What educators believe about how human brains function and what causes brains to change is one of the most important factors that determines how they organize curriculum and deliver instruction. Even those educators who claim to be unaffected by psychology or learning theory (in my experience a large majority of teachers eschew theory), their teaching Read More
Category: Teaching & Learning
Education for Information-Rich Fields
We all know the teacher who insists, “but my field is content-rich. I need to cover all of this, so that students are ready for next year.” This attitude is grounded in a sincere interest that students “know” what they should know. It also results in the teacher adopting the “fill their brains” with information approach to teaching. What is becoming Read More
Elevators Pitch on Scaffolding
Scaffolding is an approach that can be used to teaching for deeper learning. This is especially useful when an instructor wants to approach a problem from the whole task, but it is too complicate for the students to complete independently. In this case, the teacher introduces scaffolds so to problem enters the students’ zone of proximal development. With scaffolds, Read More
Carving Out Time for Authentic Learning
Are Twitter followers colleagues? My answer is yes, based on the number of times threads have led me to think about what I really mean in these short posts. Also based on the number of times Tweets cause me to look back at things that I recall as being effective in the past and I Read More
An Elevator Pitch on the Changing Nature of Teaching and Learning
Teaching and learning are endeavors that have changed significantly in the decades since the cognitive science and the learning sciences emerged. More accurately, the nature of human learning has not changed, but our understanding of it has changed and this has led scholars and educators to redefine what they expect of students. Yes, teachers are Read More
Improving Memory and Recall
Scientists have identified several strategies whereby individuals can improve their memories, however. While these can be used effectively when adopting a content-only approach to teaching, they can also be incorporated in other ways. For example, faculty can recommend students use these outside of class in homework situations; this allows students to invest as much time Read More
Inductive Reasoning…. How About Inductive Education?
Qualitative researchers are among the thinkers who practice inductive reasoning. They investigate questions, gather experience, immerse themselves in their data which captures the part of the world that holds their interest. From their data, they identify generalizations that appear to be supported by their data and they seek to apply those generalizations to other situations. Read More
Reconceptualizing “Career and College Ready”
For a generation, educators have been attempting to teach so that students are “career and college ready.” One tenant of this goal has been “grades must reflect what students know and can do.” Educators were encouraged to remove criteria such as participation, homework completion, timeliness, and other aspects of work that are not associated with Read More
On Social and Technology-Rich Education
Education. Ever since there have been humans, they have invented methods of teaching. The need to teach arises from our nature as social and technology-using creatures. Humans need to teach the young how to survive (what to eat and how to find it, how to modify the world for survival and comfort, and what is Read More
The Problem with #edtech Integration
In the 2006 edition of a popular textbook for courses designed for educators learning to create technology-rich classrooms, Robyler (2006) defined integrating educational technology as “the process of determining which electronic tools and which methods of implementing them are appropriate responses to given classroom situations and problems” (p. 9). This idea had been a staple Read More