21st Century Learning and Teaching

As education grows and changes educators have the opportunity to change the way they envision their roles and their classrooms.

Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder.

At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas.

This is part seven of the nine-part series from the Project Happiness curriculum. We are looking at important factors that influence the happiness and social and emotional learning of elementary scho

ol age children, helping students learn life skills, manage emotions, and increase empathy. Each blog post features one letter of the acronym HAPPINESS:

H = Happiness

A = Appreciation

P = Passions and Strengths

P = Perspective

I = Inner Meanie/Inner Friend

N = Ninja Mastery

E = Empathy

S = So Similar

S = Share Your Gifts

In this post, we will explore Empathy.

More and more, our world is driven by right-brain thought. Sadly, consider what's happening today in schools. With a poor economy, budget cuts are being made across the country.

Daniel Pink shares some helpful insights about how our brains function in his book, A Whole New Mind. He describes the difference between left-brain and right-brain thinking. He argues that the old world is a left-brain world. The new one is a right-brain world.

Part of our dropout problem can be summarized in one phrase:

===> we are preparing students in "Left-Brain" schools to enter a "Right-Brain" world. <===

The school does not resemble the world they'll enter after graduation. If they graduate at all.