Mark Twain in his adventures of Tom Sawyer tells of Tom playing hooky from school, usually fishing or roaming in the woods. On a beautiful spring or fall day, life in a classroom was disconnected from a young boy’s need to get out and explore, and perhaps do something meaningful, such as catch a fish […]
Educating the Whole Person
As we look towards the new education, we see that our constant testing for facts and measuring academic skills have robbed our children of rich and meaningful learning experiences. For deep learning, we need to involve the whole person–mind, body, heart, and spirit. Human potential cannot be quantified. As we study history and explore human […]
Human Potential Begins at Birth
The human being grows based on experiences in his or her environment. Brain development and learning are based on an individual’s interaction with sensory information. Even in utero, our brains react, change and grow according to stimuli. Human beings are born to connect positively to the people and objects in their immediate surroundings. We naturally […]
What Does Success Look Like?
In shaping the new education, we’ll need to understand key concepts: how learning takes place, how to create a new way of assuring proficiency, how to stock each student’s box of learning tools, how to allow for deep learning time on a daily and multi-year level, as well as how to appreciate the uniqueness of […]
Understanding How Learning Takes Place
In our model of exponential education, our methods of teaching and learning will be scientific in approach and execution. We’ll understand how children learn, and we will teach using principles, methods and techniques based on observable ways that children and adults learn best. Our schools will focus on helping children and adults have the tools […]
A New Grading System
In our education for a new world, we learn to respect and honor the uniqueness of our children, while giving students, teachers and parents the time to learn and forge partnerships. In this new system, children possess a set of age-appropriate tools to organize thoughts and actions, to problem solve, to foster self-expression and to […]
Students Need Learning Tools
As human beings, the problem solvers, we need learning tools that will help us organize our thinking and actions, tools that help us with self-expression, tools that help us learn to problem solve while digging out facts and tools that help us prepare for performance of our goals and objectives. In our current educational system, […]
Learning Requires Deep Time
Research shows that to master a subject requires 10,000 hours of concentrated practice. At 40 hours per week, 50 weeks a year, we’d need 5 years to become a master. Ratchet that time down to 20 hours per week and we are looking at 10 years. Ten hours a week of practice, we’ll need 20 […]
Every Brain Is Unique
We say that every snowflake is unique. We also say that every person is unique. We need to start walking our talk. Every person is born to a unique set of circumstances, time, place, family, natural affinities, intrinsic motivations, attraction to objects, activities and people in our environments. Fifty factors in different combinations would give […]
Towards the New Education
Exponential Education: Releasing Human Potential Remember that moment playing tic-tac-toe when you discovered if you were the first one to mark a square, you could beat your opponent? If you always won, what was the fun of that? It was on to bigger and better games. In the movie, War Games, a computer designed to […]