Five Building Blocks in the New Architecture of High Schools — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

  • Schools personalizing learning and moving to mastery often use five linked learner experience systems to promote growth on learning goals.
  • Each system has unique learner experiences, feedback protocols, supports and staffing strategies.
  • These systems work independently and together to promote learner-centered growth toward shared outcomes.

Schools personalizing learning and moving to mastery or competency-based learning models often use five linked learner experience systems to promote growth on learning goals: skill-building, projects, immersion, advisory, and out-of-school learning. Each system has unique learner experiences, feedback protocols, supports and staffing strategies. These systems work independently and together to promote learner-centered growth toward shared outcomes (i.e., learner profile or portrait of a graduate).

 

The biggest tech trends of 2022, according to over 40 experts — from fastcompany.com by Mark Sullivan
Startup founders, Big Tech execs, VCs, and tech scholars offer their predictions on how Web3, the metaverse, and other emerging ideas will shape the next year.

We asked startup founders, Big Tech execs, VCs, scholars, and other experts to speculate on the coming year within their field of interest. Altogether, we collected more than 40 predictions about 2022. Together, they offer a smart composite look at the things we’re likely to be talking about by this time next year.

 

The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days — from sloanreview.mit.edu by Ben Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar, and Ashish Malik
Many organizations are implementing no-meeting days, but finding the optimal weekly balance requires deliberation.

Excerpt:

Though building trust and achieving team cohesion rely on frequent, quality interactions, meetings are no longer the best way to accomplish this. As a result, many organizations…are taking a stand by adopting no-meeting days, during which people operate at their own rhythms and collaborate with others at a pace and on a schedule that is convenient, not forced.

The subsequent impact of introducing meeting-free days was profound, as outlined in the table below. When one no-meeting day per week was introduced, autonomy, communication, engagement, and satisfaction all improved, resulting in decreased micromanagement and stress, which caused productivity to rise.

 

 

11 Trends that Will Shape Work in 2022 and Beyond — from hbr.org by Brian Kropp and Emily Rose McRae

Excerpt:

9. The chief purpose officer will be the next major C-level role.
Issues of politics, culture, and social debate have fully entered the workplace. Employees have been asked to bring their whole self to work as organizations try to create a more inclusive and productive work environment. This is fundamentally different than a decade ago when employees were expected to leave their personal perspectives “at the door.”

Employees also expect their employer to get more involved in the societal and political debates of the day…

Addendum on 1/24/22 (emphasis DSC):

  • Leading in an Age of Employee Activism — from sloanreview.mit.edu by Megan Reitz and John Higgins
    Employees are demanding that managers engage on topics like climate change and racial equity — and leaders need to be ready to respond.
 

Trends Shaping Education in 2022 — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points:

  • It’s hard to see trends in a crisis.
  • Around the edges and behind the scenes three important shifts accelerated: new learning goals, team tools and staffing, and active learning.

 


2022 Learning Trends


 


Google Slides here


 
 

Methods and tools to develop future-ready skills — from blog.neolms.com by Rachelle Dene Poth

Excerpt:

Because of the changes that we experienced in the past year, I believe that it is important to have various options, whether teaching in-person, hybrid, or virtually. Choosing methods like Genius hour or project-based learning, activities such as scavenger hunts or learning stations, or selecting digital tools that promote more interaction with and between students will help foster the development of essential future-ready and SEL skills.

There are many methods and tools to explore, but it’s important to focus on the why behind the choices we make for our students. The use of digital tools promotes collaboration, communication, creativity and many more essential skills while also promoting the power of choice for students to share what they have learned.

More choice. More control.

Also see:

Escape rooms have become very popular as a place teams can go to work out how to get free from the room in which they are “trapped.” It’s like a real-world version of a computer game that makes you work together to solve puzzles to escape from somewhere.

Breakout EDU helps to bring that experience to educators so as to better engage students and help them learn while having fun.

 

The Associated Press is starting its own NFT marketplace for photojournalism — from theverge.com by Mitchell Clark
It’s offering collectors ‘exclusive, historic, and stunning visual content’

Excerpt:

The Associated Press, or AP, has announced that it’s starting a marketplace to sell NFTs of its photojournalists’ work in collaboration with a company called Xooa. It’s billing its foray into NFTs as a way for collectors to “purchase the news agency’s award-winning contemporary and historic photojournalism” and says that the virtual tokens will be released at “broad and inclusive price points” (though it’s hard to tell what types of prices resellers will want on the AP marketplace).

Also see:

Why Samsung built an NFT aggregator into its new TVs — from digitaltrends.com by Phil Nickinson

Excerpt:

Or, perhaps, it’s the idea of an “NFT aggregation platform” being built into the television. It sounds insane — baking something that most people don’t understand, let alone engage in — into a TV. Most of us can’t even describe what a non-fungible token is, let alone tell someone how to go get one. It’s a multi-layered process that’s far more difficult than taking a screenshot of something you saw on Instagram and then sticking it up on your TV.

But that’s also not the point.

“In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator,” reads the press release, “a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place.”

 
 

What’s ahead for AI, VR, NFTs, and more? — from oreilly.com by Mike Loukides
Here are some predictions for tech in 2022.

Excerpt:

Just as we saw new professions and job classifications when the web appeared in the ’90s, we’ll see new professions and services appear as a result of AI—specifically, as a result of natural language processing. We don’t yet know what these new professions will look like or what new skills they’ll require. But they’ll almost certainly involve collaboration between humans and intelligent machines.

Also see:

  • How A.I. is set to evolve in 2022 — from cnbc.com by Sam Shead
    Key Points: 
    * AI can excel at specific narrow tasks such as playing chess but it struggles to do more than one thing well.
    * While AI still has a long way to go before anything like human-level intelligence is achieved, it hasn’t stopped the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon investing billions of dollars.
 

Amazon Gift Signals Confidence in Community Colleges — from insidehighered.com by Suzanne Smalley
The company is giving $3 million to kick-start a computer science bachelor’s degree program at community and technical colleges throughout Washington State.

Excerpt:

Amazon is funding a pilot that will support the launch of new computer science bachelor’s degree programs at community and technical colleges in Seattle and across Washington State, an investment meant to address a workforce shortage plaguing the e-commerce giant and other employers who can’t find qualified candidates for unfilled computer science positions.

 

5 Ways Teachers Can Help Students in Their Online Learning Journey — from edtechreview.in

Excerpt:

With the growing prominence of online education and its integration into the daily lives of students, teachers can play an active role in helping students in their online learning journey. Here’s how:

 

Why the Science of Teaching Is Often Ignored — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie
There’s a whole literature on what works. But it’s not making its way into the classroom.

Excerpts:

Yet, teaching reformers argue, the dangers of ignoring the expanding body of knowledge about teaching and learning are ever more apparent. Traditional teaching may have sufficed when college campuses were more ivory tower than lifeboat, educating future generations of scholars and other elites rather than trying to lift up a diverse group of students and prepare them for an increasingly complex world.

Studies have also shown that faculty members are more likely to try evidence-based teaching practices if they feel they have supportive colleagues and departments. Faculty learning communities can be particularly helpful, teaching experts say, because instructors meet regularly over a series of months to tackle complex challenges, often by exploring the research and experimenting with small changes to their teaching.

Reforming teaching evaluations so that they reflect the hard work of reading and reflecting on teaching scholarship is also a critical lever for change.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian