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Blogs, Education Reforms, Globalization »

[17 Mar 2024 | No Comment | 272]

INTRODUCTION
Focus, focus, and focus! Focus is what this book is about. Here we aim to help school leaders understand what they should focus on and why. We share examples, vignettes, and practical advice to illustrate how to focus without losing sight of the big picture. School leaders often are overwhelmed (Klusmann et al., 2023). They feel they need to be responsible for everything happening in the school, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teachers to students, from finance to extracurricular activities, from the physical environments to school culture, and from systematic …

Blogs, Education Reforms, Globalization, Technology »

[25 Feb 2024 | No Comment | 881]

About five years ago, all schools embraced the idea of global competence. Governments wanted their students to be globally competent; organizations such as the Asia Society led the development of the content of global competences, and international tests such the PISA even administered an assessment of global competence of 15 years old students in different countries in 2018.  International study tours, global exchange of students and teachers online and offline, joint global projects in teaching and research, as well as publications and conferences on global competence were all on the …

Blogs »

[5 Aug 2023 | No Comment | 1,545]

Is it possible to reduce the time students spend in classrooms and schools? Would such a reduction be better for learning and retaining teachers? How should learning be more flexibly enacted in the post-pandemic era? Why are some schools have moved to 4 days a week?
Jim and I wrote this article to discuss the possibilities of rethinking school participation and calls for schools to reconsider the necessity and costs/benefits of forcing students and teachers to be physically present in schools for the traditional 5 days a week. It was published …

Blogs, China/Chinese »

[17 Jan 2023 | No Comment | 3,206]

Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao
G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Solution Tree, 2023 
Williamson McDiarmid is the Dean and Alumni Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Distinguished Chair of Education at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Yong Zhao is Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas, Kansas, and Professor of Educational Leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Australia.
 
Introduction
Too often, the lives of people who have climbed out of dire circumstances and subsequently left their mark on the …

Blogs »

[5 Jan 2023 | No Comment | 6,874]

This is the draft of my chapter on creativity in the book Creative Provocations: Speculations on the Future of Creativity, Technology & Learning co-edited by Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra that is recently published online. Read the published article here.
 
How Not to Kill Creativity?
Yong Zhao
University of Kansas
University of Melbourne
People in education have a very bad habit. Whenever something is said to be important, we try to teach it. Social and emotional learning (SEL) has gained importance so there are programs to teach it. Computational thinking is now considered important, so schools should teach. …

Blogs »

[19 Aug 2022 | No Comment | 4,665]

Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao co-authored by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao will be published by Solution Tree in November. Below is the preface.
 
Preface
Everyone is born with a probability for their future. Birth locations, family circumstances, and community resources shape the likelihood of a particular life in the future.1 For instance, a person born in a remote rural area is much less likely to work on Wall Street than a person born in a wealthy suburb of a big city. Similarly, a person born into a family with …

Blogs, Education Reforms, Globalization, Technology »

[5 Feb 2022 | No Comment | 13,222]

Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students How to Thrive in a Rapidly Evolving World 
By G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Taylor and Francis on Jan 31 2022
Introduction
How do we prepare our children for a world that is yet to be made? This is the question we want to know and we try to explore in this book.
As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling to educate students amidst a world-wide pandemic.  Many are being stretched to adopt and use unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies.  For their part, most students, …

Blogs »

[25 Sep 2021 | No Comment | 41,740]

I co-authored this article with Daniel Yiorgios Rigney, which is just published. Below is the abstract and you can read the entire article here.
Outcomes in education are complex and numerous. Seemingly simple instructional choices can have far reaching implications for a student’s interest in a subject, their social network, and even their psychological well-being. These types of outcomes are rarely studied however. Interest in short-term instructional outcomes is far more prevalent, as made evident by the popularity of yearly high-stakes testing. Combatting this trend will require educators and policy makers …

Blogs »

[9 Mar 2021 | No Comment | 348,823]

My article Build back better: Avoid the learning loss trap published in Prospects on March 4 2021. Below is the abstract and you can read here.
Abstract

A dangerous trap exists for educators and education policy makers: the learning loss. This trap comes with a large amount of data and with sophisticated projection methods. It presents a stunningly grim picture for education and it invites educators and policy makers to make wrong decisions and invest in wrong things. The article identifies a number of undesirable outcomes that their concerns could lead to. It also …

Blogs »

[18 Feb 2021 | No Comment | 73,349]

Just published in Journal of Educational Change: The changes we need: Education post COVID-19
Yong Zhao and Jim Watterston
Accepted: 28 January 2021
Read here or Download the PDF here
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused both unprecedented disruptions and massive changes to education. However, as schools return, these changes may disappear. Moreover, not all of the changes are necessarily the changes we want in education. In this paper, we argue that the pandemic has created a unique opportunity for educational changes that have been proposed before COVID-19 but were never fully realized. We identify three …