Tag Archives: education reform

“What would Joan do” is a question children’s media professionals can ask as we explore the pedagogical possibilities of new digital tools. Early childhood researchers have long noted that children often “think like a scientist” as they explore novel materials or situations. Likewise, viewers may imitate their favorite television character, as when preschoolers try broccoli after seeing Elmo do the same. Children, youth, and individuals of all ages can learn to think and act like artists, authors, naturalists, mathematicians, philosophers,…

Today’s children were born into relative peace and prosperity, however unevenly distributed. But now we are collectively encountering a world of disruption, uncertainty, and anxiety. All of us are figuring out how to cope with rapid change and maintain as much normalcy as possible, while caring for ourselves and each other. We also expect that our society’s inequities will be made significantly worse by the crisis across all aspects of our lives, not just in terms of our health and…

This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post. It’s that time again. New commitments and new resolutions to make…and hopefully keep. As educators and children’s advocates we are involved in many initiatives whose goals are reimagining education and providing equal opportunity to all children. We are board members and advisors to some nonprofits that are doing remarkable work with kids — Sesame Workshop, Creative Commons, The Forum for Youth Investment, We Are Family Foundation, Learning Matters, Vroom and Journeys In…

This interview with Michael Levine originally appeared in Literacy 2.0 in August, 2011. It appears here with the permission of the author, Robert L. Lindstrom.   In 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, the venerable children’s TV programmer Children’s Television Workshop (now named Sesame Workshop) spun off a nonprofit research and production institute intended to do for digital media what Sesame Street did for television, namely make the medium both educational and entertaining at the same time. The center…

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post.   On Tuesday, June 7, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop will present a report at the E 3 Expo in Los Angeles that may surprise media designers and cause policymakers to step back from their current concerns about kids’ digital multitasking addiction, cyber-bullying, violent videogames, and mobile disruptions in school. While much of the public discussion about digital media is concentrated on how little influence parents have in shaping…

Reprinted from Huffington Post This teacher bashing must stop! It is an unwise diversion from what matters most: teaching children to love learning and be creative right from the start. As an unabashed ally in the moral outrage that animates Davis Guggenheim’s powerful film “Waiting for ‘Superman’ “, count me as a skeptic of the proposed prescriptions advanced by the movie. Brent Staples of The New York Times gets it just right: “the many complex problems that have long afflicted…

By Esther Wojcicki and Michael H. Levine, reprinted from the Huffington Post American students’ lack of knowledge about the world is unsettling. According to surveys by National Geographic and Asia Society, young Americans are next to last in their knowledge of geography and current affairs compared to peers in eight other countries, and the overwhelming majority of college-bound seniors cannot find Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel on a world map. Less than one half of today’s high school students study a…