At several time over the last 20 years, I have helped schools create electronic portfolio projects– I wish these had been more sustained, but I’ve found there is a vast disconnect between what educators think they will be and what they really are. I discovered this summary of eportolfios that I prepared for a specific […]
Category: Teaching & Learning
On Human Cognition
After more than 30 years in education, I have become convinced that the systems we have created are grounded in an incorrect assumption of what constitutes human thinking. As educators, our goal is to increase and enhances students’ cognitive abilities. When they leave our classrooms, they should be able to observe more and more sophisticated […]
Rate, Interaction, Place: Three Aspects of Education
We how work in education have been thrown into chaos this past year. The chaos has not been as bad as our reaction to it, but that is a topic for another post. What has become clear in the past year has been educators’ assumptions about teaching and learning and schooling. As often happens, my […]
On Academic Freedom
One of the issues I’ve seen raised in recent months, and one that I expect will become more common as we move into the “post-COVID” era of education is academic freedom. Specifically, I refer to the argument by faculty that they have the “right” to teach in any manner they see fit and that any […]
The Paradox of Banning Cell Phones
Cognitive load is a well-known and established theory. Basically, it posits humans have a limited amount of cognitive processing power available at any moment; game theorists would declare our cognitive capacity is a zero-sum quantity. What is used for one purpose is unavailable for other purposes. In classroom, we want to limit extraneous cognitive load […]
Assumptions Educators Make
Education is about changing humans. When our students leave, we hope they can do things, see things, and think things they could not before the class. That reality is rich with the potential for abuse and history shows it has been abused, but there is equal reality that education can be co-opted for other goals. […]
Latent Learning
I’ve read an interesting article recently that challenges what appears to be to orthodox view that performance on tests and other assessments is predictive of long-term learning and the ability to apply what one has learned on other situations. Among the several points that support the authors’ claims are seemingly contrary observations. Latent learning is […]
Performance and Learning
Recent decades have found educators sharply focusing on performance. This arises from the dominance of standards to guide curriculum. At all levels of education, we define what it is that students are supposed to know and do, translate that into learning objectives, then check students’ performance on assessments that (ostensibly) measure the degree to which […]
A Gap in Education
The foundational idea of education is that students are able to “do something” after the process is complete that they could not do before. What students can do depends on the experiences that comprise their education. There seems to be two competing versions of what we hope our students will be able to do after […]
Lessons Learned from a Lesson on the Freedom of Speech
Like many, I have been thinking a lot about freedom of speech lately. My purpose in this post is not to comment on that freedom. I have always been a strong advocate for free speech, but speech and actions are not the same. These events have brought me back to my high school days. I know how faulty […]