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
Author: Gary Ackerman
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
“In Recent Decades…” Observations of Education
What exactly does it mean that “students learn?” For many generations, student learning in classrooms has been focused on their ability to remember information. If students could accurately recall what they were taught for a long time after they were taught it, then we assumed they had learned it well. That concept of learning seems inadequate today. In recent decades, scholars have detailed the Read More
On Teaching and Learning
In classrooms, we observe teaching and learning. We expect these two activities are closely and positively related. The more and the better we teach, we reason, the more and the better students will learn. After more than 30 years in classrooms in a range of roles (some which have allowed me to be to proverbial “fly on the wall” who observed teaching at its Read More
On Change
In their 2010 book Change, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, scholars and business leader who study change, attributed resistance to change to three factors. These are observed regardless of the type of change. First, until new practices become habit, people must exert self-control to adopt them; this self-control is necessary to continue using the new Read More
Is This Part of a Greater Pattern?
I started my career in education in the late 1980’s. To increase my salary, I enrolled in graduate courses and the I could take a purchase order from the school when I enrolled. My principal or department head needed to “approve” the course, but it was informal. When I started I was in control of Read More
Annotation
Much of my work supporting online teaching and learning is listening to faculty (and students) “complain” about discussions. Students find them to be “hoops” to jump through, and faculty do not spend much time improving them because students do not engage with them in the manner they hope. Emerging learning science is confirming that interaction Read More
On Instruction
While some associate instruction with the leaners as a passive recipient of information, Burton, Moore, and Magliaro (2004) suggest this is an inaccurate conclusion, and they suggest instruction can provide a structure for approaching a complex body of knowledge and also for maintaining knowledge. Reif (2008) identified several factors that make instruction effective including articulating Read More
A Slightly Cynical Rant on Innovations in Education
Some educators accept the invitation to learn about an innovative pedagogy being introduced to a school. These individuals tend to receive extra training, lead planning and implementation meetings, and deliver professional development to colleagues. In my experience, those who become local advocates of these innovations tend to be less experienced teachers and educators who do Read More
Technology & Cognition
The global computer networks that we have at our finger tips in the third decade of the 21st century have been attributed with creating a “global village,” and that seems a appropriate metaphor as many have had the experience of communicating with individual at the next seat or thousands of miles away using ICT. The Read More