Breakfast Club Blog
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is a curated space where bloggers from around the world contribute content on a continual basis about a variety of topics relevant to in and out-of-school time. The BOOST Breakfast Club blog is at the heart of an ongoing dialogue where expanded learning and education professionals share their personal thoughts and stories from the in and out-of-school time field. They also tell us what they ate for breakfast!
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is Brain Food for In and Out-of-School Time Leaders!
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STEM Anyone? Everyone?
STEM isn’t one of my areas of expertise. As a consultant, I’ve spent time with hundreds of programs. I’m clear that there really are fifth graders who know much more than I do about robotics, coding and engineering design and are better at algebra than I ever will be. I love my time with high school students who are excited about 3-D printers – especially when they make cases for my iPhone. But I really have no idea how this works. I’m probably in the top 10% of folks my ...Read More
Project-Based Learning (PBL) in Out-of-School Time
Projects that unfold outside the regular school day create opportunities for students to explore personal interests, tackle challenges, build new skills, and sometimes even improve their communities in the process. I’ve seen students use this rich learning time to monitor local air quality, invent devices to improve life for children with disabilities, design digital games and apps, and run their own multimedia publishing centers. “It’s all about what kids want to do,” on...Read More
A Modest Proposal: Taking Your Program to the Next Level
As Common Core gets underway, we have a great opportunity to take our programs to the next level. We can ensure that students aren’t just consumers of knowledge, but creators, critics and communicators of ideas! We have a chance to become more student-centered, to be guides-by-the side and facilitators of learning rather than adults who are in charge of what kids learn or what they experience. We can expand on youth development as a principle and practice by making 21st Century skills real...Read More
After Afterschool: Developing the Future Workforce
Most school-based efforts to introduce students into the workforce take the form of job fairs that promote traditional careers, but by all accounts, ten years from now the job market will look noticeably different than it does today. Some traditional jobs are likely to disappear. Others will survive, but the job descriptions and requirements will change. Some new fields, such as “green” technology, will evolve into major employment sectors. Entirely new professions will emerge, ones ...Read More
Teaching Creativity
A couple of weeks ago, I received a copy of a Newsweek.com story on one of the multiple listservs I receive. I confess, I don’t usually read everything that I receive through a listserv, and often, I will save an article or link “to read when I have time.” This article, however, caught my eye, and I am really grateful I took a further look. Titled The Creativity Crisis: For the First Time, Research Shows that American Creativity is Declining. What Went Wrong—And How We Can Fix ...Read More