An email from a participant in a recent Art of Hosting-type workshop where I brought my juggling balls and taught juggling. One of the participants, a teacher, picked up the skill and left with my three balls in hand to evangelize play! This may end up sounding like the silliest email ever but thanks for showing me how to juggle. I am really enjoying it. I have never found something that I am not hard on myself to perfect until now. I go outside, or inside and practice for a few minutes and if the balls drop, …
I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies. The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key …
Three very interesting resources on a new form of evaluation to me, developmental evaluation, created by Michael Quinn Patton: A Developmental Evaluation Primer Patton’s own slides on developmental evaluation A practitioner’s guide to developmental evaluation This is the first thing I have seen on evaluation that has got me excited about the connection between complexity, systems thinking and change.
This amazing video is significant on a couple of fronts. First it shows how much other stuff we share our solar system with. Second it is a lovely visualization of seeing, learning and becoming aware. It is the sum total of what humans know about asteroids in our solar system, and like all good learning it gets better over time as we perfect patterns and then ways of seeing and understanding. And like all good learning, it takes and becomes memory, knowledge and then part of our everyday experience. Over 30 years of constant and repeated practice with constant improvement …
From my friend Jerry Nagel, a quote from guitar maker Phil Patrillo: We send our kids to school. I call it the “brain laundry.” They teach them everything you don’t want them to know. It’s done in the name of education and fairness and righteousness, and the things of common sense and how things are done, are never explored. You get a piece of paper with your name on it, if you follow the instructions. I got a Doctorate not because I wanted the piece of paper; I got the Doctorate because my professor said to me, “You know more …