Building strong, healthy friendships from young

How do we help our kids build strong, healthy friendships? It begins by teaching and helping them to understand what constitutes a good friend. Here are 3 essential traits:

 1. Trustworthiness

Talk about words that define 'trustworthy', and actions that influence whether we trust a person or not (e.g. lying).
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To help your child understand the importance of being someone trustworthy, you can play-act different scenarios; this will allow them to experience the impact of their actions. You can then ask follow-up questions to reinforce how important it is to be trustworthy.

 2. Forgiveness

It can be difficult for children to understand this; it's far too easy for them say "I don't want to be friends with (name) anymore because he/she did (insert action here)." On the flip side, children are either unaware that they may have hurt their friend, or be afraid to admit a mistake.
Disagreements do happen; it's vital that we teach them to work out the conflicts on their own and to forgive each other.

Note: instead of instructing your child to solve the problem and to forgive/ask for forgiveness, help your child determine if the relationship is worth the effort. This will help to motivate the child in resolving the conflict and retaining the relationship.

 3. Graciousness

Children may be unsure of how they should interact with others who are not like them. Encourage your child to be open to potential friendships with various personalities; being gracious to everyone regardless of their popularity and personality is an important life lesson.

As the famous saying goes, "Don't draw lines (between people). Draw circles and be inclusive." You can brainstorm with your child ways to help others feel included in different social situations.

Relaxation is Good For Your Mind

                    

Find yourself flooded by to-do lists that never end? Too busy to even indulge in your hobbies? Maybe it is time to take a step back and have a look at your life. Is it all work and no play?

Life is not all about work and not having time to relax. In fact, overworking can cause undue stress, which can result in physical and health problems such as heart disease and depression.

Relaxation rejuvenates your mind and body, so set aside time to do something that you like and enjoy. Making time to relax energises your mind and body.

Furthermore, after a fun and rejuvenating break, you will feel refreshed and be ready to take on any challenges at work. So it does pay to have fun!

Relaxing is not a treat, but something that you need to set aside time to do regularly!

TAKE THAT HOLIDAY ESCAPADE

It is time to put words into action, and take that vacation that you have been wanting to take, but never gotten around to doing so.

• One day or one month, it is still a vacation

  You can take a week and set off to explore a new city, or go on a weekend getaway to a nearby island resort. Even a short Sunday picnic at the beach with friends and family will help you tremendously to unwind and relax.

• Make sure your vacation is work-free

  Before you take off for your escapade, be sure to plan well in advance. Finish up whatever work that you can, delegate your responsibilities and arrange for colleagues to cover your duties at work. With that, you can enjoy your break in peace.

• Force yourself to stop thinking about work while on vacation

  As long as your plans are in place, you have nothing to worry about and should be able to enjoy your vacation to the fullest!

MANAGE YOUR TIME

A common complaint is that we just simply cannot find time outside of work to relax and have fun. More often than not, it is just a case of poor time management.

• Do not procrastinate

  It is important to prioritise your tasks, and finish the most important things first. Do not put off doing something because more work will soon pile up.

• Keep track of how you spend your time

  Create an activity log over several days and identify where you waste the most time. It could be time spent going through your spam e-mails or aimlessly browsing online. Rectify that, and soon you will find that you have a little more time each day for yourself.

• Plan out your activities

  Always block out time for personal relaxation first before jotting down all other obligations and appointments in your calendar.

THE LITTLE THINGS IN LIFE

Sometimes relaxation is not just about taking that long-awaited vacation. All you need is just a few minutes a day to enjoy the little things that will brighten up your day.

You will be amazed at how much difference something as small as listening to your favourite music will help uplift your spirits and enrich your life.

Or you can start now by taking a few minutes off, sit back, let your mind wander, and relax. All you need is just that little extra rest to inject the freshness back into your life.

e-learning initiatives for Lifelong Learning

  

In its first foray into e-learning, The Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA) will be piloting 40 continuing education courses for adult educators, Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin announced.

Minister for Manpower Tan Chuan-Jin began his opening address at the Adult Learning Symposium (ALS) this morning with a synopsis of the sci-fi movie ‘Edge of To...morrow’ to depict the need to learn, to stay ahead of the game. On continuing education and learning, Minister reiterated that as individuals, we grow as people only because we are always learning, and society offers vast opportunities to those who adjust, learn and embrace changes.

One of the key highlights in this year’s ALS is strengthening the CET infrastructure with technology and ensuring that our adult educators are technologically attuned. As Minister noted in his speech - in the highly connected world we live in today, e-learning will become a staple that underpin our future CET framework.

Speaking at the fifth Adult Learning Symposium on Thursday (July 10), Mr Tan said these online courses could last as short as three hours or as long as a couple of days. Participating trainers can choose from topics such as workplace literacy and instructional methods, all targeted at adult trainers to encourage them to go for continual learning.

The Manpower Ministry (MOM) announced the review of the continual education and training master plan last year and the outcomes are due in the later part of this year. E-learning will be a key feature in the future continual education system here.

The Institute for Adult Learning under the WDA is setting up an online portal, LearningSpace.SG, for learners to search for and take e-courses developed by Singapore-based training providers. Another initiative in the pipeline is the setting up of an Innovation Lab (iN.LAB) at the Lifelong Learning Institute, for partners and trainers to collaborate and experiment on learning solutions.

Prior to this, the Singapore Workforce Development Agency, WDA, has set up a "Learning Cafe" to promote lifelong learning among Singaporeans.

The "pop-up" cafe, first started in Raffles Place in April 2014, will not only be providing free coffee to walk-in guests, but also offer 17 bite-sized modules for those who're interested in picking up new skills such as coffee brewing, digital art and customer service.

Passion is all it takes for one to start the initiative. Just a simple thing like drinking coffee which many of us does in our everyone life can be used as a start-up for something one is passionate about. That applies to many things that we do. Like, the learning cafe, it provides a first step for people to be curious, take a look, and realised that actually there are a lot of different things that we can do. This is something that we need to continue doing, whether in the form of learning cafe and other formats."

Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE)

Motivate Students to Teach One Another

What if we asked our students questions (straight from our curriculum), and then we let them, in groups and with the internet, find the answers themselves?  That’s what Dr. Sugata Mitra suggests might motivate and inspire students to learn and teach one another on their own, without adult interference.

Winner of the 2013 TED Prize, educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra has shown with his ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments that, “in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest” (http://bit.ly/N0esFy).

The Self-Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) proposed by Dr. Mitra lets students organize themselves in groups and learn using an internet-connected computer with little teacher support. What would that look like in your classroom?

To create a SOLE environment in the classroom, the teacher can build a website of resources and let the students choose what they wanted to learn.  Movie making, 3D architectural design, animation, coding, blogging, infographic design, computer game design: a wealth of online tutorials allowed the students to pursue their own passions and teach themselves (and each other) whatever they wanted to learn.

But what would a SOLE look like in an academic course, like in the English classes? Could we motivate our students to read critically and write effectively on their own?

In November each year, Ms Matt's students are tasked to write their own novels (thanks to the support of the Young Writers Program of NaNoWriMo). In the past she used to spend September and October giving her students assignments to help them prepare for this writing project: plot outlines, character descriptions, setting details, etc. This year, she decided to ask them to research how to write a novel on their own?  The students are encouraged to search for answers to questions such as: how do I write a novel? How do I create complex characters? How do I plot my story?

Ms Matt thinks the answers her students find on their own will be more powerful than the ones she spoon-feeds to them.  What do you think?  What questions could you ask your students to find on their own? How could your students self-organize, with whatever tools they need, to learn the curriculum?

How to Make Learning Irresistible

Failure is a positive act of creativity,” Katie Salen said. Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs know this as adults. But in schools, the notion of failure is complicated.

Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play and founder of Quest to Learn, the first public school based on the principles of game design in the U.S., explained how failure can be a motivating agent for learning in her presentation at SXSW.

Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right. We need to “keep the challenge constant so players are able to fail and try again,” she said. “It’s hard and it leads to something rewarding.”

Game designer Jane McGonigal makes a similar point. She dedicates an entire chapter in her book Reality Is Broken to “fun failure” and why it makes us happy. When we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way; excited, interested, and most of all optimistic, Salen said. “Fun failure” even makes us more resilient, which keeps us emotionally safe.

But the opposite is true in school, Salen said. School usually gives students one chance to get something right; failing grades work against practice, mastery, and creativity. To keep kids motivated, learning needs to be irresistible, Salen said.

Over the past year, Salen went on a “listening tour,” interviewing game designers at Media Molecule, Valve, and Blizzard Entertainment. Here’s what she learned in terms of gaming principles that can be applied to education:

• Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. Too much drama, too nerve-wracking or scary an environment makes it hard for participants to learn. Students need space to think, look around, process, and reflect.
• Learning is social. Problem-solving is increasingly collaborative. Salen heard a Media Molecule designer explain how much players’ own interactions, often more than the design, adds to the experience. Players, like students, can bring ideas to the process that designers don’t even think of. Will Wright, designer of The Sims and Spore, says he designs communities, not games. “We need to design a classroom as a community in which the participants’ knowledge is valued and the exchange of their own expertise is valued,” Salen said. “Most challenges in school today only deal with individual problem-solving. Tests don’t reward collaborative problem-solving. Sharing is often seen as cheating,” while collaborating in cross-functional teams is what’s needed more and more in a complex world.
• A strong sense of community creates safety. Open up space for students (players) to interact with one another, a space for which you’ve created 1) a need to know, 2) a need to share what they know, and 3) the infrastructure for that sharing. “Sharing should feel like a gift,” Salen said. Let players/students participate in the designing too. In participatory learning, like open-source code writing, the design keeps getting better.
• Learning that empowers the learner helps make it irresistible. Mark Healey at Little Big Planets told Salen that empowering a player to do something feels like a “force flows through your veins like you can change the world around you.” When we can design learning experiences that feel like that, we make learning irresistible.

Self-Assessment Inspires Learning

Self-reflection is self-assessment, and one of the most significant learning tools we can model for our students. Ultimately, we want our children and adolescents to be the self-assessors of their work, dispositions, and goals. Research repeatedly reports that the difference between good teachers and superior teachers is that superior teachers self-reflect.

The brain is wired for this strategy, and it has been a part of our evolution. When we teach to a child's or adolescent's brain, we empower that student with the "inner resources" that directly affect his or her ability to pay attention, engage, and create meaningful learning experiences. School culture is simply about relationships, and the brain is relational organ designed to survive, think, and feel.

People change people; programs do not create sustainable meaningful changes. Through the integration of resiliency research coupled with a deep understanding of how our neuroanatomy affects the stress response system, and our attention and ability to remember, we no longer need to manage behavior. Instead, we begin to engage one another.

Simply stated, when the brain feels any type of a threat (emotional, social, or cognitive stress) the thinking part shuts down. Unless a school culture feels or is perceived as "safe," learning does not occur. We are unable to process, integrate, and remember topics, concepts, and standards. Educational neuroscience is about creating states of mind for learning that initiate curiosity, anticipation, autonomy, self-reflection and awareness.

Personalised Education is BEST for learning

There is a difference between differentiation and personalized learning. In the last year, I've been shifting toward the personalized learning aspect of curriculum design. How do I engage my learners and make their classwork more authentic?

Last year, my school rolled out iPads for every student, and with the transition to Common Core, it was the perfect time for a massive curriculum shakeup. I'm lucky that my department gave me ample time to start working on this process. Simultaneously, I started experimenting with Genius Hour for my 8th grade students. Genius Hour equated to one hour a week, or one class day, where I let the students become experts in anything they wanted. This allowed them to explore their passions, and I saw engagement like never before. All of these things coalesced into a different mindset for me as a teacher. I'm nowhere near a full personalized education model, but I'm keeping the student-centered approach in the forefront as I continue this process.

So what are the essentials of personalized education, and how does something like Genius Hour play a role? Keefe and Jenkins found six basic tenets of personalized instruction.

1. Dual Teacher Role

To use Genius Hour effectively, get all your pieces together and ready to go so that you can use your valuable face-to-face time with the students. Your job is to coach and advise them through the process. While some students won't need much interference from you, others will need more intense coaching, so it's good to touch base with all students at least once during this hour. Because this should be a self-paced activity, with a bit of structure introduced by the teacher, you'll be able to offer regular 1:1 help.

2. Learn About Your Students

You'll learn more than you ever thought possible by watching your students go through this process. They are picking what they're passionate about, so the topics will be quite varied. Through this process, you'll also learn who is intrinsically motivated by their topic and skills, and who will need help. If you can learn a little about your students before jumping in (their developmental levels, what type of workers/learners they are, their prior knowledge on the topic), the better off you'll be in your dual role as coach and adviser. Last year when I went through this process, it was a second-semester activity. I have since reflected that the students needed more time. This year, I'll start in November so that I have time for getting to know my students before we begin.

3. Create a Culture of Collaboration

Because you're working so closely with your students, Genius Hour naturally develops a culture of collaboration. Some students chose to work as a group -- I allow up to four per group -- but many preferred to work on an individual basis. I required them to create a video pitch for their project, and then critique each other’s ideas and provide feedback. We also teamed up with other classrooms across the country to do the same. So we established the positive skill of learning from others how to make our project better.

I also had the students find a mentor and conduct an interview on their topic. Some were people in our own school or community. We're lucky to have a small university just blocks from our school, and many of the staff were willing to open their doors to provide help and support. Some students went further, contacting authors and other professionals for help. I even had one student that Skyped with an author who was then in Hawaii doing research but happy to talk with an eighth grader. I found this part of the process to be the most rewarding for students.

4. Create an Interactive Learning Environment

I often had the students brainstorming with each other or having online discussions via Schoology on different pieces of the process. At the end of the project, students were asked to give a TED-style talk on their topic. After watching and analyzing several TED talks, they did a discussion thread about what makes a successful TED talk.

The students also worked together on various topics and projects. They practiced their TED talks with each other prior to giving them, and provided critiques and feedback on their video pitches and websites. I asked them to use their own websites to reflect on their process, and then review each other's Genius Hour posts at least once through this process.

I would also challenge teachers to rethink their classroom workspace. This Edutopia video series inspired me to turn a previously unusable space at the back of my classroom into a Genius Bar and Recharging Station.

ISTE's Learning & Leading Magazine featured Australian schools working with modular furniture to cultivate digital-age learning environments. While I couldn’t afford a ton of new furniture, I noticed that a lot of the pieces in this article were small stools that the students could manipulate for different styles of learning. My admin let my buy some inexpensive stools from Ikea, and my kids moved them all over the room to use as they saw fit.

5. Build Flexible Pacing, But With Structure

I utilized my learning management system to build folders for each of the benchmarks that I wanted my students to achieve on the project. I also created a Google presentation with all the materials I would need for each Genius Hour day. By having all of this ready to go ahead of time, I could "let go" as a teacher so that the students could move at their own pace, while freeing up that valuable face-to-face time for me to work with the kids one-on-one.

6. Create Authentic Assessments

The students' year-end TED-style talks on their chosen topics created a performance assessment requiring them to show their passion to their peers. They were extremely excited about sharing out what they learned. I've found that the more you can relate their classwork to their passions, and the more likely that classwork will be seen and critiqued by someone other than their teacher, the better outcome you'll get from the students. The work now has meaning for them.

They also were reflecting throughout the project, which allowed me to assess their progress regularly. And through our face-to-face time, I could naturally assess their progress. I found that my students covered at least 15 different Common Core standards during this project.

Well there you have it -- Genius Hour lends itself nicely to the basic structures of personalized learning. I guarantee that once you see the level of engagement that choice and passion can bring to your students and the curriculum, the personalized education mindset will start leaking into all of your lesson planning decisions.

Kids' learning ability is in their DNA

You may think you're better at reading than you are at math (or vice versa), but new research suggests you're probably equally good (or bad) at both. The reason: The genes that determine a person's ability to tackle one subject influence their aptitude at the other, accounting for about half of a person's overall ability.

The study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, used nearly 1,500 pairs of 12-year-old twins to tease apart the effects of genetic inheritance and environmental variables on math and reading ability. Twin studies provide a clever way of assessing the balance of nature versus nurture.

"Twins are like a natural experiment," said Robert Plomin, a psychologist at Kings College London who worked on the study. Identical twins share 100 percent of their DNA and fraternal twins share 50 percent (on average), but all siblings presumably experience similar degrees of parental attentiveness, economic opportunity and so on. Different pairs of twins, in contrast, grow up in unique environments.

The researchers administered a set of math and verbal tests to the children and then compared the performance of different sets of twins. They found that the twins' scores - no matter if they were high or low - were twice as similar among pairs of identical twins as among pairs of fraternal twins. The results indicated that approximately half the children's math and reading ability stemmed from their genetic makeup. A complementary analysis of unrelated kids corroborated this conclusion - strangers with equivalent academic abilities shared genetic similarities.

What's more, the genes responsible for math and reading ability appear to be numerous and interconnected, not specifically targeted toward one set of skills. These so-called "generalist genes" act in concert to determine a child's aptitude across multiple disciplines.
"If you found genes for reading," Plomin said, "you have over a 50 percent chance that those same genes would influence math."  That's not to say specialized brain circuits don't exist for different tasks, said Timothy Bates, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in Tuesday's study.

"If those 'squiggles on a page' the young child encounters are math or prose, different brain systems, with different genes, are involved in learning to decode them," he said. The new study just illustrates that these genes build on a more general foundation of learning ability, he said.

The finding that one's propensities for math and reading go hand in hand may come as a surprise to many, but it shouldn't. People often feel that they possess skills in only one area simply because they perform slightly worse in the other, Plomin said. But it's all relative.  "You might think you're a little less good at math, but compared to everybody in the world, you're pretty good at math," he said.

That's great news for those who came out on top of the genetic lottery, but what about everyone else?
"We don't want to pit nature vs. nurture," Plomin said. "But for parents who still think kids are a blob of clay that you mold to be what you want them to be, I hope this data - and there's tons of other data like this - will convince people to recognize and respect individual differences that are genetically driven."

He sees parallels to obesity: People can no more control a genetic predisposition that causes them to struggle with arithmetic than they can control an inherited tendency to put on pounds. That doesn't mean nothing can be done to bring those students up to par - it just might take more effort. Plomin suggests individually tailored educational approaches could help, in which students could learn at different rates using different techniques, potentially assisted by the growing role of technology in the classroom. Finland consistently dominates international education rankings, and Plomin points to its strategy as a good example.

Finland has decided to do "whatever it takes" to bring every child up to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy needed to survive in the modern world. In practice, this has meant reducing class sizes, trying alternative learning approaches, and spending hours outside of class with any student who needs it.

Plomin also points out that genes don't predetermine performance. Appetite is just as important as aptitude, he said. "The brilliant mathematician - that's all they do for decades, they just think math and work on math," Plomin said. "It's not like it comes to them with a flash of inspiration. It's really a long, long process of thinking about these things."

The study results show that attitudes about learning are out of date and need to change, Bates said.
"Just as we no longer blame mothers for schizophrenia, we should be humble when blaming schools and parents for not every child learning as quickly as we'd desire," he said. "The implications, I think, are that children really do differ at very deep levels in how easily they learn."

Free Play is the BEST for Learning

  

A recent study shows that the more time children spend in structured, parent-guided activities, the worse their ability to work productively towards self-directed goals. 

The nationwide Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) had just ended and these kids really deserved a good break from the studying routine. They ought to be given the autonomy to play and relax in the coming school holidays before they face their next hurdle in secondary school. For the next three long months, they can explore their neighbourhoods and discover the mysteries, treasures, and dramas they have to offer. This childhood idyll will hold true for some children, but for other kids, the coming of the holidays signals little more than a seasonal shift from one set of scheduled, adult-supervised lessons and activities to another.

Unscheduled, unsupervised, playtime is one of the most valuable educational opportunities we give our children. It is fertile ground; the place where children strengthen social bonds, build emotional maturity, develop cognitive skills, and shore up their physical health. The value of free play,  daydreaming, risk-taking, and independent discovery are important activities in the development of children’s executive functioning.

Executive function is a broad term for cognitive skills such as organization, long-term planning, self-regulation, task initiation, and the ability to switch between activities. It is a vital part of school preparedness and has long been accepted as a powerful predictor of academic performance and other positive life outcomes such as health and wealth. The focus of this study is “self-directed executive function,” or the ability to generate personal goals and determine how to achieve them on a practical level. The power of self-direction is an underrated and invaluable skill that allows students to act productively in order to achieve their own goals. Children who engage in more free play have more highly developed self-directed executive function.

The authors studied the schedules and play habits of 70 six-year-old children, measuring how much time each of them spent in “less structured,” spontaneous activities such as imaginative play and self-selected reading and “structured” activities organized and supervised by adults, such as lessons, sports practice, community service and homework. They found that children who engage in more free play have more highly developed self-directed executive function. The opposite was also true: The more time kids spent in structured activities, the worse their sense of self-directed control. It’s worth noting that when classifying activities as “less structured” or “structured,” the authors deemed all child-initiated activities as “less-structured,” while all adult-led activities were “structured.”

All of this is in keeping with the findings of Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray, who studies the benefits of play in human development. In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, he elaborates on how play supports the development of executive function, and particularly self-directed control:

Free play is nature’s means of teaching children that they are not helpless. In play, away from adults, children really do have control and can practice asserting it. In free play, children learn to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, create and abide by rules, and get along with others as equals rather than as obedient or rebellious subordinates.

When we reduce the amount of free playtime in preschools and kindergartens, our children stand to lose more than an opportunity to play house and cops and robbers. Some elementary programs recognize the importance of play and protect its role in preschool and kindergarten.

Montessori schools and Tools of the Mind curricula are designed to capitalize on the benefits of self-directed free play and student-initiated activities. Tools of the Mind programs, for example, place even more importance on developing executive function than on academic skills. In their terminology, “self-regulation” is the key to success both in school and in life:

Kindergarten teachers rank self-regulation as the most important competency for school readiness; at the same time, these teachers report that many of their students come to school with low levels of self-regulation. There is evidence that early self-regulation levels have a stronger association with school readiness than do IQ or entry-level reading or math skills, and they are closely associated with later academic achievement. 

This is not news to most teachers, who, when tasked with educating increasingly crowded classrooms, hope and pray for students with well-developed executive function. The ability to self-direct can spell the difference between an independent student, who can be relied upon to get her work done while chaos reigns around her, and a dependent, aimless student, who is distracted by his classmates and must be guided from one task to the next.

Parents, if you really want to give your kid a head start in the coming school year, relinquish some of that time you have earmarked for lessons or sports camp and let your children play. That’s it. Just play. Grant them time free from your ulterior motives and carefully planned educational outcomes. Let them have dominion over their imaginary kingdoms while their evil dragons, white wizards, marauding armies, and grand battles for supremacy unfurl according to their whims and wills.

This is taken from an article written by Jessica Lahey, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a former English, Latin, and writing teacher. She writes about education and parenting for The New York Times and on her site, Coming of Age in the Middle, and is the author of the forthcoming book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.

Educating Global Problem Solvers

What are the biggest problems in the world?

A humane educator once poses that question to his students and they mention war, poverty, climate change, and more. About a year ago, a group of Connecticut middle school students produced such a list. When they were asked whether they could image us solving these problems, only a handful out of the 45 students responded positively.

This humane educator who teaches about pressing global challenges and offers students the tools to become "solutionaries" for a more just and sustainable world has never encountered so much hopelessness in a middle school classroom, not even in the most underserved schools in the most disenfranchised communities.

Fortunately, he was able to turn their hopelessness around by leading them through a visualization. He asked them to close their eyes and imagine themselves as very old and approaching the end of their lives. He then described a very different world, one in which we'd solved our biggest problems. Then he asked them to imagine a child approaching them and asking what they had done to help bring about this better world, and he invited them to answer that child. With their eyes still closed, he again asked if they could imagine us solving our problems, and this time only a few did not raise their hands.

The educator felt relieved that it didn't take much to shift these students' sense of hope and efficacy, but the experience reinforced his belief that our education system needs to shift to ensure that we prepare our students to meet their future.

Given the enormous challenges we face, and the dire consequences of inaction, we educators owe it to our students to make certain they graduate knowledgeable, prepared, and empowered to participate in the necessary tasks of transforming destructive and unjust systems in production, agriculture, energy, transportation, and more into healthy systems through whatever careers they ultimately pursue.

What's ironic about the Connecticut children's initial lack of hope is that, despite the potential calamities we face, we're actually living in less violent, less discriminatory, and less cruel times than ever before in recorded human history. Add to that our capacity to communicate and collaborate with people across the globe and a vast, growing body of knowledge available on handheld computers, and there is every reason for our children to feel hopeful and enthusiastic. We've never been better positioned to solve our problems, and our students need to know that each one has an important role to play in bringing about a more just, sustainable, and humane world before it is too late. So it's up to us to provide an education that enables them to be the critical thinkers, creative innovators, and collegial collaborators.

How can we do this? Here are two ideas.

1. True Price

True Price is a humane education activity in which students analyze an everyday item, such as an article of clothing, an electronic device, a food, etc., and ask the following questions:

1. What are its effects, both positive and negative, on you as an individual consumer, on other people, on animals, and on the environment?
2. What systems support, promote, and perpetuate it?
3. What alternatives do more good and less harm, and if no alternative exists, what systems would need to change to make alternatives ubiquitous?

True Price is flexibility. It can fit into the core subjects of language arts, science, math, and social studies, as well as foreign language, art, economics, and more. It can be done in a single class, as a homework assignment, as a project, or through an elective. In the process of answering the questions above, students become better critical and creative thinkers, more conscientious choice makers, and more motivated change makers. The activity can also lead to projects that promote collaboration and problem solving.

A few years ago, the educator did a presentation at a high school on the True Price activity with a conventional cotton t-shirt made in China. While they couldn't know much about that specific t-shirt, there's a lot they do know about conventional cotton production: it uses large amounts of pesticides; child slaves work in cotton fields in Asia; sweatshop conditions are the norm in many factories; dyes, often dripped into the eyes of conscious rabbits in animal tests, are largely toxic; and a significant percentage of these toxins wind up in our waterways.

There are also positive effects. The production and distribution of a t-shirt employs many people, and its wearer is able to buy it at a reasonable price, but when asked for alternatives that do more good and less harm, students realized that we could, and should, do better. After the talk, one of the inductees exclaimed, "We should have been learning this since kindergarten!" She understood that without knowledge about unhealthy and unjust systems, we cannot change them.

2. Solutionary Teams

Debate teams are commonplace in high schools, and students learn excellent critical thinking, speaking, and persuasion skills through them. In debate, students are typically assigned one side or the other of a fabricated either/or question. Imagine, instead, solutionary teams where students work together to come up with innovative and cost-effective solutions to actual problems, whether in their own school, their community, their nation, or the world.

Youth yearn for meaningful education. Grateful letters were received after humane education presentations and courses were done. As one eighth grader wrote, "Spending that week in the course was the most inspiring five days of my life so far. It had made me realize how much just one person can do to help the world."

While this letter sounds positive, it does not speak well for the education system at large. A week-long course with a humane educator shouldn't be the most inspiring five days of any teenager's life. Her whole education should be inspiring. All of her teachers should be humane educators who infuse their curricula with relevance and meaning so that no child ever doubts his or her capacity and responsibility to contribute to a better world.