AI is hot today. Almost everyone is talking about AI with all sorts of suggestions, advice, comments, and emotions. The majority of the conversations are about how to integrate AI in traditional classrooms. But given the history of educational technology, it is unlikely that AI can do much in the traditional classroom that aims to teach students the same prescribed curriculum and pass traditional exams. For AI to realize its potential, we have to reimagine education.
Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling is an article I wrote and published …

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 …

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 …

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, …

My latest book Learners without Borders: New Learning Pathways for All Students is published by Corwin in July 2021. Below is Chapter One.

It may surprise you to learn that teenagers in Nepal are using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learn English and Egyptian, study dinosaurs, and take high-level STEM courses. On Episode 33 of Silver Linings for Learning, a weekly show about educational innovations during COVID-19, we had five Nepalese students and two teachers as guests. They told an unexpected story of learning beyond their schools. Nepal, a very small country largely …

PISA has many peculiar and surprising discoveries…
Having a growth mindset is negatively associated with academic performance for participating students from China (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang or B-S-J-Z China), according to the 2018 PISA results. That is, Chinese students who had a fixed mindset scored higher in PISA reading than those who had a growth mindset. Considering that Chinese students’ stunning scores that put them way above all other students in the world, this finding should be disconcerting to proponents of growth mindset, including the PISA team.
Does this invalidate the belief that growth mindset …

“Better-paid, better-educated workers face the most exposure” to AI, concludes a  recent report about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on jobs in the future. This conclusion should make us question the widely held belief that our children should get more education. More education is never a bad idea and has long been believed to lead to better lives, more income, for example, as illustrated in the diagram below.

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html
Historical data suggest that the premium of education has increased over the years. The payoff of more education has grown significantly from the 1960s …

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on December 3rd 2019. It was adapted from part one of an article to appear in Journal of Educational Change. The longer version discusses three illusions PISA has created and relied on for its undeserved impact on global education: the illusion of excellence, the illusion of science, and the illusion of progress.
PISA is a masterful magician. It has successfully created an illusion of education quality and marketed it to the world. In 2018, 79 countries took part in this magic show out of the belief …

The following is the Introduction of my book What Works Can Hurt: Side Effects in Education published by Teachers College Press in June 2018.
Introduction
“Ibuprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction,” you are warned when you buy a bottle of Advil, and “this product may cause stomach bleeding.” Medical products are required to disclose clearly their intended effects and known side effects. The intended effect of the common pain reliever Ibuprofen, for example, is to temporarily relieve “minor aches and pains.” The drug’s known side effects include allergic reaction and stomach bleeding. Hence …

My latest book Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All has ben released by Corwin Press. You can order it from Corwin or Amazon. Below is the Introduction.
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Benjamin Franklin wrote about a philosopher friend of his who used his two legs to determine with whom to avoid acquaintances more than 200 years ago. In The Deformed and Handsome Leg, Franklin says there are two kinds of people: One always finds beauty and good in things and people and thus is happy and pleasant to be with, while the other always looks …