Ken Robinson is one of my favorite speakers. His TED Talk on Education and Creativity is the all-time most watched TED Talks and worth seeing more than once. His book Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life is a wonderful resource. If you don’t have time to read the whole book, you might watch this brief encapsulation and animation of its central idea: that we each have talents to contribute linked to our abilities and passions and the best hope for the world is that we cultivate the diversity of gifts we have rather than only valuing some. As he talks about this idea of cultivating an...

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...

I titled the category for these recent posts “Teaching,” but I could just as easily titled it “Learning,” as how we teach is greatly shaped by how we believe people learn. In recent years, significant research has demonstrated that we do our best learning when our deepest passion and sense of calling is engages. Among other things, this research argues against employing a model of education shaped by standardized testing – which has little to nothing to do with unique gifts and interests – toward a more personalized, student-centered approach to learning. Of course, attention to the question of how we...