The one thing that has not changed during my 35 years in education is that teachers complain about anything they perceive as “not practical.” When I was an undergraduate student, by classmates and I sat in the corridors of the building s in which education classes met (usually drinking coffee– a truly useful skill for Read More
Category: Teaching & Learning
On Problem Solvers
Good problem solvers recognize three realities:
Design Your Teaching
In education, we are taught to plan our lessons. In more progressive communities, we are taught to “backwards design” our lessons and units. Begin with what you want to accomplish, decide how you will know if you got there, then make sure you take your students through a series of activities that will allow them Read More
Education Cannot Be Engineered
The most flawed educational proposals proceed from the position that education is an engineering problem, and thus we can build educational systems can be built to create systems that produce measurable achievement reliably. For many reasons, those systems that approach all teaching and learning as a recipe that produces learning that can be measured with Read More
On Myths in Curriculum
Increasingly, we recognize many of the things that are “true” in society are myths. In education, we hear lots of folks promote “learning styles,” but that idea is a debunked myth. In education, we also hold that curriculum and teaching should not be political. It is reasoned teachers’ job is to teach the facts and Read More
What? Why? And How?
Throughout my career as an educational technologist, I frequently used a “What? Why? And How?” structure to organize my presentations to students and to faculty. The earliest evidence I can find in my teaching of this organization is in 2000 when teaching the information technology course in the school librarian sequence at our state university. Read More
On Student Autonomy
A recent tweet and my reply (along with the replies of others) got me thinking about students’ role in deciding curriculum, learning activities, and products through which they demonstrate their learning. Earlier in my career, colleagues and I spoke of “student voice and choice.” As with all dimensions of classroom organization and activity, there is Read More
The Conative Domain
Teachers teach. What exactly they should teach, what they actually do teach, and the degree of consensus about what they teach and the degree to which they are doing it are very contentious issues today. Most would agree some of the curriculum belongs in the Most educational practitioners are content if students demonstrate new learning Read More
Yeah… All Curriculum… It’s Political
Educators know there is no possibility that education can be politically neutral. Sure, we generally avoid taking an explicit side in any election—in one’s role as a public school educator, they cannot even advocate for passing the local school budget. All knowledge is, however, useful in either supporting or rejecting a conclusion; all decisions can Read More
Research. Practice. And the Gap Between the Two.
In education (as in other fields) we hear leaders who proclaim they are “data-driven” and they “use evidence.” Despite this, there tends to be agreement within the education research community and within the practitioner community that research is not a factor that affects decisions I the manner we would all hope. (In New England the Read More