Seriously teachers. Stop tweeting pictures of students. — Dr. Gary Ackerman (@GaryAckermanPhD) November 11, 2021 I recently had a tweet go “viral” in the non-celebrity sense… something like 80,000 impressions in a day which I attribute to the likes, replies, and retweets. In this post, I dig a little deeper into my rationale for the Read More
Category: Schools
Schools are Multifaceted Organizations
It may seem unnecessary to state it, but schools are places where children are present. Lots of children. Seriously, they are everywhere. They reflect the social, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, and other characteristics of the local population. They affect every decision made in schools. Whether those decisions are in the best interest of those children Read More
Yet Another Look at the Standard Model of Education
Stop reading this sentence and imagine a school. In your mind, enter a classroom where students and teacher are present, and class is in session. Look around. See the teacher in the room, see the students, and see what they are doing. If you didn’t play along with the preceding sentence, recall a movie or television program in which a classroom, teaching, and learning was portrayed. It doesn’t Read More
Student IT Users
A theme I have addressed several times in this blog is the difference between information technology users in schools and technology users in other organizations. In this post, I focus specifically on the characteristics of student user that be unfamiliar to IT managers who learned their craft in businesses and industries. When IT professionals understand Read More
How Students Answer “Why am I here?”
This question is asked by students all the time. It doesn’t matter what their age, what they are studying, who is paying the bills, or how dedicated to their long-term plans they are, students question their purpose for being in school and engaging in the curriculum and instruction. For some students, the question is answered Read More
Thinking About Schools
I am beginning to use the term “Innovation Age School” to describe education in the middle of the 21st century. Innovation, we know, is “doing something differently.” I am convinced we are doing things differently… we are doing everything differently… how we make money… how we engage with others in our community… how we interact Read More
Why is Education Always Reforming?
Although the constant cycles of reforms can be tiresome for many educators, the cycle can be explained by and even predicted by aspects of education that are well-known. First, education is a field that requires continuous improvement. One never “achieves being a good educator,” we adopt new practices, adapt existing practice to unfamiliar students, and Read More
On Community Colleges
I made the decision to finish my career working in community colleges. I was asked why. Here is a summary of my response. These institutions prepare minds and bodies for new opportunities. There are several aspects these school that are appealing to me as an educator and as a teacher of teachers. First, students who attend these 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
“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