“I’m sorry class, but we’re going to have fun today.” This is how teacher, musician, composer and game designer John Hunter starts his class in the 2010 documentary World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements, which tells the story of how he uses his World Peace Game to help students work to solve global issues. In an age of smartphones and tablets, Hunter has had much success bringing his multi-level board game to classrooms all over the world.

Tasked with using negotiation and problem-solving skills to get countries to work together instead of resorting to war, children spend hours going through the political simulation, working in “nation-teams” to do what diplomats with years of experience struggle with everyday.

Hunter developed the game in 1978 while creating curricula for gifted students at an urban high school in Richmond, Virginia.

“We were studying Africa, so I thought, ‘Why not put it on a game board?’ So I took the continent of Africa, divided it into countries, divided the kids into teams, and said, ‘Now what should we do with the continent? Well, there are a lot of great things, but let’s look at the problems and fix them, let’s solve things,’” Hunter said.

“So we gathered up all the problems we could find — socially, militarily, economically, politically — and challenged ourselves to actually solve them somehow. And that became the basis of our game.”

Hunter has since updated the game from a two-dimensional game to a four-tiered Plexiglas tower, adding modern-day factors such as drone warfare.

“The game is just a pretext, an excuse for us to develop compassion for others and to try and decrease suffering and increase the caring we have for each other,” Hunter said.

John Hunter is making history … with his revolutionary game during a time of global tension. Hunter presented his game at the TED2011 Conference and has done the same in Norway, Austrailia and other countries. During his presentation at the Pentagon last November, officials there were so impressed with the game that they invited Hunter back, along with his students, to discuss it in more detail.

What’s next for John?

Hunter had to quit his full-time position as a teacher at a Virginia school to travel and spread the word about the World Peace Game. He’s also working on a book about the game, which is scheduled for a 2013 release.

In his own words …

“The fundamental level of all good curricula is based on the relationship between the teacher and the student,” Hunter said. “That is the essence of everything that occurs that is good for the student, that helps the student develop. You have somebody who understands them and can build a curriculum towards them and for them, and facilitates their mastering it in a way that a pre-prepared script cannot.”

On black history…

“The full spectrum of human experiences is in black history. We all hope that we take from it the best of everything that there is. We all hope that we learn from it all the things to avoid. We look to history to help guide our steps so we don’t make the same mistakes — and we do take the best from the past forward.”

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Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.

It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. “I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company,” he says.

Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual “Evernote has changed my life” sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: “If you ever need any money let me know.”

Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: “It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?”

The answer came right back: “Would half a million dollars be enough?”

Today, the company is swimming in tens of millions of dollars in cash from both VCs and profits. Evernote is buying companies, tripling in size each year, and drawing 40,000 new users a day. If you live in Silicon Valley or Tokyo, where Evernote has reached cult status, none of this probably surprises you. Otherwise, you must be wondering: What the hell is Evernote?

Libin has different ways of explaining it: It’s your brain offloaded to a server. It’s Google for the Web of your life. It’s a spotlight on the dark matter of your universe. It’s a tool for converting your smartphone from a time killer to a time saver.

Learn more about how Evernote works, and hear from some of its biggest fanatics in the tech industry.

OK, so Evernote is a little hard to explain—you have to get to know it to appreciate how subversively effective it is. You could say pretty much the same about Libin, as well as about the team of fellow managers—many of whom have stuck together through multiple start-ups—and the company they have built around memory. It’s a company whose employees romp in spacious offices ringed with conference rooms named after video games. (So much for adulthood.) Whose customers are so dedicated that many eventually choose to pay for the service, even though they can use it for free. That’s starting to change the way children learn in schools. And that has set its sights on affecting the lives of a billion people—a goal that’s looking less fanciful every day.

Such lofty ambitions might have seemed absurd when Libin’s family moved to the Bronx, New York, from the Soviet Union in 1979. Libin was 8 years old. Fourteen years later, he had managed to effect a trifecta of ancestral shame when he left Boston University one course short of his bachelor’s degree, in a fit of pique over a questionable charge on a school bill. “I was the first one in my family for 200 years who had no degree, didn’t play an instrument, and wasn’t a chessmaster,” says Libin, who, whatever his limitations, has raised acerbic self-effacement to an art form.

Degree, schmegree—Libin could code. He had been a computer…

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– David H. Freedman

Ken Royal from Scholastic Administrator Magazine took Evernote for a test drive, posting this video during the Florida Educational Technology Conference. This will remain front and center through the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA) conference. Attention educators: we are looking for classrooms, schools and districts that are interested in piloting Evernote for Schools. Contact us if you are interested!

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School of Thought: 12 Education Activists for 2012

Hunter, an elementary-school teacher, is a legend in his home state of Virginia, where the World Peace Game he designed in 1978 allows fourth-graders to game out various scenarios of global doom or global cooperation. The game, which is played on a huge multi-level board and is a bit like an analog version of The Sims, got traction nationally when Charlottesville-based filmmaker Chris Farina turned it into a documentary film that had many screenings last year and is still making the rounds at film festivals.

As World Peace and Other Fourth-Grade Achievements has quietly circulated in the education world, Hunter has given TED talks and addressed audiences around the country about the game’s power to inspire students and teachers. The film, which emphasizes not only children’s optimism, but also the game’s power to teach collaboration, critical thinking and problem solving, speaks to a lot of people in education. When I moderated a screening at Harvard last year, several audience members were moved to tears. The film should see wider distribution in 20…

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The Martin Institute is pleased to announce that teacher John Hunter, a 4th grade teacher with Albemarle County Schools in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been named as the first Martin Institute Teaching Excellence Fellow. Much attention has been brought to John Hunter’s teaching because of his 2011 TEDtalk, which was named by TED and the Huffington Post as the most influential TEDtalk of 2011.

John Hunter believes that his fourth grade students can solve world peace, as well as develop strategies for solving nuclear disasters, oil spills, global warming, endangered species issues, mineral rights, water rights—a total of about 30 interlocking, real world problems. John sets The World Peace Game in motion and then guides his students through the critical and strategic thinking, collaboration, and negotiation processes needed to understand and develop solutions for these global issues. Hunter explains, “The World Peace Game is about learning to live and work comfortably in the unknown.”

Over the course of the last 25 years, John has developed The World Peace Game, a multi-dimensional strategic board game that requires his fourth graders to solve world dilemmas that are environmental, geopolitical, financial, military, and every other layer he can think of combined. He uses his large scale game grounded in real world problems to teach his students critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, coordination, communication, research, negotiation skills, and the skill of synthesis, among other vital 21st century skills. His approach is to create a stimulating learning environment that excites, inspires, challenges, and supports students in their learning. Students learn to observe, connect, think, and construct meaning through inquiry, collaboration, and experimentation.

John’s teaching approach is completely student-centered and aligned with an emphasis on 21st century thinking skills. The learning environment that he structures is dynamic, fast-paced, and intense which results in highly motivated and engaged students who take real ownership and interest in their learning. For these reasons, the Martin Institute is delighted to welcome John Hunter as our first Teaching Excellence Fellow.

Martin Institute to Develop Educational Resources with John Hunter

John Hunter, in conjunction with the Martin Institute, will be developing educational resources and Master Classes for teachers interested in developing student-centered learning approaches that promote high levels of critical thinking and engagement.

Read more about John Hunter and the World Peace Foundation here.

As he explains in his TEDtalk, John’s work has been documented in the film World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements. Filmmaker Chris Farina chronicles John Hunter and his class through a whole cycle of the World Peace Game. This excellent film captures the energy and intensity of students who are capable, with guidance, of handling large amounts of often ambiguous and conflicting information that surround real world issues and working through it to develop solutions. We see a classroom of students negotiating their learning, collaborating both with peers and the teacher who is at once teacher and co-learner.

Martin Institute to Develop Curriculum Based on World Peace Film

The Martin Institute has also formalized an agreement with the filmmaker Chris Farina to develop a viewer’s guide and a facilitator’s guide for schools that want to use the film as the basis for transformative conversations about teaching and learning. The Martin Institute will also be developing a half day professional learning session around the film to take to schools across the country…

Read more about Chris Farina and Rosalia Films here.

[From The Martin Institute read more]

Schools are finding that technology can be an important element in making their behavior programs more proactive from an administrative and an instructional perspective. Applications that streamline data collection and analysis and that engage students in positive social interactions can turn the tide in a school’s anti-bullying efforts.

The challenge is matching behavioral objectives with the right technology. To leaders in the Dallas Independent School District (TX), the goal was getting better at identifying effective points of intervention, perhaps even before an actual bullying incident could take place. At the same time, there was the challenge of dealing with a tight budget and the demands on the time of classroom teachers who have more than behavior problems to deal with.

“You don’t go from being a model student to ending up in a DAEP [disciplinary alternative education program],” says Suzie Fagg, executive director of student services for the Dallas ISD. “This is a progression, and when you’ve got technology, it’s easier to see that progression and intervene before it gets to a point where you’re sending a child off to a DAEP.”

Describing her district’s Student Welfare Freedom From Bullying plan as “one of the most comprehensive anti-bullying policies in the country,” Fagg says the effort is directed at preventing and reducing acts of bullying before they ever have the chance to get out of hand. Dallas ISD already collected reports on bullying incidents, but the data were disparate, not allowing for the kind of analysis Fagg believes will help schools identify problem areas.

“All of the data, when you take it together and look at trends, that is what your school environment is all about,” Fagg says. “If you have a lot of incidents of bullying going on and you know that a lot of it’s happening [for instance] on this stairwell, then you need to begin to address the issue of that stairwell. How can you deploy staff there? How do you educate staff about what they need to be looking for? How do you educate students on what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior?”

Real-Time Data
To implement her anti-bullying policy, Fagg turned to Review360, a hosted software program that helps educators collect relevant data and improve student behavior. The data collection begins with a customized incident-reporting form that matches the process educators were already using at Dallas ISD, but a host of pull-down boxes were added to the online form to ensure consistency of incident description and streamline reporting. The form standardizes the language used to describe behavior, eliminating the need to interpret subjective language–making the data easier to take action on.

“We have an office of student discipline, so they collect discipline reports. But unless you act on those reports, they’re just numbers,” Fagg says. “It’s not just discipline referrals. It’s about using the referrals and the data from those referrals to maybe improve on the operation of our schools, as well as the relationships between our students and our staff.”

Fagg sees the new technology as a way to intervene at the very outset rather than after the fact. “If it’s a paper referral, you stick it in a folder,” she says, “but if we can see [real-time] data on this student and say, ‘This student hasn’t acted out at all, and now all of a sudden we’re seeing these referrals come through,’ then we need to intervene before it’s too late.”

“We know what works with kids with behavioral problems,” says Stewart Pisecco, a behavioral psychologist and the creator of Review360. “Our biggest challenge isn’t coming up with what works, but rather how to get what works implemented consistently in the schools.”…

– Margo Pierce

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Spontaneous and Relentless Compassion

This TED Talk, is about a geo-political exercise I created for public school children in 1978. Its consistent successful outcome over the last three decades (negotiating and solving fifty inter-locking global problems, and having every nation’s asset value and societal good increased), I would say is based almost entirely upon the nature of the relationship between the teacher and the students, and between the students themselves. The game board itself is a multi-level tower of Plexiglas covered with thousands of game pieces and layer upon layer of complex, global crisis requiring hyper collaborative problem solving, in the midst of chaos, uncertainty, and adversarial pressures. Everything is, and is designed to go wrong on every level and in every sphere… all at once… for everyone.

And yet what I find, when my students are thrown into this super-heated crucible with its recipe for immediate and complete failure, that instead of boiling over they add new ingredients, performing a sort of alchemy, turning leaden problems into gold. Solving problems in the Game is certainly a messy process, with false starts, inaccurate assessments, and wrong-headed impulses. But the thought of there being no way out does not seem to occur to the children, although the situations presented are structured to appear that way. No way out, they come to realize is a self-designated option created by the conceptual mind. This concept actually has no inherent existence in reality.

The children have a lack of pre-conceptions, a lack of experience really, of what has or has not worked, of what can or cannot be useful. Because of that innocence, or naivete, their solutions come across as bold, creative, and often wildly open-hearted. Their failures, which I fully expect and accept, are welcomed as sincere experiments. They are working from a place before perspectives harden and attitudes solidify, where for example, compromise is demonstrated to be a lack of separateness from others, rather than being seen as personal sacrifice. Compromise as a method does not seem to be experienced as a lost of self. Rather the students’ over riding concern in negotiations is for a happier outcome for all…

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– Arianna Huffington and Chris Anderson

The next 12 days hold one of my favorite annual traditions. Each year we look around in the less-obvious places for ideas, organizations and people we believe in. Then, during the 12 days following Christmas and into the New Year, we donate a piece of our profits each day on behalf of each of our clients. Using social media, we’ll share our giving choices each day. This isn’t to show off how generous we are, although we are proud of our giving culture. The purpose is to inspire others to do the same, or to discover new ways of supporting positive change in the world.

Tonight is our kickoff, with contributions on behalf of our client Excent, via our microfinance partner Kiva, to support a small, woman-owned business in Iraq. The proprietor’s name is Jwan:

Jwan is 35 years old and a proud mother of four children. She is also a proud and successful Iraqi working woman. For the past three years, she has been working hard in her beauty salon. Her clients are very pleased with the service they receive.

Jwan is requesting a loan of $2,400 from Relief International-Iraq to make some changes to her salon and improve the working area, which will allow her to hire an employee to work with her in the salon.

To learn more about Kiva and/or micro-finance, click here.

We’ll update this post in a few weeks with a complete roundup. In the mean time, if you are inspired, send us a comment or email and let us know!

Thanks for reading. May your 2012 bring abundance, liberation and joy…

Respectfully,

Ian Bryan

President & Founder

Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders

World Peace and Other Fourth Grade Achievements
December 07, 2011 Wednesday AT 3PM CT

They face war, economic meltdowns, border disputes, ethnic strife, and the devastating effects of global warming, while trying to keep cool heads and guide their countries to peace and prosperity. And they are only in the fourth grade. John Hunter teaches children how to make peace, but can fourth-graders really save the world?

See More: wpr.org