There are few people I enjoy listening to more than Ken Robinson. An educator and expert on creativity, he is the author of the excellent book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, and his TED Talk on schools and creativity has been watched by more people than any other Talk. In this presentation, he offers both a candid description of why our current education is failing us as well as clear suggestions for making it better. The reason education is such an important topic, of course, is that it doesn’t just affect children and their parents, but all of us. Education shapes the emerging generation, the generation we will...

“Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” This is just one of Rita Pierson’s statements that is funny, insightful, and right on the target. She was responding to a colleague’s comment that, “They don’t pay me to like kids; they pay me to teach the kids. I teach; they should learn. Case closed.” Except, as Rita explained, “Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” At the core of Rita’s educational and pedagogical philosophy is one simple but powerful conviction: education is about connection. It’s hard to learn if you don’t feel connected. Which means that kids don’t just need a teacher, they...

I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a really fine book that explores the neuroscience behind how we make decisions. In one of the early chapters, Lehrer describes the role dopamine neurons play in decision-making. Essentially, they are those elements of the brain that register experience and create emotions. Interestingly, these neurons actually learn from experience. That is, they take note of successes and failures and improve their predictive performance (creating an emotion before something actually occurs – pleasure at the sight of an ice cream cone, anxiety when noticing that the back door to the house is...

It’s National Teacher Recognition Week and so all week I’ll be posting on teachers, teaching practices, and education more generally. Why? Because I don’t think there is anything more important for our future than how we are educating our children (and ourselves) right now. Which means that teachers are incredibly important. But you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the kind of attention given teachers in the media and from politicians in recent years. Politicians, in particular, have heaped all kind of blame on our teachers for the state of our kids’ education even as they have been slashing school budgets, laying siege to...

In another of my favorite TEDTalks, Sir Ken Robinson – an expert on education, creativity, and vocation (he calls it discovering your element) – identifies creativity as perhaps the most important quality for us to develop if we are to solve the problems of our generation. Yet he is concerned that most of our schools are not set up to nurture creativity at all and, in fact, often hamper its development. While he talks about education, however, don’t be deceived, this Talk is for all of us, as we think about how to cultivate creativity in all of our roles and tasks. This particular TEDTalk has been seen by more than...