Female scientists challenge stereotypes | Not the Science Type — from 3M.com
Female scientists challenge stereotypes and blaze paths for future generations in this 3M-produced docuseries

Excerpt:

STEM education has an access issue: let’s change that.

Around the world, people believe the we need more people in STEM careers. Eighty-seven percent of people believe we need to do more to encourage and retain girls in STEM education. At the same time, barriers remain – 73% of people believe underrepresented minorities often lack equal access STEM education.

Not The Science Type gets to the heart of access and gender inequity in STEM education and STEM fields. This four-part docuseries features four female scientists who are challenging stereotypes and confronting gender, racial and age discrimination as they rise to prominence.

Not The Science Type highlights four brilliant minds, showcasing women who break down boundaries within their fields – biology, engineering and science and technology-based applications.
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Female scientists challenge stereotypes and blaze paths for future generations in this 3M-produced docuseries.

While each woman has taken a different path to pursue scientific excellence, they are bound by the common experience of feeling excluded, or “not the type” in traditionally homogenous fields.

 

14 charts this year that helped us better understand COVID’s impact on students, teachers, & schools — from the 74million.org by  Kevin Mahnken

Excerpt:

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects.

From DSC:
While not minimizing the impact of the “learning loss” that is often written about, I do wonder if maybe the types of learning going on during the pandemic weren’t captured on a standardized test. Maybe the types of learning that our youth and families learned about help set them up for our present VOCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. And for a future where change doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Some of the types of learning that might not show up on the standardized tests include:

  • Dealing with life’s challenges and tumultuous changes
  • Being flexible
  • Adapting
  • The importance of having sufficient Internet connections and the corresponding hardware and software to keep on learning remotely
  • Where or to whom does one go to for help?

Also, as has been said elsewhere, bashing online learning or virtual instruction is often unfair. The remote learning that teachers and faculty members were thrust into lacked appropriate instructional design. Many teachers and faculty members hadn’t yet been trained on how to put together solid online-based courses and/or to use the tools that are required to offer such courses. Also, many in society didn’t have Internet access (or insufficient access), a quiet place to study and/or participate in online-based learning.

 
  • From DSC:
    I continue to think about the idea of wiping the slate completely clean. If we were to design a lifelong learning ecosystem, what would it look like? How could we apply Design Thinking to this new slate/canvas?

Perhaps we could start by purposefully creating more pathways to weave in and out of the various siloes — and then come back into the “silos” with new ideas, knowledge, and experiences:

  • PreK-12
  • Higher education
  • Vocational programs
  • Business and the corporate world
  • Government
  • Communities of practice
  • Other

Integrate apprenticeships, jobs, sabbaticals, rest, purpose, passions, intrinsic motivations, other into this lifelong learning ecosystem. Take one’s new learning back to one’s former silo(s) and improve things therein. Such a design would help keep curricula and learning/training environments up-to-date and relevant.

It would also allow people more pathways through their careers — and to keep learning while doing real-world projects. It would help people — and institutions— grow in many ways.

 

Thriving education systems, thriving youth — from events.economist.com by Economist Impact

Some of the key topics to be discussed include:

  • What are the challenges in how we measure learning outcomes today, and how does this need to transform?
  •  What is a learning ecosystem? What does a successful learning ecosystem look like?  
  • What factors enable the development of thriving learning ecosystems?  
  • Who are the key stakeholders that make up the learning ecosystem? How do different stakeholders see their role in the learning ecosystem?
  • Which national policies need to be in place to support effective education ecosystems?
  • What information and data do we need to assess how well learning ecosystems are performing?
  • What data do we need to collect so that we don’t perpetuate traditional approaches to defining and measuring success? 

 

New Report from Global Google Research Project Considers the ‘Future of Education’ — from thejournal.com by Kristal Kuykendall
Global Trends and ‘Preparing for the Future’ Highlighted in First of Three Reports

As we march towards a radically different future, what should the role of education be and how might it look? To begin to answer this question, we collaborated with research partner Canvas8 to conduct a global study in 24 countries that synthesizes insights from 94 educational experts, two years of peer-reviewed academic literature, and a media narrative analysis across the education sector.

Excerpts:

Google for Education has released the first report from a massive, two-year study considering the role of education in a “radically different future,” and what that might look like.

Part 1 of Google’s Future of Education report focuses on big-picture themes seen as most likely to impact education and the future workforce in the coming years and decades.

Parts two and three of the Future of Education project will be released in the coming months, said Magiera, who was a K–12 classroom teacher for a decade in New York City and Chicago before working as a district leader, a chief information officer, and as an advisor for the Obama administration’s ed tech planning efforts. Part two will focus on “evolving how we teach and learn” and part three will be about “reimagining the learning ecosystems and the spaces,” she said.

Reimagining Learning Ecosystems -- by Google for Education

 

 

How High School Should Change for an Era of AI and Robots — from edsurge.com by Jeffrey R. Young

Excerpt:

In other words, we have for the last century and a half in the knowledge economy been educating our students to become repositories of information—whether they’re lawyers or doctors [or engineers] and so forth. And then somebody pays them a great deal of money to extract some of that knowledge from their heads. What’s happening now is that’s being reposited in algorithms increasingly, and that’s only going to be more the case going forward, so that the most intelligent, capable medical diagnostician, I predict, will be a computer somewhere in the next 20 years.

What is the role of the doctor then? The doctor’s role is to be a knowledgeable interpreter of that algorithmic diagnosis—to check it, to make sure that there wasn’t a snafu, and to make sure that there is no social bias in the outcome. And also to help interpret that into a regimen for treatment and healing on the part of the patient in a human-connected, empathic way.

And [at Iowa Big], one of the very first questions that one of her teachers asked her was, ‘What makes you mad?’

The systems that we have for public education are becoming more rigidified, not more experimental and resilient. And they’re becoming increasingly non-functional. And I believe they’re going to face some sort of systemic collapse.

And here are several other items from the education space:

All Teacher Shortages Are Local, New Research Finds — from the74million.org by Kevin Mahnken
In a study released [on 12/1/22], researchers show that teacher vacancy levels vary drastically between schools in the same communities

Excerpt:

K-12 teacher shortages — one of the most disputed questions in education policy today — are an undeniable reality in some communities, a newly released study indicates. But they are also a hyper-local phenomenon, the authors write, with fully staffed schools existing in close proximity to those that struggle to hire and retain teachers.

The paper, circulated Thursday through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, uses a combination of survey responses and statewide administrative records from Tennessee to create a framework for identifying how and where teacher shortages emerge.

Why Are Americans Fleeing Public Schools? — from washingtonpost.com by John D. Harden and Steven Johnson
Seven parents on choosing private education for their kids

Excerpt:

The pandemic transformed the landscape of K-12 education. Some parents withdrew their kids from public school and placed them into private or home schools. Their reasons varied: Many preferred private schools that offered in-person instruction; others distrusted public schools’ pandemic precautions.

It’s not clear whether those trends will stick, and the factors are complex. So far, data show that since 2019, private enrollment is up, public enrollment is down and home schooling has become more popular. Families flocked to private and home schools at the greatest rate in a decade, according to American Community Survey estimates from the U.S. Census. The government projects that K-12 public school enrollment — already facing demographic pressures — will drop further to about 46 million students by fall 2030, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, reversing decades of growth.

 

 

Mississippi microschools are expanding education options for families — from spn.org by Kerry McDonald

Excerpt:

When Stephanie Harper decided to open Harper Learning Academy in Byram, Mississippi in August, her goal was to create a small, personalized educational setting in which her daughter would thrive. Conventional classroom environments weren’t a good match for Harper’s child. They also weren’t working well for the daughter of Harper’s colleague, Tekeeta Funchess. Harper and Funchess had been longtime teachers in the Jackson Public Schools before they left their jobs to provide educational consulting services to public school districts through the firm Harper founded in 2016.

As they worked together, they realized their daughters were experiencing similar challenges in standard school settings. “We’re mothers with children who learn differently who are trying to improve the system but realized that the system wasn’t working for our children,” said Harper, who is a certified teacher with a Ph.D. in education. They also suspected it wasn’t working for many other children as well.

 

Resources for Computer Science Education Week (December 5-11, 2022) — with thanks to Mark Adams for these resources

Per Mark, here are a few resources that are intended to show students how computers can become part of their outside interests as well as in their future careers.

Educating Engineers

Maryville University

Fullstack Academy

Also see:

Computer Science Education Week is December 5-11, 2022

 

Homeschooling high school with interest-led learning — from raisinglifelonglearners.com by Colleen Kessler

Excerpt:

There is a misconception that interest-led learning is not appropriate for a high school education in your homeschool. The good news is that all the same benefits of interest-led learning still apply in the middle and high school years.

Think of an interest-led homeschool as one that functions more as a college than a high school. Just as a college student declares a major and the bulk of their study is in that topic area with supplemental general education, your interest-led high school can function the same way.

Allowing interests to guide the educational path you take in your high school has tremendous benefits including:

    • Less resistance
    • Less learner anxiety
    • Increased self-confidence in learning
    • More in-depth studies in topics of interest
    • Self-motivated learning that can be applied in later college and career settings
 

Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation— from nytimes.com; video by Agnes Walton and Nic Pollock

Excerpt:

A survey of National Education Association members at the beginning of the year revealed an unsettling truth: More than half of the respondents said they were looking for a way out. That’s an astounding number of unhappy teachers. If they all quit, it would leave millions of students in the lurch.

But were these just empty threats? At the start of this school year, we spoke to over 50 educators in almost 20 states to find out. The picture they painted was far bleaker than we could have imagined: Empty classrooms, kids in crisis, and teachers who can’t survive another day on the job — that’s the reality of American education today.

And from the UK, see the following:
The word OUCH! comes to my mind here — for this item from the UK and from the above item from the US. The politicians are going to need to back off and let the teachers do their jobs. Or we may not have many people who want to go into teaching anymore. The current situation is not only bad for the teachers, it’s bad for the youth/students.

 

Homeschooling High School With Interest-Led Learning — from raisinglifelonglearners.com by Colleen Kessler

Excerpt:

Think of an interest-led homeschool as one that functions more as a college than a high school. Just as a college student declares a major and the bulk of their study is in that topic area with supplemental general education, your interest-led high school can function the same way.

Also relevant/see:

This approach allows you to help them develop their interests, communicate that you see their interests as valuable, and it gives your child the chance to follow their own paths of interest. It’s an outstanding way to facilitate a self-motivated, self-directed learner and thinker. 

 

Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students — from by Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell
Federal law promises homeless children an equal shot at education. Many fall through the cracks

Excerpt:

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of district-level federal education data suggests roughly 300,000 students entitled to essential rights reserved for homeless students have slipped through the cracks, unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them.

Some 2,400 districts — from regions synonymous with economic hardship to big cities and prosperous suburbs — did not report having even one homeless student despite levels of financial need that make those figures improbable.

And many more districts are likely undercounting the number of homeless students they do identify. In nearly half of states, tallies of student homelessness bear no relationship with poverty, a sign of just how inconsistent the identification of kids with unstable housing can be.

 

In elementary classrooms, demand grows for play-based learning — from hechingerreport.org by Ariel Gilreath
Play supporters point to improved literacy, fewer achievement gaps, and better motor skills for students

Excerpt:

It can be difficult to explain what play-based learning looks like, said Mara Krechevsky, senior researcher at Project Zero, an education research group in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Over the past seven years, Krechevsky and her research team have been working on a project called the Pedagogy of Play, studying play-based learning at schools in Boston, Denmark, South Africa and Colombia.

Through their research, Krechevsky’s group came up with three basic tenets for playful learning: students should be able to help lead their own learning, explore the unknown, and find joy. Under this framework, play time doesn’t have to be the reward for completing work and learning. Play can actually be the work, Krechevsky said.

Addendums on 11/20/22:

 

National Apprenticeship Week [November 14-20, 2022] — from apprenticeship.gov

Excerpt:

What is National Apprenticeship Week?
NAW is a nationwide celebration where industry, labor, equity, workforce, education, and government leaders host events to showcase the successes and value of Registered Apprenticeship for re-building our economy, advancing racial and gender equity, and supporting underserved communities. NAW is an opportunity to highlight how Registered Apprenticeship, a proven and industry-driven training model, provides a critical talent pipeline that can help to address some of our nation’s pressing workforce challenges such as rebuilding our country’s infrastructure, addressing critical supply chain demands, supporting a clean energy workforce, modernizing our cybersecurity response, and responding to care economy issues.

Also relevant/see:

  • Understanding New Collar Apprenticeships — from workshift.opencampusmedia.org; requires you to complete a form to get the guide
    Apprenticeships aren’t what they used to be. Long a pathway into the trades, apprenticeships now are also preparing Americans for new-collar jobs in fields from healthcare to tech. And governments and companies are putting big money into modernizing, diversifying, and growing the system—hoping to change the face of apprenticeships. This guide takes a look at this evolving landscape.
 

Our mission is to empower people with disabilities to live their best life! We do this by showcasing adaptive products.

The product categories out at allaccesslife.org

 


Addendum on 11/14/22:

clusiv.io — as mentioned at The Accelerator at WGU Labs Invests in Platform for the Blind or Visually Impaired

Clusiv is an online learning platform for the blind and visually impaired that teaches occupational training, technology skills, and educational courses to empower employment. We help remove barriers to successful employment by teaching the skills you need to be equipped for the modern workforce.


 

How AI will change Education: Part I | Transcend Newsletter #59 — from transcend.substack.com by Alberto Arenaza; with thanks to GSV’s Big 10 for this resource

Excerpt:

You’ve likely been reading for the last few minutes my arguments for why AI is going to change education. You may agree with some points, disagree with others…

Only, those were not my words.

An AI has written every single word in this essay up until here.

The only thing I wrote myself was the first sentence: Artificial Intelligence is going to revolutionize education. The images too, everything was generated by AI.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian