Posts under ‘secondary school renewal’

Canadian Alanna Mitchell, this year’s winner of the Atkinson Fellowship in public policy named brains as the secret to better schools. Not all agree.
Mitchell recalled a Minister of Education who asked a neuroscientist: “The brain? What does the brain have to do with education?” In my renewal work across many countries I heard similar [...]

Government Funds Promote Failing Secondary Schools
People say stimulus money simply creates new layers of bureaucracy that prolong broken secondary school programs. My question is: How will the White House Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education support teens to climb new mental  peaks?  Will successful schools proliferate through fast growing charters?
President [...]

Written By Ellen Weber, PhD and Robyn McMaster, PhD
Higher Education and Brain Based Benefits

Challenges of Change
Renewal is to the university community today what Renaissance was to the Middle Ages. Both encompass a resurgence of learning. Both tap into more potential from the human brain. To reconfigure university teaching for a rebirth [...]

Consider current higher education communities in crisis, where one dean said, We pretend to teach them, they pretend to learn. Have you seen the disconnect between learning and leading change for the 21st Century?
Yet normal brain activity is now observable to show how humans acquire and use knowledge. How will neuro discoveries impact higher [...]

What makes MITA renewal so different from other top leadership and learning improvement models?

Thanks to Dr. Robyn McMaster’s masterful handiwork with cameras and talented online solutions, we’re able to carry on the MITA renewal conversation I’d been looking forward to for some time. Hope you’ll jump in to share your renewal stories, so we can [...]

What would it take to renew university learning and draw more brainpower from learners and leaders? We know adult intelligence improves – from MDs such as Dan Siegel, Director of  Mindsight Inst at UCLA School of Medicine, who draws on recent science to harness the brain’s circuitry. The results?
Research offers increased brainpower opportunities that [...]

Few disagree on an urgent need to increase America’s science and math proficiency in order to compete in our fast paced world. But less art?
Sadly, the arts become an easy target when budgets get slashed. Yet both multi-dimensional advances of art along with empirical rigor of science both challenge and transform high performing minds. Like [...]

When government tosses out money as renewal incentives, in hope that dollars buy benefits, bureaucracies respond with inferiority.  Rewards and pay-for-performance practices work against renewal, according to Alfie Kohn who draws from hundreds of studies. Do you agree?
Have leaders of educational institutes removed themselves from the heart of problems ordinary people face? Sadly,  many leaders [...]

When you rev up mental equipment daily to either sink or swim, you discover how creativity and curiosity will trump criticism and intimidation. How then can you experience mental power in settings where no brain is left behind?
One friend and fellow leader Dave Caiazza, put it this way:

Work against the dangerous twins of jealousy and [...]

To renew with the brain in mind is to approach teens and teaching with new vision, diverse tools, and higher expectations for all:

Teens bring unique knowledge to technology and renewal both recognizes and uses their technical skills. (Braden Husdal in Teaching starts from Brain Down)
Repetition is less effective for teens than teaching math [...]

Imagine a climate of peace, with humility that inspires, and people who recognize talents, and you’ve just begun to awaken intrapersonal intelligence. Build healthy relationships that shape character, and your brain cultivates new neuron pathways toward spirit and highest values such as caring in your character and in others. Or trust that turned LA’s most [...]

Will President Obama’s $4 billion incentive for school reform help teens use more robust brainpower to reach their real potential? Not every teen will win the title world’s best brain as Julia Chartrove won at the International Brain Research Organization. Yet all can draw on more brainpower to reach higher motivation and achievement. It may [...]

We see too many high school faculty fall prey to fatalities that shrink progress and rob brainpower. While progressive education is hard to beat, it’s also hard to find. It’s time to help steer educational organizations through bureaucratic barriers and beyond tough economies in order to reclaim brainpower for learning and growth. Key is to [...]

New York burns while Albany fiddles. News of political infighting, stalemates, accusations and posturing flood us daily, while opportunities for greatness fade for NY. A closer look, though, shows bureaucracy working against ethical brainpower. How so? 
Neuro discoveries uncover organizational problems and possibilities.
1. Secondary schools and universities in crisis continue to downsize rather than reconfigure [...]

Some insist that tenure’s the way expert faculty ensure free speech without fear of losing jobs. Others protest that tenure keeps ineffective people and blocks brainpower for new initiatives. With more campuses being sued, and relevancy questioned it may be time to take another look and what learners expect and what classes offer.
Today, for instance [...]

Imagine reinvigorated secondary schools or universities, designed with each learner’s brain in mind. It’s time for the death of education to become the dawn of learning. Time for learning renewal to reinvent your entire community! If you see past broken systems, or catch a glimpse of talented people ahead, you’ve already spotted the brain’s plasticity [...]

Have you experienced mental power that bubbles over in circles where no brain is left behind? Interactive sessions where creativity trumps criticism, and diversity’s the handmaiden of dignity and innovative virtue?
If so, would you agree that brilliant solutions tend to flow from pools just outside of the prevailing thought – where:

1. No Brain Left [...]

The mark of a successful secondary school is motivated teens achieving at the peaks. Does it happen in your community?
This summer launches Rochester’s first MITA Brain Institute – custom designed for secondary faculty, and poised to reconfigure learning – with the brain in mind.
Participants will create curriculum together to jumpstart teen brains for higher motivation [...]

Read vision statements  that affirm  secondary and university renewal, and you’ll spot innovative learning opportunities for all. Observe classes in these same schools, though, and practical results appear far less impressive. Have you noticed that a school’s intent, and its classroom practices too often differ when it comes to renewed learning and assessment opportunities for [...]

Surveys show that few parents of teens see any incentives to enter secondary schools, and yet LA’s worst school reached out to parents and became the best.  It turns out that many absentee adults disliked high school as their teens do, and tell you that not much changed since – regarding secondary school failure.
Interestingly,  research [...]