Giving Compass' Take:

• Getting Smart explains how three education leaders in Virginia have implemented their own contemporary progressive education model: putting a focus on crucial lifelong learning competencies with a workforce development component.

• Why is it important for education and teaching methods to change and grow with students? How can schools help prepare students for college and careers?

• Here's how one schools is getting students passionate about their learning.

Pam Moran just wrapped up 32 years as an Albemarle County educator. After a dozen years as superintendent, Pam passed the torch last month to her deputy, Matt Haas. She left a great example of what she calls “contemporary progressive education.”

With Albemarle colleagues Ira Socol and Chad Ratliff, Moran just published “a map of what we believe are the processes necessary to move from schools in which content- driven, adult-determined teaching was the old norm to new learning spaces and communities in which context-driven, child- determined learning is the new norm.”

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-based Thinking Change Schools is not a how-to manual, but it does ask you to do some heavy lifting. Each chapter ends with sections designed to spark your own learning including sections called provocation, structured Inquiry, reflective pause, and take action.

“We have rejected the mass standardization of learning that has dominated schools for decades,” said the authors.

Read the full article about timeless learning and listening at Getting Smart.