Consider my friend and former colleague Mrs. D. Until recently, she was a first and second grade students teaching for decades. She knows the students that arrive in her classroom are diverse; some are readers and writers, some some are still trying to learn the alphabet. Mrs. D. is always looking for the next thing Read More
Category: Learning
Why We Value Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky, a man who was born November 5, 1896 and died at 38 years of age. His death at such a young age was due to tuberculosis. Vygotsky attended school in Orsha, which is is north of Moscow, Russia. After he completed his degree at Moscow University in 1917, he taught literature and psychology Read More
Elevator Pitch on The Curse of Knowledge
Humans are learners. Humans are also the products of their environments, and once something from the environment is learned it is very difficult to unlearn it and what we have learned influences what we learn in the future.
What Gould Said About Intelligence
Education is based on a simple idea: we want to make people smart. “Smart” is the general term that we use to describe an individual who has greater than usual skill and knowledge. Smart is approximately aligned with intelligence which is approximately aligned with the ability to think and learn. I am being nebulous here Read More
Deconstructing Correct Answers
Multiple choice test questions and students’ answers to them seem perhaps the simplest data we encounter as teachers. We pose a question. Students read it. Students give the correct answer or the incorrect answer. Tally the correct answers to measure each student’s understanding. We can deconstruct the process into three components. We assume students: Understood Read More
Elevators Pitch on Brains
In his 2013 book, Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Learn, Matthew Lieberman described research from late in the 20th century that determined the default areas of brain activity. When a person stops trying to do something else, and the rest of the brain goes quite, the default areas are active. If one begins Read More
Elevator Pitch on Brains and Technology
Human brains are adaptable organs. They are designed to absorb and process information, to find patterns and generalize, and store information in the many forms it finds and creates. As a social species, communication is an essential aspect of human life as well. Human brains are born into a social group and that groups form Read More
A Rationale for Social Learning
Intelligence has been perceived to be a cognitive activity originating the brains of an individual for generations. While there is surely a cognitive component, learning science is telling us that human brains evolved to learn from and with other brains. While methods that find students learning together continue to be contentious, it is clear that Read More
On Learners
Learners and their brains are the natural phenomena in which the technology of education is grounded. To be educative, an experience must be compatible with the physiology and psychology of their bodies and brains. For the 21st century educator, the classroom is filled with learners who have much different relationships with technology compared to those Read More
Elevator Pitch: Conditioning
One of the earliest psychological theories to be applied to schooling was behaviorism. According to this idea, humans learn by associating rewards with actions; we tend to continue to do (learn) that which is positively rewarded and avoid that which is negatively rewarded. The type of learning associated with behaviorism is called conditioning. Conditioning is Read More