Global Educator, Curriculum Developer, and Trainer
In the past few weeks, I’ve begun writing a series of 15 blog posts for Quarter Zero’s Idea Board. These articles all target major challenges facing anyone trying to teach/coach teenage entrepreneurs. They have been pretty easy to write because frankly, there are a lot of challenges. For example, #1 is about Abolishing the Passive…
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I’m reading Tim Brown’s book Change by Design, part of my prep work for my job as Chief Educator-in-Residence at Quarter Zero, and I keep wondering: What if we used design thinking to tackle everyday problems in schools? For example, tardies. Tardies drive high school teachers and administrators crazy for so many reasons, but here…
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Note: This post was originally published on Quarter Zero’s Idea Board. As Chief Educator-in-Residence for Quarter Zero, I’ll be posting there every 2-3 weeks. I’ll also continue to post to this blog and NeverBore.org, but possibly less frequently. Five years ago, my high school student entrepreneurship program nearly folded. We’d had a lot of failures…
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“When you start talking about authentic instruction and assessment, the math teachers in the room stop listening.” Not true for all math teachers, I know. But one math teacher pulled me aside after a recent workshop to share this observation. Math teachers — especially those teaching higher level courses like trigonometry and calculus — know their…
Read MoreShould high school students work in teams — or solo? When I was a student, we did about 90 percent of our work alone. With the exception of lab work in science and the occasional English group project, we were expected to learn independently, so we would be prepared for individual success later. Back then,…
Read MoreOne of my favorite lines in Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk: Do Schools Kill Creativity? is when he points out that schools are really really good at preparing students to become professors. And, I would add, teachers. Academia is nothing if not self-perpetuating. We teach students to write papers and lab reports in styles that…
Read MoreWriting SMART goals — “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound” — is now a fall rite of passage for public school teachers, right up there with crafting a syllabus, assigning seats and putting up bulletin boards. This process always strikes me as perfunctory. Do SMART goals really get us anywhere? Or is this just another…
Read MoreMy school district spends about $13,000/student each year. President Trump’s children went to private schools that cost $30,000-$50,000. Baron’s elementary school in New York charges $47,000 per student this year. So I wonder what our president means when he says our public schools are “flush with funds”? I wonder what it would be like to…
Read More“If a student got 100% in your class by delegating all his tasks/homework and papers to a virtual assistant and spent under $20 for the entire semester, is that bad? … Because in the real world, you are the most efficient employee of all time.” Will Tjernlund, a former student, posed this question to me…
Read MoreWhat are the best new ideas in education? Who has the solutions that will motivate and inspire today’s students? This week, several of my Penn classmates attended the ASU GSV education technology summit in San Diego. According to the summit’s promotional materials, the program included “the top minds in talent and education from around the…
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MARTHA RUSH 