I was intrigued to see the paper series about Student Motivation published by the U.S. Center on Education Policy shared as a resource on GETideas.org. This resource ties right into an important reflection I had planned to share with you this month about the topic of student motivation. I love when fortuitous things like that happen! As a college instructor, I have never for a moment doubted to critical role…

Several years ago, I was invited to work with a school in Georgia to help the administration address very serious problems relating to student motivation and engagement, teacher burnout, and what they described to me as “quickly deteriorating atmosphere of resentment and disengagement among our staff.” I was asked to offer a series of teacher development workshops on 21st-century skills and student engagement. The principal sent me a rather comprehensive…

As an age-old joke goes, it is difficult to know what fish talk about, but you can be sure it is not water.            – Peter Senge Senge’s reflections about goldfish are metaphorical for us today, as 21st-century educators who usually are unaware of the uncanny similarities our daily activities and surroundings and the greatest invention of the industrial era — the assembly line. As Senge argues…

We are the stories we are told. Each of us alone and all of us together are the living embodiment of all the stories we have heard and all the stories we have told each other. Narrative shapes our behaviors, our thoughts, our actions. Wrap a story around something, anything, and that thing suddenly takes on a deeper meaning – and long after listening to, and absorbing the story, its…

Henry Jenkins (pictured above), a former MIT Professor and the person who coined the term “transmedia,” defines it as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels.” In plain English: Transmedia stories offer that element that traditional education struggles to provide: choice. Whereas in most classrooms the teacher dictates pace, content, beginning, and endings, in transmedia story-reading the reader makes multiple choices: whether…

[…] inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long…

Schools, by and large, have tamed the canon. They have made it into the stuff of tests, multiple-choice answers, and standardized responses. Everyone now, finally, has access to the canon at a time when schools have rendered it toothless. Young people today have access to far more texts, images, and diverse media of far more kinds than in the past.                     …

 “Rationing college by social class and ethnicity results in a higher education system that will increase the gap between the 1% and the rest in ever more extreme ways.” -Gary Rhoades Center for the Future of Higher Education This month, the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) will meet for its annual convention in Orlando, Florida (U.S.). Community college leaders from around the nation will convene to discuss challenges and opportunities…