Unpacking All Chart Paper

Unpacking the Word All

ALL: is it just the latest slogan or term that we throw around loosely in education? It sounds good: ALL students college and career ready, what is our school doing to prepare ALL students, ALL students prepared for a bright and successful future. But do we really mean ALL? Why should we unpack the word…

CIE ESD cover

Essential Skills and Dispositions: Developmental Frameworks for Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Self-Direction

This set of developmental frameworks was created to facilitate discussion within communities of practice and to enhance a shared understanding of the dynamic nature of four essential skills—collaboration, communication, creativity, and self-direction in learning. The frameworks define components inherent to each skill and describe performance across a beginner to emerging expert progression, informed by research on the development of expertise. Unlike discipline-specific learning progressions and rubrics, the developmental progressions reflect components essential to the skill itself and describe growth dependent on many years of active exploration, experimentation, setbacks, and reflection.

Michael Their in Barcelona

Global Citizenship: A Study in Progress

Last month, I traveled to Barcelona, Spain, to conduct a unique, mixed-methods study of metacognitive skills at the International Baccalaureate (IB) World Student Conference. I surveyed global citizenship levels among IB Diploma Programme students from 19 nations who attended the weeklong, project-based learning experience. I conducted two diverse focus groups: one with students representing eight…