4 Visionary Conference Mindsets

Reposted from Velvet Chainsaw:

Vision…it’s easy to talk about. It’s hard to create and implement. And it’s often even harder to upgrade. What’s your vision for the 21st Century conference? How are conferences evolving? As the new year starts, there’s no time like the present to think about creating a fresh vision and adopting a new frame of mind for your next conference.

The world continues to evolve at a rapid and accelerated pace. Conferences are in a unique position to evolve to reflect societal changes or become prehistoric monuments of the past. The best visionary conference organizers fuel innovations inside great meetings. These visionary leaders have moved beyond operational effectiveness. They are using new tools and new points of view to meet their attendees’ needs.

When a conference organizer combines their team’s energy, vision and intelligence with the right 21st Century conference organizer mindset and tools, they can create remarkably powerful forces. Here are four visionary leadership mindsets today’s conference organizers should foster and implement…

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Sackstein: 11 Tips to Upgrade Your Classroom to the 21st Century

Reposted from Starr Sackstein’s Blog:

Change should be the only tradition educators adhere to.

John Dewey said, “The self, is not something ready-made, but something continuously made through choice of action.”  And since education is not ready-made either, we need to continuously grow as educators to help our students develop as people.

Education, therefore must be in a constant state of maturation and growth completely contingent upon the time and place it is happening in. In this way, we can raise and nurture vitality in our students to help them become productive members of current society.

Maria Montessori said, “Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment.”

As educators, each of us must aspire to develop with the times we are teaching in. The 21st century is rich with new and exciting tools in technology that we can no longer ignore and why should we? Outlawing electronics is school is ridiculous when most students have them and need to learn to use them appropriately. We could harness these tools and use them the engage and teach students more effectively rather than use them as other reason for detention.

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21st Century Classroom Design Cultivates Collaboration [VIDEO 2:56]

There is a new innovation zone in Sakamaki Hall on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa campus that includes three new classroom spaces—and these are not your mom and dad’s college classrooms. They feature easy-to-move, comfortable, flexible furniture that allows for multiple seating and standing options; walls and walls of white boards and sliding plexiglass surfaces to write on; the latest technologies for content display and sharing; bright rooms filled with natural light, ample outlets and a lot of space to move around.

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21st Century Work: Career-Readiness Isn’t What It Used To Be [INFOGRAPHIC]

Thinking of jobs, careers, and pay is–by some–being replaced with the idea of work, relationships, and meaning. Technology and the resulting connectivity are a part of this. In the 21st century, we all have personal “brands”–digital footprints that precede and proceed us, leaving a record of our interactions and ideas for anyone to see. The concept of career-readiness is changing because how we live and work is changing. Traditionally, this conversation is reduced to a “characteristics of” dialogue, where we promote ideas like collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. The more precise we can be as educators in our views of what work is actually becoming, the better we can prepare students for that always-changing reality.

Creating The Education System We Need

Reposted from MindShift:

“The problem is not to get incrementally better with our current education system,” said Tony Wagner, expert in residence at Harvard’s Innovation Lab. “The problem is to reimagine it.” Wagner is not the first to call for a  make-over of the education system, and he certainly isn’t the first to advocate for content that connects with students in authentic ways or that teaches real world skills. His voice joins with the countless educators clamoring for the freedom to pursue those same goals.

To transform education in ways that have impact, a bottom-up and top-down strategy should be implemented, Wagner said. If parents, students and teachers make their voices heard about what true accountability would look like, they could change the conversation. But the bottom-up strategy will only work, Wagner said, if it’s accompanied by business leaders clearly articulating the outcomes they’d like to see and helping align accountability to those outcomes.

“We need teachers and parents to advocate for a better system,” Wagner said. And perhaps most importantly, students need a voice as education goes through major changes. “We’re not asking students at all about what they think about the quality of their own learning and about what they aspire to learn,” Wagner said.”

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