One of the common responses when it is suggested that faculty design their courses for deeper learning is, “I will, but they need the basic information first.” While this may seem to be a reasonable response given the fact that many students arrive with little prior knowledge in the field it is an untenable position. Read More
Category: Learning
Heutagogy
Everyone who works in or studies education is familiar with the word pedagogy. It comprises the strategies and methods teachers use to teach. Included in pedagogical practices are a wide range of activities that are grounded in behaviorist, cognitive, and connectionists psychologies. The methods are connected by several assumptions, however. Specifically, pedagogy assumes the teacher Read More
Tests: Learners as Rulers: Clouds
Consider for a moment clouds. We know they are collections of water (or ice) droplets, and they are “things.” When we look at the sky, we know they are individual things, but when we look out of the airplane window, we see they are less clearly bounded than they appear, and foggy days confirm they Read More
On Models of Success
Schools, businesses, governments, and other organizations attempt to accomplish goals. Ostensibly, it seems leaders can define what they will accomplish, decide how to measure the accomplishment, and plan for how to accomplish it. Some populations, for example business leaders and politicians, seek to accomplish goals that: Define test scores as the measure of learning; Test Read More
On Intelligence
In his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that mental capacity is important to humans, and—whatever it is—it is a uniquely human characteristic that has, in many and diverse forms, contributed to the development of our species. Alfred Binet, the French scientist who began developing tests to measure Read More
On Students Who Become Teachers
On January 17, 2022, I posted the tweet that is embedded below. It generated far more conversation than most of what I tweet, and the replies are worth the time to read. Some of the replies did challenge my overgeneralization and my lack of citing any references. Of course, those criticisms were spot-on. Most teachers Read More
On #edtech in the Wild
Only when teachers/ learning designers are doing their jobs! https://t.co/DNbvfwFoFy — Dr. Gary Ackerman (@GaryAckermanPhD) January 14, 2022 My snarky reply to Derek Moore’s tweet drew the “tell me more” response. I tried to compose a few 280-character responses, but I didn’t have time, so I took to my blog. There is a companion tweet Read More
Elevator Pitch on Emerging Teaching Practices
In recent decades, scholars have rediscovered the very effective learning that happens outside of classrooms. Because it is so difficult for “school learning” to displace the concepts learned outside of classrooms seems to confirm the strength of what is learned outside of school. As cognitive and neuroscientists have illuminated the changes in human bodies and Read More
Epistemology Matters
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
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