Teachers know “proficiencies” are coming to dominate as the buzzword that is attracting the attention of educational leaders and policy makers. (Some might characterize this as a distraction of attention from important issues and needs, but I will proceed without comment on that speculation.) One of the disputes I have with how this is being Read More
Category: Learning
Types of Knowledge
I am in the middle of rereading Carl Bereiter’s 2002 book Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. Among the intriguing ideas is the book is his confrontation of the “mind as a container” metaphor. Recent generations of educators have operated under the assumption that one’s brain is a container and that what we know Read More
Cognitive Load Theory
54: Cognitive Lod Theory This post complements this earlier one on The Lens of Cognitive Load Theory While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011) (CLT) predicts and explains technology use once it has been adopted. CLT is Read More
The Self-Driven Child
In private conversations for several years, I have been promoting “Ackerman’s Theory of Control.” My informal theory can be summarized as “people (children included) need to control something in their lives… if they don’t feel in control, they will take control of something.” My theory emerged out of years of working with children, and finding Read More
Debunking Learning Styles
There has always been something suspicious to me about “learning styles.” As teachers, we are supposed vary our delivery, so that each student can learn through the style that works best for the individual. The idea seemed too simple, and it seemed that it did not really explain what I observed with my students. “Learning Read More
Learners: Past and Future
I have been reviewing Technology-Rich Instruction: Classrooms in the 21st Century, my book that was published in 2015 and discovering how much of it seems dated. (This observation is despite my desire to write a book that would inform teachers and education leaders for longer than the typical 6-18 months we can expect from a Read More
Natural Impulses of the Child
This is an initial draft… as time allows, I will continue to develop this post. John Dewey identified four natural impulses of children: to inquiry to communicate to construct to express For experiences to be educative, he reasoned, they must allow students to follow these impulses. If we hold these to be true, and there Read More
Humans as Technology-Using Creatures
Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com Technology is a relatively new word to the lexicon. The term was first used in print in 1831 by Jacob Bigelow, a New England botanist and doctor who published a series of his lectures as a textbook. Evidence of technology use by humans, however, extends far into pre-history. Wherever archaeologists Read More
iGen: Read This Book!
A different review is available here: http://hackscience.net/blog/?p=269 Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGEN: why today’s super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy– and completely unprepared for adulthood and (what this means for the rest of us). New York: Atria Books. For several years, educators have been hearing about (and teaching) Millennials. This term Read More
The Capacity to Learn
This post concludes the theme begun in The (Overturned) Model of Standard Education and continued in Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education A dominant theme in the literature on the future of work is that workers—all workers, white collar, blue collar, in the services, information field, and trades, and yet to be discovered fields—will have Read More