Last week, Microsoft participated in the largest gathering of Ministers of Education in Europe and around the world at the Education World Forum.  At the forum, discussion of ensuring our students have the right skills to compete in this global economy was top of mind.  In partnership with Cisco and Intel, with the leadership of University of Melbourne we had the opportunity to participate in two ministerial exchange sessions.  During these sessions, the Executive Director, Patrick Griffin gave an update on the progress of the Assessment and Teaching of 21^st Century Skills Research Project, Singapore and Australia highlighted how they are engaging in the project and hope for how the project will influence the work they are doing in their countries and lastly the ministers discussed what are the policy, curriculum and professional development implications of implementing these new types of assessments and teaching interventions in their countries.

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project is focused on defining those skills and developing ways to assess them.  By achieving this, the project aims to promote the teaching and assessment of twenty first century skills at government, school system, school and teacher levels. By collaborating with other large employers, the companies aim to influence employer hiring strategies to emphasize these skills among new employees. By placing the assessment materials and technical components in the public domain and by making them available to large scale survey strategies, the project aims to influence a broad range of countries by publishing cross national studies of student attainment in twenty first century skills.  These three approaches to the transformation of education, government involvement, company employment criteria and cross national assessments of skill levels will act as a multi-pronged stimulus to curriculum change and enable schools to prepare students for living, working and thinking in the twenty first century.

There are many international and national assessment programs, assessment organizations, NGOs, businesses, research centers and individual researchers working on the specification of 21^st century skills.  This collaboration does not presume that one form of assessment should be imposed on every community. The goal is not to develop one assessment format. Rather, it is intended that there will be support for conceptual, methodological, and technological advances in assessment that can support the parallel efforts of many organizations and countries. It is expected that the assessment and teaching process developed within ATC21S will provide an exemplar framework that countries and organizations can use or draw upon with confidence. The project also aims to help inform the development of the next versions of cross national benchmarks such as PISA and IEA ICT assessment, as well as other international and national assessments in the next three to five years.  Already PISA has called for tenders to develop both the assessment and delivery platform for one of the ATC21S skills (Collaborative Problem Solving) under development.

The project has been planned to consist of 5 phases:

1.      Conceptualizing the program and the development of a series of white papers

2.      Hypothesis formation and development of the assessments and teaching and learning strategies

3.      Coding and administration development

4.      Trials of the assessments and teaching and learning strategies

5.      Dissemination of the output to the greater education community: providing assessment tasks, teaching notes, developmental learning progressions, research papers, and technology to support the classroom as an open and shared source, with everything to be open to the public domain or use.

The project is currently at the coding and administration development phase and hope to enter the trials phase in the second half of calendar year 2011.  In discussing with the ministers in London, the excitement around this project is three-fold:

• No one has to date defined learning progressions for these 21st century skills. The learning progressions define levels such as the progression from novice to expert.  For example what is a novice, moderate, expert at collaborative problem solving?  Assessments to monitor developing competence and the relevant teaching interventions are needed to help a student grow in competence (and perhaps confidence) in order to demonstrate higher levels of performance and competence.
• Today, most large scale cross national testing programs (e.g. PISA) results take a number of months’ or even years delay’ to provide feedback to systems, teachers and students. In addition they generally do not provide information to teachers on how to intervene or help students develop to higher levels of thinking or competence. Most formative assessments require teachers to observe, rate performance (often on very poor quality rubrics) and then decide on how to intervene. The rubric and the judgment error involved have led to a loss of credibility for this form of assessment, sometimes because of human error but also because of the poor quality of the scoring rubrics.  The goal of this project is to create an automated system that as the student is doing the assessments the teacher is notified regarding learning intervention and students receive instant feedback.  The project also intends to “background” quantitative data that educational jurisdictions can collect in order to make summative decisions at a system level. The systems will be able to identify the areas in which cohorts of sub groups of students are struggling and make appropriate curriculum change decisions or promulgate investments to increase effectiveness and efficiencies. These decisions will be able to be made in a much reduced time frame.
• This is an international project with researchers and teaching practitioners working in 4 founder countries and possibly 3 associate countries. It will create an international standard and help encourage the learning environment needed to teach 21st century skills.

To learn more about the ATC21S Project, please visit http://www.atc21s.org; participate in the linked-in community; contact the Executive Director Patrick Griffin or Microsoft Lead Rane Johnson-Stempson.  To learn more about our work with governments around the world visit: Education Leadership Website

So I love this great idea from my friend Oscar Trimboli, an amazing individual from down under in Australia.  If you have not met him, you must http://au.linkedin.com/in/oscartrimboli.  His great idea is to give back to your network.  They take time to help you and you should take time to give them a little something back.  So I want to share with you some amazing individuals, great books and movies I have enjoyed.  As you can see I have been working a little too much and not watching enough movies.  My plan is to update my blog significantly over the holidays and catch up with the 1 year of quietness…  enjoy

People:two people I admire and hope I can someday change the world as much as them

Jacqueline Novogratz: Jacqueline totally inpsires me that people can take their talents and make great things happen!  I hope someday I can change the worls as much as she does!  She is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund. Prior to Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. She also founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank.

Rich De Lorenzo: I absolutely love rich and so excited he is part of my life.  He is an amazing induvidual, with an amazing heart who will change the face of Education in the United States and hopefully the world.  If everyone followed their passion as much as Rich, the world would be significantly different and every child would reach their potential!  Rich co-founded the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition (RISC), whose mission is to help other educational systems reinvent themselves so that every child has the opportunity to achieve his or her dreams. DeLorenzo has been instrumental in the comprehensive transformation that has yielded phenomenal results in both academic achievement and the transitional skills. The Chugach School District was the only K-12 district to receive the New American High School Award and one of the first to receive the National Malcolm Baldrige Award. Community standards linked with state and national standards, effective instruction, meaningful assessment, and a strong accountability system has been at the forefront of this reform effort.

Books: three books who help me want to be a better person and help better the world

Leaving Microsoft to Change the world: I love this story and hope someday my paths cross with John!  I can’t wait to see where a Room in Read goes in the future…John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and his life’s work–not at business school or leading Microsoft’s charge into Asia in the 1990s–but on a soul-searching trip to the Himalayas. Wood felt trapped between an all-consuming career and a desire to do something lasting and significant. Stressed from the demands of his job, he took a vacation trekking in Nepal because a friend had told him, “If you get high enough in the mountains, you can’t hear Steve Ballmer yelling at you anymore.” Instead of being the antidote to the rat race, that trip convinced John Wood to divert the boundless energy he was devoting to Microsoft into a cause that desperately needed to be addressed. While visiting a remote Nepalese school, Wood learned that the students had few books in their library. When he offered to run a book drive to provide the school with books, his idea was met with polite skepticism. After all, no matter how well-intentioned, why would a successful software executive take valuable time out of his life and gather books for an impoverished school? Leaving Microsoft to Change the World chronicles John Wood’s struggle to find a meaningful outlet for his managerial talents and entrepreneurial zeal. For every high-achiever who has ever wondered what life might be like giving back, Wood offers a vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the lessons learned at a hard-charging company like Microsoft and apply them to one of the world’s most pressing problems: the lack of basic literacy.

“Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan” I  wish I had the courage to put my life in danger to make the amazing sacrife and changes iMortenson does.  He is the author of the most popular recent account of a part of the world at the center of American foreign policy. His views will influence how voters react to President Obama’s efforts in Afghanistan. However distasteful he finds the word “terrorism,” Mortenson makes no secret of his disgust with the Taliban. The heroes of this book are 14 riders, loaded with AK-47s, their horses “short legged and shaggy and iridescent with sweat,” who came across the Irshad Pass to Pakistan in 1999 and begged Mortensen to build a school in their remote part of Afghanistan. The school was built, and at the end of that struggle the author
saw their triumph as a path to peace for all. “They had raised a beacon of hope that called out not only to the Kirghiz themselves, but also to every village and town in Afghanistan where children yearn for education, and where fathers and mothers dream of building a school whose doors will open not only to their sons but also to their daughters,” Mortenson writes, “including– and perhaps especially — those places that are surrounded by a ring of men with Kalashnikovs who help to sustain the grotesque lie that flinging battery acid into the face of a girl who longs to study arithmetic is somehow in keeping with the teachings of the Koran.” After some initial reluctance, he embraces the U.S. military as part of the effort to bring education to children so unimaginably far from civilization. Soldiers provide personal donations and transportation of materials for some of his projects. But he  puts most of his faith in the Afghans themselves, particularly those who persuaded him to build more schools. He says they can crush the Taliban and overcome the country’s old cultural biases against educating girls. Mortenson
may be unrealistic, but the past decade of his life has been one improbability after another. It is unfair to expect him to lose hope now. He wants the United States to stay and help his friends save their country. He’s on a roll, and he doesn’t see why he can’t carry everyone with him.

The Joy of Living: Unlocking the secret and science to happiness: I had the opportunity to do a workshop with Rinpoche, love him.  Great insight, great understanding and he taught me to give my monkeymind a part-time job.  Love it- you will need to read this book to understand what that means!  The next generation of Buddhism is creative, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary. Born in 1975 in Nepal, the author is among the generation of Tibetan lamas trained outside of Tibet, and he’s also a gifted meditator.  His brain activity has been measured during meditation, earning him the enviable sobriquet of “happiest man on earth.” He fuses scientific and spiritual considerations, explaining meditation as a physical as well as a spiritual process. Mingyur Rinpoche knows from experience that meditation can change the brain. He experienced panic attacks as a child that he was able to overcome through intensive meditation. If diligently practiced, meditation can affect the “neuronal gossip”—his imaginative rendering of brain cell communication—that keeps us stuck in unhappy behaviors. The meditation master offers a wide variety of techniques, counseling ease in practice to avoid boredom or aversion. Less is more; practice shorter periods more often, he says. His approach will be especially welcome for anyone frustrated by meditation or convinced they’re “not doing it right.” This book is a fresh breath from the meditation room, written with kindness, energy and wit.

Movies:that make you think how do we need to change our life and how to appreciate the cards that you have been dealt!

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire The power of teachers to transform people’s lives and how we all can help others to see their value and be contributors of society. In Harlem, an overweight, illiterate teen
who is pregnant with her second child is invited to enroll in an alternative school in hopes that her life can head in a new direction.

Up in the Air Do we work too much and miss the important things in life?  How do we ensure there is more meaning.  With a job that has him traveling around the country firing people, Ryan Bingham leads an empty life out of a suitcase, until his company does the unexpected: ground him.

CoCo Avant Chanel: you can do anything you put your heart soul and dream that no one can stop you. The story of Coco Chanel’s rise from obscure beginnings to the heights of the fashion world.

So after almost a year of not blogging, I am back!  I promise to have at least a monthly update.  My first blog will be about my first year in my new role and what I have learned and how I have been inspired.  My next post will be about some amazing people I have met on the way.  I hope for my new blog will inspire people to change the world based on what motivates them and I hope tehse stories will inspire you.  Good-luck and let me know what I can change and how I can make this blog better.  Thanks!   Rane