In a recent post, I argued: Tests are horrible measures of whether students are mastering valuable 21st century skills, the skills that really matter. Just published is a new book by education writer Anya Kamenetz that attacks the standardized tests that are used today in the United States. The TIME Magazine review quotes from it: The research… Read More The Problem With School Testing
A team of education experts at the Open University (UK), led by Professor Mike Sharples, have identified “ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education” in this new report. Of course, you can find similar lists in just about every business magazine and newspaper, but what’s… Read More Ten Educational Innovations To Watch For In The Next Ten Years
The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way is the title of a new book by Amanda Ripley. Ripley has traveled around the world, to the countries where students consistently get the highest scores on international student assessments (like the PISA test of the OECD). In Finland, South Korea, Singapore, and… Read More The Smartest Kids in the World
The Economist of 17 September 2011 has a detailed three-page story about “the great schools revolution” resulting from “a global battle of ideas.” This has resulted from new masses of comparative data, such as the PISA tests developed by the OECD and first used in 32 countries in 2000, and McKinsey consulting group’s new education… Read More International Education Reform
I’m reporting this from Shanghai, where I gave the keynote talk this morning to a conference of educators at East China Normal University. I’ve just learned of the McKinsey report “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better.” After studying twenty countries, they identified eight key take-home messages: 1. A school system can… Read More How To Improve Schools
I spent a few days last week in Oklahoma City, as a keynote speaker for an event sponsored by the Creative Oklahoma initiative. Believe it or not, but Oklahoma is working hard to become known as the “state of creativity” (and they’ve gotten a good start by securing the domain name http://www.stateofcreativity.com). Like many of… Read More The State of Creativity
The Creativity Guru 