While I spend my professional time now as a career success coach, writer, and leadership trainer, I was a marriage and family therapist in my past, and worked for several years with couples, families, and children, Forbes reports. Through that experience, I witnessed a very wide array of both functional and dysfunctional parenting behaviors. As a parent myself, I’ve learned that all the wisdom and love in the world doesn’t necessarily protect you from parenting in ways that hold your children back from thriving, gaining independence and becoming the leaders they have the potential to be. I was intrigued, then, to catch up with leadership expert Dr. Tim Elmore and learn more about how we as parents are failing our children today — coddling and crippling them — and keeping them from becoming leaders they are destined to be…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
The most influential person in education technology
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today, says Forbes. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan…
…Read MoreEd-tech and activism are reinventing education on 30 under 30
This is the era of the edu-preneur, when being a K-12 or higher ed professional can mean anything from cofounding a start-up with excess of $50 million in funding or launching a venture that uses the Kickstarter model to fund classrooms and libraries in at-risk communities in the U.S. and abroad, Forbes reports. The 30 Under 30 in education are in the forefront of this revolution. Here, their take on the future of learning, the classroom, and the role of the technology…
…Read MoreComcast, Khan Academy aim multimillion-dollar partnership at low-income families
As much as Khan Academy has promised “a free world-class education for everyone everywhere,” the reality is that many of the 10 million people reached monthly by its accessible video lessons remain middle-class people–those with enough means to have broadband access, Forbes reports. So today, Khan Academy founder and Executive Director Salman Khan and Comcast CMCSA -0.81% announced a partnership in which the cable company will provide a cash donation and hundreds of thousands of public service ads that amount to several million dollars over several years. The partnership was announced Monday at The Atlantic’s Silicon Valley Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View…
…Read MoreMerit pay for teachers is only fair
Business has long been accustomed to rewarding good performance with salary increases, but the birth of merit pay for teachers is proving both protracted and painful, Forbes reports. Evidence that performance-related pay raises standards is hard to come by, and last summer one of the few schemes to show a positive impact was quietly dismantled. But this doesn’t mean it should be abandoned. Even if merit pay does not lead to higher grades, its supporters argue that there is another reason that makes it worth considering as a replacement for a system that takes little account of ability or effort…
…Read MoreDo SAT tutors add up?: One parent’s journey
I’m going to start with a disclaimer: I’m one of those crazy parents who paid more than $150 per hour–or rather per fifty minute session– to help my child with the SAT test, Forbes reports. The fact feels humiliating, like the memory of tossing your wedding ring into a poker game. By some standards, I got off easy. It may seem like an urban legend but there are SAT tutors in New York city who charge more than a thousand dollars per session. Stratospherically priced test prep is the brainchild of Arun Alagappan, Harvard law grad, founder of Advantage Testing and the hero or despoiler of the pre-college landscape, depending on your point of view. Rates at Advantage range from $225 to $775 per fifty minutes, with the Kafkaesque stipulation that sessions run a minimum of 100 minutes…
…Read MoreWhy hasn’t the tech industry disrupted the textbook industry yet?
My view is that the innovation required for textbooks is far beyond what most companies are doing, Forbes reports. In fact, I think most entrepreneurs (and their investors) are completely missing the boat here. Think about WHY people would ever change from a physical to an electronic textbook. In the consumer world, we had the technology to move physical books to digital books over 10 years ago. Why weren’t we reading books on our computers before 2007? One answer: the Kindle, and other similar portable e-readers (iPhone/iPad included). Moving books to digital was not the real value prop – the value proposition was having a lighter, handheld library on the go! Until that was possible, nobody wanted to read digital books…
…Read MoreHow to fix education: Flip it upside down?
Nearly everyone agrees the online education is going to be huge, but ask what exactly that means in practice and how that will impact students, and the bickering begins, Forbes reports. Except about one thing. As Pulitzer Prize winner Tina Rosenberg recently wrote in the New York Times, “online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on.” What is it? A model where “students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call ‘homework’ in class,” Rosenberg explains, before going on to report that though research is still in its early stages, “many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.”
…Read MoreGrit, optimism and other buzzwords in the way of education
Angela Duckworth was recently awarded a $625,000 “no strings attached” MacArthur genius grant for her research on “Grit,” Forbes reports. Along with perseverance, initiative, and optimism, grit is one of the hottest buzzwords in K-12 education. Many teachers, policy makers, and reformers are shifting their focus from cognitive skills to character attributes. Supposedly, these “21st Century Skills” correlate more directly to an individual’s long term success. Unrelated to new technologies, or digital literacy, 21st Century Skills are all about desirable character traits. I’m all for a move away from dependence on standardized test scores, but the focus on “character” is suspect. Paul Tough writes, “We have been focusing on the wrong skills and abilities in our children, and we have been using the wrong strategies to help nurture and teach those skills.” In his book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough celebrates the KIPP charter schools. The KIPP schools use a “Character Growth Card.” Teachers rate students’ demonstration of a series of attributes, such as social intelligence, gratitude, and curiosity, on a scale from one to five. This report card is central to KIPP’s pedagogical strategy…
…Read MoreUsing games and apps to teach writing
We may be too literal when we think about what it means to be a good writer, Forbes reports. Especially when it comes to teaching children, we get caught up in structure, grammar, and syntax–these are parts of writing for which we can build standardized tests. Yes, these are components of the written language system, but the real skill is not the ability to understand the system (unless you’re a linguist). Rather, it is the ability to use the system effectively within a situated reality. Essentially, writing is a process of representing experience within the confines of a complex meaning system. To re-present is literally to present again. The primary skill needed to write well is the same as the skill needed to do anything well, the ability to translate and then present again within a variety of systems…
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