Education is about changing humans. When our students leave our classrooms, we expect they can do things, see things, and think things they could not before the class. If our students leave with their abilities unchanged, then they (and we) have wasted their time and energy and money while there.
Author: Gary Ackerman
On Social Cognition
Humans are social creatures. Our brains function differently when we are engaged with others compared to when we are engages alone. We have capacity to solve much more complex problems when working together compared to when we work alone, but we also have greater capacity to deceive ourselves. This summer, I finally read Edwin Hutchin’s Cognition Read More
How to Use Occam’s Razor
We all experience circumstances that we know cannot be due to coincidental. We see things on our digital devices that we interpret as evidence our devices are “spying,” as they “know” what we want. I had such an experience earlier this week. I needed an address… a real address where I was sending a piece Read More
The Affordances of Virtual Classrooms.
The idea of affordances has been used in the last few decades to capture the idea that the environment allows us to do certain things. Some environments afford some actions, other environments afford different actions. In this post, I consider the characteristics of virtual classrooms and what they afford students and teachers. First, technology has Read More
Some Things No Longer Tenable in Education
As we return to “normal,” teachers will be building classrooms in which teaching and learning happens in both physical places and online spaces. Until now, most educators have perceived clear boundaries between online teaching and face-to-face teaching. That separation is no longer tenable. For decades, educators have heard “the jobs your students will have do not exist yet.” Until recently that has not been true; as we Read More
Multidimensionality of Learning
The multidimensional nature of human learning can be interpreted differently. In the previous section, I reviewed the multidimensional nature of what humans know. Harris and Williams (2016) claim learning is “a multidimensional process [emphasis added] that causes a change of state in the brain (p. 8).” For those authors, multidimensionality refers to the types of experiences that Read More
On Problems as Teaching Strategy
Merrill (2002) placed real-word problems at the center of effective teaching. The problems, however, must be judged “interesting, relevant, and engaging” (p. 46) to the lead to learners so they have a sense of caring that was labeled “ownership.” Such problems are also selected so that students understand the problems, care the problem be solved, Read More
Learning… Always Defining Learning
My definition is grounded in three assumptions about learning. First, learning can be inert. Whithead North, introduced this term in to describe the knowledge that can be expressed by learners, but they have no idea what it means or how it should be interpreted or applied. In my experience as a science and math teacher (and also a student Read More
On Collapse
Rereading Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed has been on my “to do” list for some time. I first read it about when the second edition was published. I’m a fan of Diamond’s work. I especially appreciate the detailed evidence and analysis he adds to popular writing. While I am not Read More
On Not Being Taught How to Teach
I left high school as a 17-year-old (yes, I am old enough that they let me start school a few weeks before my fifth birthday) who knew that he wanted to become a science teacher. My path to my undergraduate as not as circuitous as many, so five years later I was a middle school Read More