Secondary / High School

Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap

From the foreward:

Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices.

In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James explores the nature of their thinking about online privacy, property, and participation.

She discusses three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people she knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from “what’s theirs is theirs” to “free for all”; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is “just a joke”; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions. ISBN: 9780262028066

The Color Investigation

10 short videos by Melissa Rivard that track the development from start to finish of a Boston Public School preschool class's investigation into color, accompanied by a Teacher Study Guide. Also on this site is a 5-minute video of two kindergarten classrooms who participated in a Making Learning Visible course in which children created "how-to" books that were ultimately displayed at the Boston Children's Museum.

Art Works at Work: The Impact of Workplace Art

This paper explores the impact that employees and board members of an organization believe the art in their workplace has on their experience at work and identifies the exhibition’s features salient to their experience of the art. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 affiliates of an Australian organization with an institutional art collection. The interview data were transcribed and analyzed using thematic analysis by two researchers, with a final inter-rater reliability of 0.96. The results showed that respondents believe there are five main ways they are impacted by the art in their workplace: the art promotes social interactions, elicits emotional responses, facilitates personal connection-making, generally enhances the workplace environment and fosters learning. Participants indicated the salient features of the collection are its changing nature, creativity, diversity, quality and connection to the organization’s mission. The findings suggest that there may be a number of positive impacts on employees and other affiliates when art is present in the workplace, including interpersonal learning and mission-related content learning. The findings suggest that art connected to the organization’s mission, rotating exhibitions and diverse collections are valued by workplace viewers. The study highlights the importance of the aesthetic environment in the workplace and is one of the first to examine artworks in the work setting.

Supporting Learning in Groups in the Staffroom (Ch. 12)

Tools included in this section of Visible Learners:

- "Throwing Your Money Away": Exploring Group Learning and Documentation

- Designing and Facilitating Adult Study Groups

- Looking at Documentation: The Collaborative Assessment Conference

- Creading Documentation or Public Viewing Protocols

Visible Learners: Promoting Reggio-Inspired Approaches in All Schools

Inspired by the innovative educational philosophy that originated in Reggio Emilia, a small city in Italy, Visible Learners offers research-based practices for fostering learning in groups through documentation. In this approach, first developed during a long-term collaboration between researchers at Harvard's Project Zero and Reggio educators, learning becomes a visible activity that develops students' intellectual capacities as well as their individual and group identities as learners. Visible classrooms can be identified by five key principles—that learning is purposeful, social, representational, empowering, and emotional. The authors define each principle using illustrative learning portraits, quotes from students and teachers, pictures, reflections, and examples of student work. Additionally, the authors offer teachers and administrators practical ways to enhance learning by increasing collaboration and critical thinking across grade levels and subject matter. Also included is a section containing dozens of tools for making learners and learning visible, incorporating guidelines for the classroom and the staffroom as well as ideas for engaging students' families. Visible Learners shows how observing and documenting learning can change the nature of that learning, and asks teachers to look beyond surface to understand who their students are, what they come to know, and how they come to know it.  ISBN: 978-1118345696