At Exploration, we are always looking for good articles, books, videos, blogs, and websites that may help us become better educators.

Over the years, we’ve frequently passed along these recommendations to teachers, parents, school administrators, and others interested in education. What’s become clear to us is that many people get just as excited as we do when they discover a good writer or speaker. Unfortunately, the average person is so busy, that it feels nearly impossible to stay abreast of all the good work out in the world. We hope to rectify this a bit with our online newsletter, Exploring Education.

Our goal with each edition is to call attention to interesting work related to the field of education and we plan on defining education very broadly. At Exploration, we think everyone should be a lifelong learner, and we don’t want to focus on work that is only of interest to those professionally engaged as educators. In addition to recommending recent work, we would also like to pass along some older pieces that remain relevant.

We have no interest in treading on the heels of the many excellent university and foundation based educational newsletters. We see ourselves more in the “good neighbor” role: we’ve heard of something compelling and perhaps helpful and want to share it along with members of the Exploration community.

This newsletter will be a work in progress. Our hope is that our readers will send us their recommendations so that we can, in turn, pass them on to others. If you have a recommendation or comment, please send it to ExploringEducation@explo.org. If you know someone you think would be interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here. Click here if you would like to be removed from our newsletter distribution list.

All the best,
Moira Kelly, Executive Director
Exploration School/Summer Programs

Sir Ken Robinson
International leader on
the topics of creativity
and innovation

Your Child's Strengths
by Jennifer Fox
(Book Review)

A Whole New Mind
by Daniel Pink
(Book Review)


The Optimistic Child
by Dr. Martin Seligman
(Book Review)

Sir Ken Robinson

If you spend any time at Exploration, you are likely to hear someone mention Ken Robinson. He’s an international leader on the topics of creativity and innovation.

Robinson makes a powerful argument that creativity is not an inborn trait, but rather something that can be learned. He asserts that we need to do a better job of developing this skill in our children.

Robinson has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, national and state education systems, non-profit corporations, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. In 2001, he was voted Business Speaker of the Year by more than 200 global companies.

His most recent book is The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

Sir Ken Robinson Online


From the TED Talks Website
Do Schools Kill Creativity?



From edutopia, the George Lucas Educational Foundation
Creatively Speaking, Part One:
The Power of
the Imaginative Mind

Creatively Speaking, Part Two:
The Power of
the Imaginative Mind

Your Child’s Strengths
by Jenifer Fox

Jenifer Fox is the former Head of the Purnell School, a girls’ boarding school in New Jersey. She observes that too often children are seen, by themselves and others, as the sum of their deficits. Educational systems contribute to this problem because they are focused on “fixing” children’s weaknesses, and Fox believes this is a tragedy both for the individual and society. She provides an alternative approach in her book, Your Child’s Strengths, an enormously practical guide for parents and educators to help children identify and develop their strengths. Fox argues that helping children discover and cultivate their strengths is a national imperative. She writes, “The world lies on the cusp of great global change, and in order to remain competitive, future generations ... will have to be more adaptable and inventive than ever. If schools expect to develop innovative thinkers who can consistently perform in a highly fluid, furiously paced future, then it is imperative that they focus on helping students identify and practice their areas of strength before they join the workforce.”

Fox is a storyteller and illustrates many of her points by sharing inspiring first-hand accounts of success from a long career in education. While at Purnell, Fox developed the Affinities Program, an award-winning strength based curriculum. Fox includes a lengthy outline of the Program in her book and focuses on three types of strengths: Activity, Learning, and Relationship.

Activity Strengths are those things you are both good at and feel good doing. For instance, if you are a strong soccer player, but don’t enjoy playing, then soccer is not an Activity Strength. But, if you enjoy cooking and your cakes and pastries are always in demand, then cooking is an Activity Strength. Learning Strengths are the unique ways in which you learn and the ability to convey these approaches to others. Some people are very comfortable learning about a subject through reading, while others do not fully understand until they can see a demonstration. If you are the person who does best with the demonstration, then you are a visual learner and that is your Learning Strength. Lastly, Fox describes Relationship Strengths as “the things you do for and with other people that make you feel strong and good about the relationship. They are the application of character virtues. Character virtues are qualities such as trustworthiness, forgiveness, loyalty, consideration, thankfulness, flexibility, and dependability. They also include such skills as being a good listener and showing empathy.”

The Affinities Program was designed for young people ages 4 to18, and it includes dozens of interactive activities for children, parents, and teachers. Part of what Fox asks us to do is look at everyday experiences differently. For instance, a child who regularly chooses one household chore over another may be “driven by natural inclinations that can be identified and applied to schoolwork.” Or a child more taken by life on the tennis court than life in school may in fact be showing a propensity for physics. Though initially designed for children, it’s clear that many of the activities in the Affinities Program would be useful to adults who seek to identify and develop their own strengths.

Fox is a realist. She does not suggest that children should be exempt from working on those things they find challenging. She does, however, believe that it’s unlikely someone will find his or her life calling in an area of weakness. When someone doesn’t know what his or her strengths are, it’s unlikely those strengths can be developed. Fox shows us a way to intentionally unearth our strengths, a far better model than the one often used – that of drifting and making the discovery by accident.

Reviewed by Moira Kelly, Executive Director, Exploration

A Whole New Mind
by Dan Pink

For all the bluster and empty rhetoric that echoes around education policy debates these days, the fact remains that the ultimate charge for teachers is to prepare their students with the best skill set to lead fulfilling, meaningful lives. In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, former White House speechwriter and current best selling author on human development, lays out an intriguing road map for where he thinks that skill set will exist.

Pink’s premise is that the world is undergoing a transformation such that the mental tools that supported success in most professions of our recent generation will be de-emphasized in the near future. In essence, logical and analytical thinking skills, the province of the “left brain” and the focus of so much “drill and fill” work for school curricula, will soon need to share the stage with skills of the “right brain,” the more intuitive, inventive, sympathetic side of our minds.

Pink spends time outlining why he believes such a movement is underway, claiming that the triple play of “Abundance, Asia, and Automation” has created an environment in which left-brained power, what Pink calls “L-directed thinking,” is now less valuable in the work world. By “Abundance,” Pink means that having access to so many products results in consumers who crave beauty in addition to basic function from those products. It is no longer enough to simply produce and have things; one must have things that are stylish. “Asia” refers to the huge growth in cheaper outsourcing of production tasks, which combines with “automation” to effectively create less demand for the pure information workers of recent times.

Pink asserts that the most successful workers of the future will need to be able to use six additional “right-brained senses” in addition to the slate of logic-based attributes of times before. He defines these right-brained skills as Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning, and then spends the second half of his book bringing each to life with examples, anecdotes and practice exercises. My favorite was the passage on Story, which Pink says is a primary method for “how we remember.” He writes, “When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact. And that is the essence of the aptitude of Story—context enriched by emotion.”

When I read this, I realized how true this has been for my own teaching. It couldn’t be called success if my students ended their time with me as passive receptacles of factual knowledge; I really wanted them to actively and productively apply that knowledge, and to engage and include other minds on the same material they had “mastered.” The ability to tell stories to others of how one used newfound knowledge is the perfect portal for even greater discovery and learning for all.

My personal epiphanies aside, I believe that throughout A Whole New Mind Pink offers intriguing new ideas to anyone who might be curious about how to best focus on his or her future growth in the face of a rapidly changing world. I enthusiastically recommend that you have a look at this short but powerful book.

Reviewed by Geoff Theobald, Director, Upper School, Buckingham Browne & Nichols

The Optimistic Child
By Dr. Martin Seligman

In the early 1960s, Dr. Martin Seligman participated in research that led to the development of the theory of “Learned Helplessness.” This theory describes what happens to animals placed in a situation in which they come to believe that no action on their parts can improve their current state of suffering. Seligman and his fellow researchers assumed that the animals would continue to struggle and work to avoid pain, but after trying to find some solutions and failing, the animals just gave up instead.

It was not a huge leap for Seligman to see that people, especially children, responded in a similar way to the animals. But since we do not deliberately deliver shocks to our young people, he was curious to see what engendered this feeling of helplessness in them. Seligman’s research on this topic led him to believe that many children fall prey to learned helplessness when their parents and other caretakers (teachers, coaches, etc.) “prematurely rescue” them from disappointment and failure, rather than allowing them to have these basic human experiences. And while he empathizes with parents and other caregivers who want to spare children the pain of disappointment, Seligman demonstrates in his book, The Optimistic Child, how this well-meaning mistake is a root cause of lifelong depression in children and adults.

But the book does much more than describe this phenomenon: it provides a detailed road map on how to stop the cycle of premature rescue and the resulting depression. In fact, the subtitle of the book is A Proven Program to Safeguard Children against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience. The book is divided into five parts. The first describes why children need optimism; the second is entitled Where Boomer Child Rearing Went Wrong; the third offers readers techniques to help them diagnose their own children in the matters of optimism and resilience; the fourth describes the specific techniques that allow children to feel powerful and optimistic; and the fifth ends the book with the realistic chapter called The Limits of Optimism. In this final chapter, Seligman argues that what children are given through the process of gaining optimism is not a set of vacuous slogans, such as “I am a special person,” or “My life will get better and better,” but a realistic self knowledge that will allow them to feel both positive and negative emotions, and know that both are rich parts of a full life.

Over the years, when I have spoken to anxious parents who have just dropped off their children to us, I have often used some of Dr. Seligman’s words. Explo has tried to gear all of its various components—from the classrooms, to activities, to the dormitories—to help children learn that they can help themselves. The role of choice, for example, is important to the growth of our students. A child may choose hip-hop dance as a one period activity and find that she didn’t like it all that much. But she knows that life is like that—not everything is perfect, and she survived the less-than-perfect period gracefully. And she knows that more choices will come along soon, and some of them may be great, and others less so, but together they make up a rich life of learning—especially about herself.

Reviewed by David Torcoletti, Head, Exploration Junior Program

Exploration Summer Programs is operated by Exploration School, Inc., a not-for-profit 501(c)3 educational organization.
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