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.
Category: Elevator Pitches
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
Effective Teachers are Perpetually Learning about Teaching
Each instructor’s experience with teachers and learning has been unique to you. The strategies your teachers used and the approaches you brought to your own learning worked for you; you would not be in this position otherwise. Do not be fooled into thinking your path to becoming educated is the path that will work for Read More
What Roszak Wrote About Curriculum
Historian and philosopher Theodore Roszak (1994) minimizes the role of information in human cognition, and he even observes “humans think with ideas, not with information” [emphasis in the original] and affords ideas a central place in the human cognition by continuing, “Information may helpfully illustrate or decorate an idea; it may, where it works under the guidance of a contrasting idea, help to call other Read More
Culture and Learning
The culture (comprising beliefs, attitudes, symbols, and similar concepts) that learners experience when they are young contributes to their views and perspectives. These influence what behaviors in schools that learners value, how they define learning, and ideas about how learning occurs. These all affect how individual interact with curriculum, teachers, and peers in school. Differences Read More
Elevator Pitch on the Nature of Schools
The purpose of education is to help people learn. Learning is a natural physiological process of the human brain. That nature defines the rules within which educators (and education policy makers) must play. While it might be convenient for policy makers to define test scores as a measure of learning, if test scores are a Read More
An Elevator Pitch on Integration as Learning
Eric Mauzer, a Harvard physics educator, is well-known for developing the concept of integration as an aspect of deeper learning. Mauzer found that after a long course in which students were taught information and solutions without context, the course had “taught them ‘next to nothing.’ After a semester of physics, they still held the same Read More
What John Seeley Brown Said About Learning
John Seeley Brown (2000) concluded that in the 21st century, the amount of information that humans access is overwhelming. Information is no longer the essential aspect of knowing. The sense we make of information is the essential aspect of knowing. Brown observed, “The forces that shape the background [of human knowledge] are the social forces, Read More
Short Rant on Assessment
When well-designed, these assessments allow for the students to actively participate in the assessment of their work; this both helps them refine the meaning they make of what they studied and it provided them with opportunities to accurately self-assess their work. Because the work is intended for authentic audiences, the students are motivated to seek Read More
Two Types of Tests
Tests can be understood in one of two ways; they are either culminating events or they are gateway events. Most tests administered in classrooms are likely culminating events. At the end of a unit of study, tests are administered to determine the degree to which the information was retained. After the test, the students can Read More