NAIS Conference Notes- Part One

I have attached my notes from the sessions I attended at last week's NAIS Conference. By intent, these are pretty informal. I've also tailored my notes to content that I think most relevant to us at Parish in the Upper School. I've tried to add links to reference items I found pretty interesting.

If you go to the NAIS Website you can find links to several bloggers who attended the conference. If there is a session I reference that you want to learn more about I recommend you check these bloggers out. I have the advantage of choosing material of potential interest to you. The bloggers on the NAIS website are much more experienced and will include more links to additional supporting content.





Wednesday, Feb 24 Pre Conference Session 21st Century Skills for 21st Century School

This session was pretty heavily focused of sustainability as the skill for 21st C school. Nonetheless, a couple of interesting thoughts:


The KIVA project was an interesting example of a community service project with an international bent. MS students completed their own fund raising and selected were to loan money in this micro financing project.

The VOICES advocacy project connected writing with service.

Question/writing prompt: What kind of future will you invent? Could we link some writing assignment in English ten with pre retreat reflection?

Interesting stuff on People who are change agents: possible Journalism series? Link to leadership strand.

If Govt and Econ were to move to grade nine it could be more project based—could some projects lead into ten grade service orientation for retreat.

Ron Berger’s book,  An Ethic of Excellence which I have not read sounds like something worth looking at. ht

Might we look at mapping 21st Century Skills: If we can agree on terminology and what those skills are we can track then across curriculum?
• Example: we teach empathy in history (but don’t necessarily call it that) when we ask readers to understand context in which someone is writing to truly understand the meaning of what they are writing.
• Literature: through the lens of what does this work say about the world. What does this work say about how I respond to the world?


Thursday February 25

1st Session- the Educator’s Field Guide to Unleashing the Innovators Within

One of the presenters was Jason Ramsden from Ravenscroft so part of my idea for attending was to get some more background on where our head of school is coming from.

We can recreate lots of the clicker technology using cell phones.

What does innovation look like—in KDG class Skype and Tell

3 steps to promoting innovation:

• Finding ( P. Bassett- Smart Happy People)

• Feeding

• Fostering

A couple of ideas:

• 3 minute observation on walk around

• Flip camera video clip of class observation

• In-house “Best Practices” workshop day

• Goals/ observation pre conference- “ what new ideas do you have for this year that you are trying?"

• Carol Dweck’s research on fixed mindset- apply to teachers “innovator” is not a fixed skill—anyone can innovate.


Opening Keynote: Arianna Huffington- Becoming Fearless

She didn’t talk politics and she didn’t fight with anyone both of which were good things

Don’t lose in your on fantasies—“There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.” Montand

The 4th Instinct is the desire to find meaning

Einstein- "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. "

Thursday 12:00 Session Mimi Ito- New Media and Its Superpowers

I did not realize until after the session that I knew the presenter. Mimi Ito graduated from the American School in Japan in 1986—I was the counselor for ninth and tenth grade at the time so did not know her well but had worked with her a bit in the debate program and knew she was a top thinker even then. There is something special about seeing our former students succeed—in this case having them return to be my teacher!

That said, I wish I liked her session more. She has been a part of a Mac Arthur Foundation Study on how youth interact with the media. She (and several other presenters) also reference the Kaiser Family Foundation Study which indicates that youth now spend more than seven and one-half hours per day interacting with media.


Ito’s point is that lots of good learning can and does take place on the social networks. Yes lots of interactions are friendship driven—purely social, but many are interest driven and based on student’s intellectual and cultural pursuits. She ;points out that this is “Interest Driven Learning” this learning is:

Demand-pull rather than supply push (the traditional classroom learning)
Peer based authority rather than institution based authority
Specialization rather than standardization
Distributed rather than centralized.

Some examples:

Quest to Learn Katie Salen
You-Media Nichole Pinkard
Chicago Library Example


Thursday 1:30 Tina Seelig Innovation as an Extreme Sport



Tina works at Stanford’s center for Entrepreneurship and was a great presenter. A lot of her examples came from projects she gave her students (and actually contests that grew out of these and are world wide. A couple of common elements to her projects were that they involved team work and there was no “answer” to get to—even she did not know what the students might produce.

Like several speakers, she talked about how we set up students with situations where there is no failure—the teacher has the right answer and if I study hard enough and give that back I cannot fail. I think of some of our students who want to be spoon-fed and wonder how we might break them of that expectation—I think part of it can be done with assignments that have no right answer.

She mentioned ventured capitalists—who look for a problem—that is where the money is to be made!

She gave several examples from her class or the contests where the students needed to get creative: what can you do with $5.00, ten paper clips of a pad of post it notes? How can you “create value” with these objects? Utube on energy use or “do” bands.

According to Seelig, we need to learn how to fail fast and frequently” Another example she gave was a class assignment where groups were asked to come up with the “best idea” and the “worst idea” for solving a particular problem. She then threw out all the best ideas (which tended to be incremental changes) and redistributed the worst ideas to different teams. Most of those ideas spawned real ideas that were unique and creative (and worth pursuing further).


Ideas:

Dave O and Patrick---any possibilities for project based work in Econ?

SMU folks talked about a similar—give kids a problem to work and lock them up with minimal direction. Could we do something here? Could we look at a day like the PSAT day and instead of trying to teach in the afternoon we give (at least some grade level) a challenge/project to work on—let me know if anyone is excited by this idea.