Live November 2nd in Elluminate - Director of "Race to Nowhere" Film on American Schools

Join me this evening for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com interview with Vicki Abeles, director of RACE TO NOWHERE:  The Dark Side of America's Achievement Culture.  Concerned mother turned filmmaker, Vicki "aims her camera at the culture of hollow achievement and pressure to perform that has invaded America's schools."  This culture, she argues, is "destroying our childrenʼs love of learning and feeding an epidemic of unprepared, disengaged, and unhealthy students."

[This event was originally scheduled for August but had to be postponed.]

Date: Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Page:  http://www.learncentral.org/event/90720

FROM THE PRESS MATERIALS:
http://www.racetonowhere.com/

This remarkable new film shines a light on the price our kids pay for this “race to nowhere.” Cheating is commonplace, stress-related illness, depression and burnout are rampant, and ironically, young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired. Featuring the heartbreaking stories of young people who have been pushed to the brink and educators who are burned out and worried that students arenʼt developing the skills needed for the global economy, RACE TO NOWHERE points to the silent epidemic running rampant in our schools.

RACE TO NOWHERE is a call to families, educators, experts and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become the healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens in the 21st century.

Among many others, RACE TO NOWHERE features Dr. Madeline Levine, author of the bestseller, The Price of Privilege, Dr. Deborah Stipek, Dean of the Stanford School of Education, Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, an adolescent medicine specialist at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, Denise Pope, author of Doing School, and Sara Bennett, author of The Case Against Homework.

Vicki Abeles learned at an early age that the key to success is hard work and a good education. Raised by a struggling, single mom who encouraged her children to attend graduate school, she worked her way up from nothing to become a successful attorney and businesswoman. As a mother, Vicki wanted her children to have all the opportunities she lacked, growing up. But when her daughters reached middle school, they were overwhelmed by pressure from classes and extracurriculars. When one became physically sick, she and her husband realized they had to rethink the way they were raising and educating their children. Vicki took it upon herself to find out how our broken education system harms both children and adults, and what we can do to change it. It is this investigation that is depicted in this film. Vicki is the co-director of RACE TO NOWHERE.

September 7th - Charles Fadel on 21st Century Learning and STEM

Join us in September for a third (and final?) live and interactive FutureofEducation.com interview with Charles Fadel, who will explore the intersection of 21st Century Skills and STEM.  He will describe how the need to teach for Skills impacts STEM:  by requiring a more critical review of the curriculum to refocus on what is relevant (applicable and significant), and by generalizing approaches found mostly in teaching Sciences (via Projects).

Date: Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Page:  http://www.learncentral.org/node/95438

Charles Fadel is Global Education Research Lead at Cisco Systems, and the Cisco board member at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (of which Cisco was a founding member) and Innovate/Educate (an organization dedicated to advocacy of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)). He is vice-chair of the Education committee of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and actively works with three committees of the OECD — CERI, AHELO, and TALIS. He has consulted with a wide variety of education ministries/boards including Massachusetts, France, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica, Tunisia, and the Dominican Republic, to name a few, and has worked on education projects with more than thirty countries and states. Charles has co-authored a book titled “21st Century Skills — Learning for Life in our Times”, and frequently lectures on this topic, as well as STEM, and Education Technology.

He is presently advising two non-profit organizations, and an innovative school system in Chile (Innova100). He is also incubating a non-profit organization addressing the convergence of 21st Century Skills and STEM to better teach Statistics and Probabilities. He is a visiting scholar at Wharton/UPenn where he recently taught a class on Technologies for Learning. He has recently served on the Massachusetts Governor's Readiness Project as well as its 21st Century Skills task force.

He has contributed many articles or has been interviewed in publications such as Technology & Learning, New Media Consortium, Massachusetts Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, eSchool News, Education Week, University Business, EETimes, and others. He has presented at numerous education conferences, including the Consortium for School Networking (COSN), the National School Boards Association (NSBA), the National Center for Technology Innovation (NCTI), and the Masie Center's learning conferences.

Charles has been awarded five patents on video, content, and communication technologies. He holds a bachelor of science in electronics with course concentration in quantum and solid-state physics with a minor in neuroscience, and a master of business administration in international marketing. An avid reader, he has autodidactically learned disciplines such evolutionary psychology and comparative linguistics. He also enjoys the lessons of classical history.