Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great…
This well outfitted German trench has a lighted Christmas tree and soldiers celebrating with music and sausages! It’s true – there was a truce in parts of the line along the western front in 1914. The official diarist of the 3rd Battalion Rifle Brigade reported: “Christmas in the trenches will always be remembered by the Battalion as a day of…
Here’s the Flickr album of photos from WinterFest 14 – last day of school before winter break. And a gallery of pics to whet the appetite: And below is the post – Tradition and Change – I wrote in 2009 about the PDS Christmas Festival of 1941. Some things change. Some things don’t From the Poughkeepsie New Yorker (Over 78,000 Read-Round-the-Clock…
We must foster global citizenship. Education is about more than literacy and numeracy. It is also about citizenry. Education must fully assume its essential role in helping people to forge more just, peaceful and tolerant societies. – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, 26 September 2012 at the launch of the Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) The 2013 Strategic Plan added two words to the mission statement – “global” and “leading”. The final…
I first tried “The Five Whys” in a faculty meeting. It was an attempt to try something new in tackling a thorny problem. This is new territory for me so it’s all a bit of an experiment. I had another shot at at the HMAE Annual Conference earlier this month where working with heads of school it was a bit…
Strategic plan outcomes can all seem rather formal and abstract until something like this leaps out and grabs your attention. This story is about a high school teacher, his students, their research and how they made a contribution to the scientific study of invasive species in our region. So … Congratulations to high school science teacher Brent Boscarino and PDS…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the MakerFaire and the connections with the “learning by doing” legacy of our school. So many thematic threads and connections with the work of the classroom. This video mix of images captures a few glimpses of MakerFaire and the wide variety of makers and making.
It’s not every day that you get to paint with an internationally renowned artist. But that was just one of the many delights of our Poughkeepsie Mini MakerFaire yesterday. Here is PDS parent Nestor Madalengoita creating a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt with the help of many hands of all ages. And what a day it was! So many more stories…
There was a lively Twitter #satchat this morning and the topic was that fad du jour: Failure. There were plenty of excellent observations and earnest calls for embracing failure as essential to the learning process. As someone who failed rather a lot in school (and done my share of it since) it’s a topic dear to me and one I…
There are lots of reasons to be concerned about the digital revolution and its impact on our lives, the lives of our students and schools. And there’s no shortage of voices raising the alarm. Here’s a small flavorsome slice of a particularly entertaining rant that was in the New Statesman a few years back: Take that digital manacle, the BlackBerry. My first…
Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up; rather ask what problem they want to solve. Their careers may not exist yet. Call me bonkers but I’ve been reading The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? It’s a recent working paper from Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford and it focuses on the…
I’ve been researching grit – the way one does on a snowy day. In the process I discovered an Australian newspaper archive with tens of thousand of instructive stories about grit and who has it. It seems grit frenzy has been with us for a while and this latest round in grit mania in education is just the latest version.…
For anyone with even a passing interest in the First World War here is an unparalleled opportunity: Operation War Diary. The National Archive (UK) has digitized 1.5 million pages of British Army unit diaries, signals, operations orders and messages from the war. They are releasing them to an army of citizen historians to read, classify, and tag. Moving through the…