Timeless Learning How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

by Socol, Ira; Moran, Pam; Ratliff, Chad

• ISBN13: 9781119461692
• ISBN10: 1119461693
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2018-08-07
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Summary

Reinvent public schools with proven, innovative practices

Our homes, communities, and the world itself need the natural assets our children bring with them as learners, and which they often lose over time on the assembly line that pervades most of the public education system today. We see no actions as more important in school than developing, supporting, and reinforcing children's sense of agency, the value of their voices, and their potential to influence their own communities.

In Timeless Learning, an award-winning team of leaders, Chief Technology Officer Ira Socol, Superintendent Pam Moran, and Lab Schools Principal Chad Ratliff demonstrate how you can implement innovative practices that have shown remarkable success. The authors use progressive design principles to inform pathways to disrupt traditions of education today and show you how to make innovations real that will have a timeless and meaningful impact on students, keeping alive the natural curiosity and passion for learning with which children enter school.

• Discover the power of project-based and student-designed learning
• Find out what “maker learning” entails
• Launch connected and interactive digital learning
• Benefit from the authors’ “opening up learning” space and time

Using examples from their own successful district as well as others around the country, the authors create a deep map of the processes necessary to move from schools in which content-driven, adult-determined teaching has been the traditional norm to new learning spaces and communities in which context-driven, child-determined learning is the progressive norm.

Author Biography

IRA SOCOL is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Albemarle County Public Schools, and was named one of North America's "Top 30 Technologists, Transformers and Trailblazers" for 2017 by the Center for Digital Education.

PAM MORAN, EdD, is superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia and was the 2016 Virginia Superintendent of the Year and a top four finalist for the AASA National Superintendent of the Year in 2016.

CHAD RATLIFF, MBA, MEd, is the Lab Schools Principal for Albemarle County Public Schools. Chad was named one of the nation's "20 to Watch" educators by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) in 2017.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Foreword by Yong Zhao xv

Introduction: How We Came to See Learning and School 1

1 All Means All: Cherishing Children 15

2 A Little History: Why We Are Here 39

3 Change: Liberating Learners and Learning 67

4 The Education World Learners Want 93

5 Envision All Things Future 121

6 Learning Ready for Today’s Real World 147

7 Break Down Walls: Opening Spaces for Learning 173

8 Timeless 197

9 Where Design Begins 223

10 Zero-Based Design: Engineering Biodiversity of Learning 247

Afterword: The Next Generation 277

Index 289