Celebrating the Season with a Sincere ‘Thank You!’
In the spirit of the season, we are sharing our November newsletter with a warm thank you.
As deeply as we understand the criticality of our mission, we also recognize that we cannot achieve it on our own. Ensuring that Decision Education is available to all students, all across the country, requires the passion, pull, and creative tenacity of many.
Each time you have shared the Alliance mission, so many others have responded by also joining our movement. And the numbers continue to grow every day. They are sharing advice, experience, interest, reach, connections, and financial support.
For that, we are truly thankful.
Together, we will ensure that every student has access to the lasting benefits of knowing how to frame a decision, clarify their values, weigh options, collect and evaluate data, consider the likelihood of outcomes, and manage cognitive biases as they make decisions. Together, we will ensure that these decisions lead to better lives and a better society.
Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones.
Joseph E. Sweeney, Ed.D.
Alliance Executive Director
Thank You to Our Two New Board Members
We welcome to our growing list of accomplished and high-impact supporters, two new Board Members.
Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Jan Elizabeth Tighe
Developing better decision-making skills in our students is a matter of national security. We have too much at stake to not give our students the critical thinking and decision skills they need to step into leadership tomorrow – whether that is as parents or as presidents. If we make Decision Education available today, we will reshape the trajectory of tomorrow.
PayPal Head of Sales Decision Science Michelle Ton
Applying decision-making skills has had a tremendous impact on my life, personally and professionally. I firmly believe that if every student had the chance to learn Decision Education skills, we would see that everything in society – business, government, social issues – would improve for the vast benefit of all of us.
Thank You to Our Generous Donors
This year, we dramatically accelerated work toward our mission. Surrounded by mounting evidence that our students and society need improved decision-making skills, we committed to having Decision Education added to school curricula.
Our donors, like those quoted below, support this commitment, enabling us to grow our staff from 14 to nearly 25, which is helping us develop Decision Education K-12 learning standards and instructional resources, as well expand our teacher and school partnerships.
The Alliance is tackling a foundational problem – how to teach good decision-making. Bringing together academic and thought leaders in the space, the Alliance has the potential to improve lives by empowering students to make better choices when they matter most.
Marta and Robert Adelson Family Foundation
Bob is an Alliance Board Member
For many years, we have decried the absence from our schools a syllabus that includes the critical thinking skills that we believe are essential to individual success and a properly functioning society. We are pleased to be able to support, at an early stage, the Alliance that is devoted to rectifying that position and is backed by such eminent theorists and practitioners in the field.
Simon and Jane Hallett
With facts and knowledge becoming increasingly prevalent and cheap to obtain, the most important set of skills to have is the ability to make better decisions around the facts at hand.
Drew and Meera Gilbert
Drew is an Alliance Board Member
Thank You to Our Decision Education Teachers
Teachers are at the heart of the movement through their daily work with students. We are thankful for them everyday.
We asked some of the teachers who joined our 2020 Decision Education Fellowship to share their experiences when they introduced Decision Education to their students. We had a hard time trimming their contagious enthusiasm into a short video.
Thank You to Our Decision Education Fellows
We received an outpouring of applications for our second Fellowship program, where teachers both learn the skills incorporated in Decision Education, and then share them with their students, helping us learn what works best.
Starting with a small core group and expecting to scale, we are working with 22 teachers from all over the country, testing with us varied approaches to teaching both teachers and students. We are grateful for their time, energy, and feedback.
Thank you to Our Experts and Research Partners
Our network of experts and advisors continually support our work with counsel, input, and direction. They also help raise awareness through their own work – including research, presentations, outreach – about the value and impact of decision-making skills. We share with you a presentation given by one of our research partners and Advisory Council Member, Johannes Seibert, who presented recently at TEDx in Innsbruck about making better decisions. Johannes is a Professor of Decision Sciences at Management Center Innsbruck in Austria.
Click on the thumbnail to watch a segment of his talk (4:12 – 7:27).
