CAROL’S SUMMARY:
Today’s generation of students loves video games and some companies are trying to put this passion “to good use.” In the article below, children “are playing educational video games as part of their school curriculum, in after-school programs or via the Web from home.” Sasha Barab, professor at Indiana University, created Quest Atlantis, a game that incorporates science. Barab states in the article, “Partly what I have to argue to teachers is that there’s value seeing that content bound up in a real-world story.” These educational video games are online for interaction and collaboration, use core subjects such as physics and math to finish a task or trial and work toward solving problems that relate to the real world. In Gamestar Mechanic players even have to defend their solutions to other Gamestar Mechanic players. Alan Gershenfiled, a former executive at Activision and the founder of E-Line Media, says “You’re essentially designing a digital system for others. That’s a very powerful 21st century skill.”

A New York City public school called Quest to Learn opened this fall and focuses on game-based learning. While this high initiative is a great start to engaging students in learning, how can traditional schools incorporate such educational video games in to their curriculum? How can publishers work to create content which truly involves students in creating their own learning? How will the role of teachers need to change to become a skilled facilitator given the scope of interactivity which technology provides?

ARTICLE:
New York Times
November 2, 2009
Educational Video Games Mix Cool With Purpose
By STEFANIE OLSEN

One of KC Phillips’s favorite video games is the Xbox shoot-’em-up Halo, because, he says, his dad taught him how to play it when he was younger.

Now 15 and a high school sophomore in Madison, Wis., KC views the game with a more discerning eye. Last year, he played Gamestar Mechanic, an educational video game that asks players to solve a set of puzzles in order to win enough power to design and create their own video games.

“Now every single time I play video games, I really think about how the designers built it and what mechanics went into it,” he said.

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com

Today’s commentary published in Education Week by Karen Chenowith, senior writer for the Education Trust Foundation, contains broad and profound implications supported by brain-based learning and cognitive research. In her observations of successful schools who work with disadvantaged students, she writes: “they based their teaching not on a preset philosophy, or a set of program prescriptions, but on what would best help their students learn” (italics mine). People often say that everyone can learn. Yet the reality is that everyone does learn. As Prentice Hall author, Dr. Lynn Quitman Troyka, writes in the introduction of some of her books, “Thinking is not something you choose to do any more than a fish chooses to live in water. To be human is to think.”

Indeed, the brain’s ability to act and react in ever-changing ways is known, in the scientific community, as “neuroplasticity.” This special characteristic allows the brain’s estimated 100 billion nerve cells, also called neurons (aka “gray matter”), to constantly create new pathways for neural communication and to rearrange existing ones throughout life, thereby aiding the processes of learning, memory, and adaptation through experience. Without the ability to make such functional changes, our brains would not be able to memorize a new fact or master a new skill, form a new memory or adjust to a new environment. The brain’s plasticity is the reason it can heal itself after stroke or injury and overcome addictions. According to Dr. Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself: “The brain is not ‘hardwired’ from birth, but holds a remarkable lifelong power to change—a phenomenon called ‘plasticity.’ Positive or negative environments, exercise, nurture, learning, and other experiences continue to change the brain throughout life.”

Which brings us back to today’s article. The reason a flexible approach to teaching works– as this article implies–is because students aren’t a one size fits all, nor is their intelligence fixed at birth. Everyone’s brain is unique and malleable for endless learning possibilities. As the principal at Imperial High School, Lisa Tabarez, in the Imperial Valley of California, quoted in this article said: “Every single student who comes before us has the ability to learn. As educators, we must accept our daily responsibility of taking students, at whatever level and place in their lives they may be, and helping them to learn—to learn how to become productive, contributing members of our society through the opportunity of education.”

• How can we ignite and nurture student minds and emotions to transform learning?
• How can the revolutionary findings in the field of neuroplasticity direct us to new possibilities for ‘rewiring’ the brain to help overcome learning disorders and to enhance memory, learning, and achievement in all learners?
• What are the implications of cognitive research for student success and transition programs, which seek to address opportunities and vulnerabilities during adolescence?

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ARTICLE:
Education Week
Published in Print: October 14, 2009
Commentary
Successful Schools Avoid False Choices
By Karin Chenoweth

I know I am not the first to notice that education as a field tends to get whipsawed between what seem like incompatible alternatives: We can teach phonics or surround children with literature; we can teach skills or content; we can prepare students for the workforce or for college; we can provide schools that are equitable or schools that are excellent. The examples are endless.

For the past five years, I have been examining schools that have, for the most part, sidestepped these battles. They are schools I have visited as part of my work for the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. The job involves identifying and writing about schools with significant populations of low-income children and children of color that are also high-achieving or rapidly improving. In many of these, just about all of the students meet or exceed state standards, and achievement gaps are narrow, or sometimes nonexistent.

To view this entire article visit www.edweek.org

CAROL’S SUMMARY
Chicago has been in the national and international news lately not only for losing the bid as host city for the 2016 summer Olympics, but for the tragic beating death of high school honor student, Derrion Albert, who was caught between two rival gangs on his way home from school on the city’s southside. Derrion’s murder is sparking a national conversation about youth violence. Many people compare the incident, which has been viewed by millions over YouTube, to Emmett Till’s brutal killing at the hands of white supremacists in 1955, when his open-casket funeral on television sparked the American Civil Rights Movement. Derrion was the third adolescent killed this school year. Since the beginning of 2007, close to 70 students have been murdered mostly on their way to or from school.

As the New York Times article below points out, youth violence isn’t only a Chicago problem; “it’s an American problem,” said Attorney General Eric H. Holder in his meeting yesterday with U.S. Secretary Arne Duncan, the former superintendent of Chicago Public Schools. As an admission counselor (who asked to not be identified) from another local high school on Chicago’s westside neighborhood said, “We’ve always heard of kids fighting kids, but they lived to tell about it. That’s not true anymore.”

Addressing such serious issues like youth violence requires support from many facets of society, including our school system. When former New York Times science journalist and co-founder of the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago) Daniel Goleman first coined the term emotional intelligence, he cited strong emotions as holding the potential for promoting great good in society as well as terrible atrocities, because some people use violence to release feelings of anger or frustration. LifeBound’s People Smarts for Teenagers program works with adolescents on developing self-awareness, as well as managing strong emotions. The principal at Skyway Elementary School in Colorado Springs, Patrick Webster, who used the People Smarts resources last spring told his counselor: “We have had ZERO disciplinary referrals from 6th grade this year, which is phenomenal.” In a typical time frame they would have received half a dozen by now.

As educators we need to cultivate a vision and establish a comprehensive game plan like they have in Colorado Springs for helping school communities curb violence and assess measurable goals. In addition to our resources for students and faculty, LifeBound provides programs for parents on coaching skills and other strategies so that they learn how to model the kinds of attitudes and behaviors they want their children to emulate. Children absorb how parents deal with a job layoff and other traumatic and stressful life events, and supporting parents in their roles is another effective way to stem the escalation of violence among school-aged children and teens.

For a review copy of People Smarts and more information about our programs for parents, please contact us by calling toll free 1.877.737.8510 or emailing contact@lifebound.com, and we’ll be glad to help you. Together we can answer the call to make a profound difference in our school communities.

ARTICLE:
Attorney General, in Chicago, Pledges Youth Violence Effort
By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: October 7, 2009

CHICAGO — Trying to spark what he called “a sustained national conversation” about youth violence, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. met with public school students and elected officials here Wednesday, pledging a heightened crime-fighting commitment from the federal government toward vulnerable children.

Mr. Holder, joined by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the former head of the local public schools, said the Obama administration was dedicated to being a full partner in the fight against youth violence, in part, because “too many of today’s victims become tomorrow’s criminals.”

To view this entire article visit www.nytimes.com