Whole Child Education

Written by Andy Hargreaves, the Thomas More Brennan Chair in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. This article originally appeared on Education Week's Finding Common Ground blog.

Woody Allen quipped that when we face a crossroads in life that leads to utter hopelessness or total extinction, we should choose wisely between them. Yogi Berra said that if we come to a fork in the road, we should take it. When Eric Clapton went down to the crossroads, he just fell down on his knees.

In 2014, the future of teaching is at a gigantic global crossroads, but the choices need not be as oddball as the ones that the ABC's of Allen, Berra and Clapton offer us! Last week, the Unite for Quality Education movement, organized by the global teachers' union organization, Education International, met in Montreal to advance its campaign of providing universal and free access to quality teachers to all students. This is a bold goal—not just access to education, good or bad, in huge classes or less, with properly qualified teachers or not; but access to quality education and quality teachers for everyone.

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Post written by Mikaela Dwyer, a journalism student at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. She considers herself a human rights activist and spends her time volunteering on campus and with various local nonprofits. After graduation, Dwyer hopes to join the Peace Corps and then become an investigative journalist for human rights issues.

Brian K. Perkins, director of the Urban Education Leadership Program at Columbia University Teachers College Department of Organization and Leadership, challenged his audience at the 2014 ASCD Annual Conference to think forward about what educators can do today for tomorrow's learners. He explained that innovation is key and reassured the audience that when he says "innovation," he does not mean "improvement." Improvement is just doing better what one is doing already. Innovation is a new solution to a new challenge.

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Post written by Laura Varlas

At the recent ASCD Annual Conference in Los Angeles, Calif., ASCD Executive Director and CEO Dr. Gene R. Carter convened an international panel of education leaders from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada. Although their contexts differ, they share many of the same challenges as U.S. educators, and their global perspective provided a new lens for considering common themes in education. Here were some of the panel's responses.

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Post written by Lora M. Hodges for Northeast Foundation for Children/Responsive Classroom, a whole child partner organization.

Morale can be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. When you walk into a school and everything immediately feels calm, safe, respectful, rich with learning, you know you're standing in a school with high morale.

That's exactly how you'd feel if you were to walk in to one of the many schools in the nation using the research-based Responsive Classroom approach. You'd see and hear teachers showing patience, kindness, and respect toward each other and toward students. You'd observe engaging lessons in classrooms. Throughout the school you'd hear adults using positive language and drawing forth positive behaviors from students. You'd get the clear sense the adults like their jobs and the children want to be at school.

This is positive school culture. This is high morale. And this is indispensable to students' school success.

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At the recent ASCD Leader to Leader (L2L) conference, attendees had a series of passionate unconference conversations. Several groups refined their thoughts into a series of presentations to share with other attendees in an "idea marketplace." During the idea marketplace, unconference groups presented for four rounds of 10-minute sessions, giving their peers the opportunity to learn from several groups in one session.

This post, written by Jason Ellingson, an ASCD Emerging Leader and past president of Iowa ASCD, shares his group's experience. Join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #ASCDL2L.

If the ladder is leaning on the wrong structure, it doesn't really matter if you can climb it.

At ASCD's L2L conference, participants were presented with an education forecast by the KnowledgeWorks organization that demonstrated a significant shift in the workforce and our education system. Based on the presentation, a group of us decided to focus on what new system of education would be needed to fairly prepare our students for this new workforce and new society.

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Caught up in the middle of the debates and discussions about education reform over the past few years lies a fundamental difference in how people view education. Is it a system designed for sorting or is it a system designed for learning?

Many of the reforms and innovations that are proposed appear to slot education into the sorting category rather than the learning category. Whether it is an emphasis on high-stakes testing or the expansion of fast-track teacher training programs, both of these education trends appear to be designed to test and label rather than to help them learn and grow.

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