Here is the agenda in case you would like to skip through for specific info. Enjoy!

“How do we learn?”
“What can we create?”
“What does it mean to lead?”

The SLA is built on the notion that inquiry is the very first step in the process of learning. Developed in partnership with The Franklin Institute and its commitment to inquiry-based science, the SLA will provide a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship. Students at the SLA will learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.

Chris is a leader in the field of integrating technology into the classroom and contends that technology in education needs to be a transformative tool, not merely additive. He is also a really passionate speaker who happens to fit a ton of information in a short amount of time, here is his speech from the TEDxNYED

“The illiterate from the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” -Alvin Toffler

“When I was in school, I hated being talked down to, I felt like I should be talked up to” an expression true to every kid(ult)…

TED brings us another intriguing speaker. Dr Aditi Shankardass is pioneering the use of technology to give children with developmental disorders their most accurate diagnosis. Dr Shankardass specializes in a groundbreaking EEG technology, developed by Harvard University. This technology records and analyses the EEG (brain electrical activity) in real time, allowing them to watch the child’s brain as it performs various functions, detect even the slightest abnormalities in these functions, and provide a more accurate clinical diagnosis than ever before.

Journalist and Author Kathryn Schultz is a self proclaimed ‘wrongologist’ who has recently written and released a book titled “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.” Her claim is that our tendency to err is also what makes us smart and we gain from embracing it.

Excerpt from her website:
To err is human. Yet most of us go through life tacitly assuming (and sometimes noisily insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken – and why do we typically react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness and shame?

In the end, Being Wrong is not just an account of human error but a tribute to human creativity – to the ways we generate and revise our beliefs about ourselves and the world. At a moment when economic, political, and religious dogmatism increasingly divide us, Schulz explores the seduction of certainty and the crisis occasioned by error with uncommon humor and eloquence. A brilliant debut from a new voice in nonfiction, this book calls on us to ask one of life’s most challenging questions: what if I’m wrong?

BONUS: In her role as a journalist for Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews Diane Ravitch. As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and a longtime conservative eduction activist and scholar, Ravitch once crusaded for nationally mandated testing, charter schools, school choice, and No Child Left Behind. Today, she rejects all those positions as bad for America’s communities, schools, teachers, and kids provocatively stating “We are in the grips of a kind of national madness”

Personality is influenced by temperament, the same way a house is influenced by its foundation. Many researchers believe temperament provides the emotional and behavioral building blocks on which adult personalities are constructed.

There is some real controversy about the edges of these definitions, of course—conflicts typical of the “nature/nurture” battlefields researchers have been fighting for decades. Jerome Kagan was really the first to sink some empirical teeth into an argument previously based on opinion. He screened 400 kids way back in 1979, doing experiments in places similar to the rooms in which the 6- and 9-year-olds mentioned above were playing. He found about 15% were behaviorally ebullient, or low-reactive [LR] and another 15% acted like behaviorally inhibited, or highly reactive [HR]. He measured a subset 5 years later and found things were remarkably stable. Only 3% of the children had actually changed categories.

Kagan next investigated 500 kids starting at 4 months of age, coding them using the same LR or HR behavioral algorithms as before. He retested these same kids at 4, 7, 11, and 15 years (the experiment is still ongoing, although Kagan has retired and bequeathed the work to another colleague). He found that HR babies were 4 times more likely to be behaviorally inhibited by age 4. By age 7, some form of anxiety had developed in half of these kids, compared with 10% of the control HRs (who made up about 20% of the population).

As HR kids navigated through school, Kagan noticed most were academically successful, even if they were a bucket of nerves. They got good grades and made lots of friends. They were less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant, or to drive recklessly—perhaps because of an anxiety-driven need to acquire compensatory mechanisms to socialize properly. Kagan actually liked HR people and regularly employed them during his research career. “I always look for high reactives,” he told The New York Times in 2009. “They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors, they’re careful when they’re coding data.”

Kagan’s conclusion? Babies come into this world with an inborn temperament. About 20% are born with a predisposition to anxiety—a behavioral type that remains remarkably stable over time. Kagan calls this the long shadow of temperament.

Not every brain state sparks the same behavior. Nor do they say everything there is to know about temperament. Kagan freely admits he is only studying 1 dimension of the phenomenon—the reaction to new things. At least 6 different dimension scales have been cited by researchers in the field at various times to describe this multidimensional idea, ranging from fearful distress to attention span/persistence to rhythmicity. (For the complete list, see the Figure.)

Most important, these studies make conclusions about tendencies, not destinies. Even when the trends are strong, the predictive power of Kagan’s work runs in 1 direction. The data do not forecast what these children will become as much as they predict what they will not become. HR infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly, or bold.

This post is made up of excerpts from the brilliant Dr JOHN MEDINA article in the March issue of the Psychiatric Times. More information, including research into the less ambiguous molecular and genetic sciences behind the findings above can be found here.