of thought while bridging physical and digital audiences. 

Their pace is self-directed, and their resources would be immediately overwhelming without a plan. 

Their objectives, while clear, are always a kind of moving target.  

Task-swapping is constant, quick, adaptive thinking absolutely critical. 

These are the things that cause understanding; they’re also effects of understanding. This is the picture of 21st century learning. How this translates to multiple choice tests and short-answer response is unclear.

It’s not uncommon for authors to be asked to submit a shortened version of a research article or piece of writing. This, says Thomas Basbøll, is too often looked upon as a problem of “reduction”, of pruning a longer text. Rather, the enormous surplus of knowledge that the longer text demonstrates the author has is a material resource for producing a different, shorter text. By using a key-sentence outline, authors can plan and reorganise the longer text without setting a material constraint on the shorter one.

Sometimes a draft gets longer than we’d like. Sometimes we are asked for a text that is shorter than the one we’re working on. We’re writing a paper for a journal with an 8,000-word limit and before we know it we’ve written 10,000 words. Then we’re suddenly asked to submit an extended abstract on the same subject with a 1,500-word limit. The problem, we tell ourselves, is to “reduce” what we’ve got to something shorter. I want to offer an argument against this way of thinking.

Education Reimagined defines the paradigm shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered as shifting how we see learners and their critical role in their own learning now, and throughout their lives. The critical shift is that “Learners are seen and known as wondrous, curious individuals with vast capabilities and limitless potential. This paradigm recognizes that learning is…

Weaving learning into a story makes learning more interesting, activates the brain’s positive emotional state, and hooks the information into a strong memory template. The memory then becomes more durable as the learning follows the narrative pattern through sequences connected to a theme, time flow, or actions directed toward solving a problem or reaching a known goal.

Nik Peachey is back with the third post from his series on digital teaching skills, this time taking a look at ‘crowdsourcing’ and the online tools you can use to use for this.

As teachers we frequently promote ourselves in our modern role as facilitators rather than knowledge owners and yet when we get into the classroom so much of what we do tends to be telling rather than asking.

Crowdsourcing information is about doing the opposite. It’s about collecting information from the room and beyond and enabling our students to share what they already know and develop their knowledge together.

As a teacher, you put a lot of thought into how to make your class and the material as accessible and engaging as possible. You think about what you know, and how you first learned it. You think about what your students already know, and how to use that knowledge as the foundation for what you're about to teach. And, as if that's not enough, you think about how to make your content so engaging that no matter what else is happening (lunch next period, upcoming prom, or the latest social media scandal among the sophomores), your lesson will hold your students' attention. All that thought goes into a lesson, and still there are students spacing out during class or seeming to fall behind. Working so hard and still not reaching every student can be frustrating. And you have no one to blame but yourself -- you're hogging all the best learning in your classroom.

"Pick any article from the newspaper," I would say to my students. "Bring it in and we'll analyze it." This was one of my favourite - and my most effective - activities in my critical thinking classes. I never knew what the students would bring in. With each article we would have to begin afresh. I was not merely teaching critical thinking, I was modeling it with them.

Why is fun and play crucial to achieving effective learning? It’s true that learning is important, but it doesn’t have to be dead serious. Everyone who desires to learn should be open to the idea of playing. It knows no age, subject, or grade restrictions. It encompasses endless notions and possibilities because it is driven by imagination. Play belongs in our learning and certainly in our classrooms, which is where we strive for achieving effective learning.

6 years ago this week the Personalization vs. Differentiation vs. Individualization (PDI) Chart was published. Millions of educators from around the world have downloaded the PDI Chart. It has been translated in many languages and it is found in schools, classrooms, academic publications, state DOE sites, educational blogs and articles.

I am excited to create and share this PDI Chart, v3 Infographic designed specifically to mark this anniversary!

The word agentic is described as an individual’s power to control his or her own goals actions and destiny. It stems from the word agency, which Webster’s Dictionary defines as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power. In the late 1980s, Stanford University Psychologist Albert Bandura began developing a theory of social cognition that he associated with self-efficacy. He later examined more specifically the role of agency and motivation, and coined the term Agentic, in which people are viewed as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulated, which he calls Agentic. Agentic learning is defined by self-directed actions aimed at personal growth and development based on self-chosen goals. Within this context, students initiate actions of their own volition that drive their learning.

 This book is available for download with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device. Multi-touch books can be read with iBooks on your Mac or iOS device. Books with interactive features may work best on an iOS device. iBooks on your Mac requires OS X 10.9 or later.
Description
The Challenge Based Learning user guide is for anyone interested in building learning communities focused on identifying Challenges and implementing thoughtful and sustainable solutions. It expands on the original Challenge Based Learning Classroom Guide and White Paper and reflects the most recent information about the framework.
If you are new to Challenge Based Learning the guide provides background information, key concepts, and resources for getting started.  If you are a Challenge Based Learning veteran the guide includes recent updates and expands on the information found in the original white paper and classroom guide. 

To borrow Smizik’s words, standardized testing does not invest in teacher’s professional capacities. The craft of teaching is lost to the demands of helping students meet the test requirements. The loss of dynamic pedagogy is appalling. The use of modules and worksheets to discuss novels lacks creativity and leads to student disinterest. The disregard for the mastery of multiplication facts causes students to lack fluency in mathematics. (These are just two examples — teachers in every grade level can offer more.) New York and other states can change the name of the standards, but it does not change the outcome: students are overly tested using developmentally inappropriate standards with substandard outcomes.