Essays by Jon Madian

Jon Madian

Hats Worn
Children’s book writer, educational & counselling psychologist, curriculum designer, software publisher, artist-in-residence, college instructor on principles of design, technology implementation strategist.

Consultant for
Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, Renaissance Learning, Capstone, many other schools, companies & curriculum publishers.

Jon still actively works with school communities who wish to reinvent themselves for the 21st century.

Brief Bio
Jon founded the Artist-in-Residence Reading Project in L.A.’s inner-city, which received significant support from the Office of Education and California Arts Council (1976-83). Based on 7-years of well-funded R&D from foundation, state & federal grants he started Humanities Software in 1983 with his wife Karen to create one of the first learner-centered, computer-assisted curriculum design programs. They sold the company to Renaissance Learning in 1999. He also founded the first journal on technology and curriculum design in 1983. Their products were Apple’s early literacy packages. He helped develop over 100 reading and writing software programs and has written extensively on technology, curriculum, and school reform.

The Essays

Unity in values education
Summary
The article advocates for a unified approach to Values Education (VE), emphasizing our interconnectedness with each other and the natural world. It highlights that both scientific and spiritual perspectives reveal the inherent unity of all things, which should form the foundation of VE. This perspective fosters kindness, compassion, and responsibility by recognizing our shared human experience and common origins, regardless of religious beliefs. The approach promotes humility, curiosity, and compassion, encouraging an integrated learning experience. It critiques the divisiveness often found in religious morality, instead advocating for mindfulness and self-acceptance to foster a compassionate and inclusive society. Ultimately, the VE approach calls for embracing our unity with creation, cultivating stewardship for the natural world, and promoting a harmonious and compassionate world through interconnected learning experiences.

Balancing measurement and human development
The potential and dangers of our digital future
Summary
This paper explores the tension between the desire for measurable education outcomes and the need for holistic human development. While digital systems offer easy alignment between curriculum and the measurement of learning, this risks promoting standardized, sterile curricula that prioritize accountability over self and relationship knowledge, creativity, and personal growth. Education should not over focus on measurable content delivery but should also foster self-knowledge, curiosity, and social-emotional learning. Technology should be used to facilitate community-based learning in which classrooms become learning design and assessment studios, and where students and teachers engage in meaningful, purposeful experiences that integrate both personal development and academic knowledge. The paper calls for a balanced approach, warning against reducing education to what is easily measured and monetized. It advocates for supporting refining all forms of learning, encouraging a balanced approach that uses technology to enhance human potential through deeper, more creative research and learning processes.

Synergies between academic and holistic learning
Summary
The integration of learning and computer sciences enables education to balance measurable academic outcomes with holistic human development. AI-supported portfolio assessment allows for the measurement of both academic knowledge and personal growth, moving beyond the limitations of standardized curricula. By using technology to create community-based learning experiences, education can foster self-knowledge, creativity, and social-emotional learning, while delivering measurable academic content within richer contexts.

The AI inflection point
Summary
This paper outlines how we can reinvent character, knowledge, and problem-solving education by using technology to integrate and expand the application of learning sciences to curriculum, assessment, and human resources.

Balancing spirit and academic traditions
Summary
Public education typically excludes spiritual teachings unless part of a curriculum on the history or comparison of religions. Values Education, though secular, encompasses the values taught in spiritual traditions.

While schools promote team spirit through sports, they avoid collective spiritual values like sympathy and empathy. To be fully educated, people need to understand spiritual traditions that teach core human values. Education should include understanding the positive and negative aspects of collective spirit to foster unity and empowerment rather than ignorance and vulnerability.

Creating a new ecology for learning
Reflections on building a natural + engineered world for education
Summary
This article discusses the necessity to transcend traditional institutional thinking. It advocates for a more cultural, developmental, and psychological approach to education. It proposes a 21st-century educational model focused on creating a new ecology for human development, schooling, and learning, supported by four pillars: Self-Knowledge, Family and Community Resources, Online Resources, and Flexible Curriculum. This model emphasizes personalized development, problem-solving, and service to others, aiming to create an inclusive, sensitive, and effective education system that our current learning sciences and technology makes possible. To build this new ecology for learning, it suggests that curriculum and assessment design must move into classrooms and be well supported by technology.

Making sense of teaching Science and the Arts in a human context
Summary
The author reflects on his journey from being a poor student to a psychotherapist, writer, and curriculum designer. He discusses the impact of his children's book "Beautiful Junk," that led to his involvement in education and the creation of the Artist-in-Residence Reading Project. This project revealed the importance of fostering children’s creativity and self-expression, often stifled by traditional curricula. The author advocates for a humanistic approach to teaching science, integrating the arts and sciences to create a holistic and engaging learning experience. He emphasizes the need for personalized learning supported by technology and research to understand and meet student and teacher diverse needs. The ultimate goal is to transform schools into immersive, STEAM-focused environments that inspire curiosity, creativity, and a sense of purpose in students and curriculum designers who are supported by technology. He ends by stating that while declaring that education should be research based, we ignore the learning, management, and human development sciences and turn STEAM and SEL into another subject taught from textbooks and uninspired lectures in preparation for tests that serve a stupefying accountability. When will we rise above the entropy of current practices?

Self-Knowledge as a 21st century skill
Summary
The article emphasises the importance of self-knowledge as a central skill for 21st-century education, supporting critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. It suggests integrating Social Emotional Intelligence (SEI) into curricula to help students understand the complex nature of their evolving selves. Mindfulness and meditation are explored as keys for developing self-awareness by non-judgmentally observing thoughts and feelings. The article argues that democracy and mutual understanding are essential for personal growth and collaborative problem-solving. It calls for educational reforms to include personalised learning that focuses on self-knowledge and psychological processes, encouraging students to explore their inner conflicts and their drives for creative expression. The article emphasises the need for a curriculum and assessment that supports the development of wise, democratic, integrated, and transcendent personalities.

Unifying our vision for evolving education
Summary
Computer science is essential for advancing many fields but is underused in education. To reimagine learning, we must leverage computer science, SEL, and STEAM to personalize education and foster engagement in supportive learning and design communities. This involves integrating social, research, knowledge and design engineering to create adaptable, inclusive, and community-centered learning experiences. By connecting students with peers, mentors, and tailored resources, we can address diverse needs and cultivate a design culture that supports lifelong learning and human development. This approach aims to unite communities in a shared purpose of nurturing and empowering future generations.

We have failed personalized learning
Summary
Personalized Learning (PL), despite its promise, exists in name only due to a lack of understanding and foundational groundwork. Defined as tailoring educational experiences to meet students' deepest needs, PL remains constrained by traditional, test-focused education systems. Effective PL requires recognizing diverse learner traits and understanding the root causes of learning challenges. Current failures stem from addressing only surface-level issues without delving into the deep, varied reasons behind learning difficulties. Advances in digital systems and developmental psychology offer tools to explore these diverse learner traits, akin to how digital telescopes now explore space. However, realizing PL's potential necessitates integrating human development sciences into education and involving teachers, students and curriculum artists in continuously improving curriculum design, shifting from a marketing-driven to a research-based approach. Broadening the definition of STEM to include human sciences is essential for building Personalized Learning and achieving a knowledge culture.

The promise of AI to move to a more learner-centered curriculum
Summary
With microcomputers came new flexibility in writing and revising lesson plans leading many people to imagine a renaissance in instructional design and the possibility of less expensive publishing along with the continuous improvement of instruction. Mostly that didn't happen! High stakes testing wagged curriculum's tail. Technology became more valued for summative assessment than for instructional design and formative assessment. Decades later with the invention of the internet and collaborative authoring tools another renaissance in curriculum design, customization, and worldwide publishing appeared. Again, the renaissance didn't scale. The question now is whether we will use AI to move from a siloed academic curriculum to a more personalized curriculum that aligns with what the science of learning tells us will serve human development, or will conventions and institutional thinking and habits place testable models of academic achievement above what the science of learning, with its emphasis on SEL, STEM and the Arts, tells us will better serve human needs. This paper explores how AI can help build a more learner centered culture in our schools, and what steps we must take to achieve this?

How AI can support developing a holistic spiral curriculum
Summary
This article demonstrates that AI can help generate an integrated spiral curriculum if AI is used to create stories that introduce students to key ideas that integrate concepts across disciplines. In this instance, AI is used to generate a story to introduce students to the source of sunlight and its impact on plants through photosynthesis. The relationship between the physics of light and matter is introduced as the basis for exploring the formula E=mc2 and the underlying concept of transformation of matter into light and light into matter and life.

Why Stories for Teaching: Insights for Educators
Summary
Stories are central to human education (cultural transmission). Their power lies in their ability to engage both cognitive and emotional centres of the brain, making them highly effective teaching tools. Here’s a closer look at why stories resonate so deeply with us and how we can use them to improve learning.

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Jon MadianHats WornChildren’s book writer, educational & counselling psychologist, curriculum designer, software publisher, artist-in-residence, college instructor on principles of design, technology implementation strategist.

Consultant forApple, Microsoft, IBM, Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, Renaissance Learning, Capstone, many other schools, companies & curriculum publishers.

Jon still actively works with school communities who wish to reinvent themselves for the 21st century.

The Essays

The AI inflection pointSummaryThis paper outlines how we can reinvent character, knowledge, and problem-solving education by using technology to integrate and expand the application of learning sciences to curriculum, assessment, and human resources.

Balancing spirit and academic traditionsSummaryPublic education typically excludes spiritual teachings unless part of a curriculum on the history or comparison of religions. Values Education, though secular, encompasses the values taught in spiritual traditions.

Jon Madian

Hats Worn
Children’s book writer, educational & counselling psychologist, curriculum designer, software publisher, artist-in-residence, college instructor on principles of design, technology implementation strategist.

Consultant for
Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Scholastic, McGraw-Hill, Renaissance Learning, Capstone, many other schools, companies & curriculum publishers.

The AI inflection point
Summary
This paper outlines how we can reinvent character, knowledge, and problem-solving education by using technology to integrate and expand the application of learning sciences to curriculum, assessment, and human resources.

Balancing spirit and academic traditions
Summary
Public education typically excludes spiritual teachings unless part of a curriculum on the history or comparison of religions. Values Education, though secular, encompasses the values taught in spiritual traditions.