Taking Action as Advocacy of Children with Autism
While people with autism often have the tendency not to make eye contact with you, chances are today, you have either seen or met someone with this neurodevelopmental condition, or at least know about it. This is partly due to the voices and the daily grind of the caregivers, educators and service providers of […]
Redesigning Educational Systems for the Future
Today, more than ever, significant academic institutions should focus on molding and shaping young people by providing them with the necessary tools for being able to respond to the fast-paced, complex, and multi-dimensional challenges of today’s society. This is imperative in order for youth to not be somehow conditioned by these changes, thus become devoid […]
Let Them Lead: Empowering Rural Youth Through Education
Before I started my one-year poverty alleviation service at Mendai, a remote mountain village 27-hour away by train from Beijing, I was talking to the local government officials. They told me I was wasting my time with those Hmong people: “I can assure you,” one of them said, “their whole lives are about waiting. […]
Freedom to Play, Freedom to Learn
In a globalized, fast-changing world, education as we know it is being redefined. The 21st Century requires young people to master a set of technical skills that are highly valuable in the workplace. Companies like Google are sponsoring kids to learn coding. Mobile devices and social media have opened new opportunities for innovative learning. And […]
Little Victories – There Are No Instant Miracles in Education Development
I am a bit of an impatient person by nature – unfortunately. I am endlessly calculating the speed of each line when standing in queues at the checkout and you don’t want to be driving behind/in front of me in traffic! However, crucially, I know there is little space for this less than admirable characteristic […]
Training Leaders to be Intermediaries Between China and the World
As international education has become larger and more diverse, one significant trend has emerged: an ambition to teach leadership. But that is not an easy call. There is still an ongoing argument about what makes a good leader, about the degree to which leadership varies with the context in which it is set and about […]
Utilizing the Power of Human Rights Education
Each year on December 10th we celebrate International Human Rights Day where we commemorate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which outlined a blueprint for societies built on principals of equality, dignity and non- discrimination. Although not legally binding, its core values inspired an array of human rights instruments, primarily the […]
The Path to Personalized Learning
In this series, Berlin Fang and Dr. Alexander Romiszowski put the much-hyped personalized learning in historical and international perspectives, while offering suggestions that may help educators think and design educational experiences conducive to effective personalized learning. Why Personalized Learning? Can Technology Fix Personalized Learning? You Get What You Measure: Assessing Personalized Learning Learning, Personalized and […]
Balancing Educational Leadership With Motherhood
I recently completed a doctorate in Education at Cambridge University. I am a Qatari mother of five children. Although my parents didn’t read or write, they were guided by a belief that education was ‘the passport to life.’ They encouraged my sisters and brothers to work hard at our studies and do well in school. […]
Learning, Personalized and Competency-Based
This article is part of a series on personalized learning (part 4 of 6). To develop expertise in anything, Malcolm Gladwell famously said in his book Outliers that you need to invest 10,000 hours. It is true in the general sense that success requires copious amount of time, but to assume that one could use the 10,000 hours equally […]