A comprehensive higher education comprises: Declarative knowledge—those facts that can be stated as well as the concepts that organizes them. English students will be able to identify important works and also to place them in the context of time and place to demonstrate declarative knowledge of their importance. Procedural knowledge—those skills that students know how Read More
Category: Teaching & Learning
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
An Instructional Video Rubric
Teachers talking over slides (or images or diagrams or animations) has become an important teaching strategy during the pandemic. It is likely to continue to be a staple of teachers not just because it will make the pivot to remote teaching easier when it becomes necessary, but because it allows for alternative method of teaching Read More
Some Thought on Grading
In my 30+ years working in education, few aspects of the work cause more consternation than grading. Students, their parents, and teachers all find grades to be a stress-inducing aspect of school. In most cases, grading is marginal to education. When we are measuring what students know, talking or thinking about how to figure out Read More
Thoughts on Grading
The ungrading community has been busy on Twitter this fall. These folks have taken grades (in the traditional sense) out of their courses, and (according to this posts) have generally been happy with the results. Students are doing work; they are learning. Some suggest students are more engaged and learning more. I have not taken Read More
Elevator Pitch: Tech = Tame, Education = Wicked
Technology problems are tame because: we can all easily recognize them as problems (for example, the network doesn’t respond, so we can’t do our work); we have known methods of restoring it (we know how to isolate malfunctioning parts of the system and there are known processes for fixing them) we all agree when they are resolved (we get back Read More
Lesson Design (Rather than Planning)
When I was an undergraduate student studying to become an educator, my peers and I took great pride in our lesson planning. When I was a graduate student (I completed my masters degree at the end of my 12th year as a teacher), my peers who had yet to teach wrote lesson plans with great care. When I was teaching Read More
Yet Another Look at the Standard Model of Education
Stop reading this sentence and imagine a school. In your mind, enter a classroom where students and teacher are present, and class is in session. Look around. See the teacher in the room, see the students, and see what they are doing. If you didn’t play along with the preceding sentence, recall a movie or television program in which a classroom, teaching, and learning was portrayed. It doesn’t Read More
Some Reality About Teaching
Unfortunately for me (and all other educators and those interested in education), humans are variable creatures; cause and effect relationships do not exist in education. We cannot be assured “if I do this, then my students will learn that.” (Those who make their living selling “the next big thing” to educators will be disappointed to Read More
What Teachers Want
In the 2003 book Creating Significant Learning Experiences, L. Dee Fink described conversations with faculty that were focused by the question, “In your deepest, fondest dreams, what kind of impact would you most like to have on your students?” Faculty answers to this question did not mention remembering information. Faculty’s answers did include what they hoped students would do with their new knowledge, how they would solve problems, how they would interact Read More