In general, humans like to categorize using dichotomies; an object is placed in one group or another. As an undergraduate student preparing to be a science teacher, I classified plants using dichotomous keys for a particular botany class, hours examining specimens (usually alone and with coffee) to decide if each demonstrated a trait described in Read More
Category: Teaching & Learning
Guided Experience: Alternative to the Standard Model of Education
“The Standard Model” of education is a theme that has bee developed on this blog. See these posts: The (Overturned) Standard Mode of Education Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education This posts continues the theme with an excerpt addressing an another alternative: Research focusing on learning in informal situations (Lemke, Lecusay, Cole, & Michalchik, Read More
Which #edtech Tools Get Used?
Because new information technologies (including hardware, software, and new uses of both) emerge very quickly compared to the periodicity of schools (new technologies appear several times during a typical school year), teachers must adopt and adapt to them constantly. When deciding which technologies to use, teachers are more likely to use technologies that: Are easier Read More
Pedagogical Nihilism: An Idea Worth Exploring
One of the first steps I took as an undergraduate student to become in independent intellectual—which I define as taking an active role in defining the course of one’s own learning—was to begin reading essays by scientists. At the time, there were Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould who were regular contributors. It was a Read More
First Principles of Instruction
As an educator, I see so many theories or frameworks or models of advocated by school leaders, scholars, vendors, philanthropists, and others. I share the frustration of those educators who wish their endless series of “innovative” (an adjective used by the advocates) practice would end, and we would decide what we should do and just Read More
Knowledge Building
Scarmelia and Bereiter (2006) contrasted 20th century instruction that as supported by ICT (in which ICT was assumed to be equivalent to print-based information) to knowledge building. For Scarmelia and Bereiter, ICT can support knowledge building as a social endeavor in which ideas are improved, and the community comes to more clear understanding of ideas Read More
Deeper Learning Principles
More than 15 years ago, Collen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner (2002), scholars from the western United States, suggested that curriculum and instruction in the 21st century will be characterized by five properties that they refer to as deeper learning principles that appear to be associated with students who more clearly understand the curriculum and who Read More
Naturalistic Approaches to Research and Teaching
In their seminal book on Naturalistic inquiry, Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba (1985) argued that much scientific research is based on a reduction of the problem according to positivist principles, and that those assumptions are increasingly insufficient to describe many problems in the social sciences, including education. Whereas, positivist theory holds that a single reality Read More
Why Standardized Testing Flopped
In the fall of 2018, an article appeared in my news feed multiple times. Peter Greene, a contributor to Forbes magazine posed the question “Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop?” in the title of his article. No educator (or parent, or higher education professional, or employer) is going to be surprised to Read More
Teach from Known to New
Teaching can be deconstructed into two types of activities: Those that introduce new ideas, and Those that help ideas become known. In many classrooms, we teaching proceeds from “new to known.” The teacher introduces an idea and explains it to the point that students can begin to practice the idea, work with it, and (we Read More