From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:
Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).
And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.
Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.
Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.
For more…
By Dave Murray, in Education News
Michigan schools are getting a $318 million boost from the federal government this year, but is that really a helping hand?
Experts speaking at an Education Commission of the States conference suggested schools used the time to start planning for when the cash by sharing services and combining their purchasing power — ideas discussed this week in or Michigan 10.0 series.
Alyson Klein of Education Week reports that school finance expert Michael Griffith told the recent gathering that states are becoming more and more dependent on the federal government, and that might not be a good thing, unless they don’t mind giving up bigger chunks of their authority.
To read more…
By Patricia Cohen, in The New York Times
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work.
To read more…
By Dale Singer in, St. Louis Beacon
What’s the best relationship between teachers and students? Love? Admiration? Respect?
What would you do if your class were deeply involved in a creative project, like a movie or a newspaper or a play, and the principal came along and said you had to get back to basics because standardized test time was coming up?
Those were the kinds of questions that teachers in Riverview Gardens faced over the summer when they wanted to get rehired for their jobs, after the district was taken over by a state-appointed board. For years, teachers around the country have been tested in the same way by the Haberman Star Teacher program, which tries to determine who is most likely to succeed in a school environment that seems to get tougher every year.
To read more…
Click here for Senate roll call.
By David M. Herszenhorn, in The New York Times
Washington - The Senate on Wednesday cleared the way for a $26 billion package of aid to states and school districts, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she would summon members from their summer recess to grant final approval to the bill.
The measure had been hung up by partisan wrangling between Democrats, who said it was necessary to avert layoffs of teachers and cutbacks in services by strapped states, and Republicans, who objected to another round of government spending and characterized it as a political payoff to unions.
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By Tim Madigan, in Philosophy Now
Tim Madigan remembers Tim Cooney (1930-1999).
“My ideas evolved from long hours in local bars, talking, talking, talking, always about morality. People were always asking ‘Who do you think you are, Socrates?’ They said it with contempt, but I would smile and say, ‘Thank you.’” – Tim Cooney
The television show Sesame Street recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion there have been a host of events, including the publication of several books. A review of one of them, Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis, caught my eye when I saw a mention in it of the late Timothy J. Cooney, ex-husband of Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of Sesame Street. Tim was a fascinating person in his own right, and I immediately bought the book to see what it had to say about him, for I had gotten to know Tim in the last decade of his life, well after his marriage had ended.
To read more…
By Jonathan Alter, in Newsweek
A first-grade teacher in Vallejo, Calif., works with students. Schools across the country are struggling with deep budget cuts.
For more than 40 years, Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the third-ranking member of the House, has been a fiery and highly effective legislator. Any history of how the country avoided another depression must include Obey, who shepherded the $787 billion Recovery Act through Congress last year with great skill (and no earmarks). He has been an inspiring antiwar liberal dating back to Vietnam and a rare man of conscience in Washington.
To read more…
By Diane Ravitch, in Education Week’s Blog Bridging Differences
Dear Deborah,
The evidence continues to accumulate that our “accountability” policies are a great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate.
Over the past several years, efforts to “hold teachers accountable” and “hold schools accountable” have produced perverse consequences. Instead of better education, we are getting cheating scandals, teaching to bad tests, a narrowed curriculum, lowered standards, and gaming of the system. Even if it produces higher test scores (of dubious validity), high-stakes accountability does not produce better education.
To read more…
A review from Chris Dede of Ubiquitous Learning, a volume edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis
Modern day conceptions of ubiquitous learning build on an influential vision of ubiquitous computing published two decades earlier by Mark Weiser (1991) of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His article depicted a world of smart objects and intelligent contexts based on ubiquitous computing, a different way of conceptualizing the interface between computers, networks, and people. In Weiser’s vision, tiny computers are embedded into nearly every artifact and setting, networked so that they intercommunicate. For example, a tree could be tagged with information about its botanical characteristics; the tree might also offer to show an historic image of its context about the time it was planted or to describe the contribution it makes to reducing local pollution and greenhouse gases. People who wandered by could access this information on a wireless mobile device; based on a person’s response, the building adjacent to the tree might then offer some information. Current images of smart objects and intelligent contexts for learning include affordances not available twenty years earlier, such as Web 2.0 tools embedded in cyberinfrastructure (Dede, 2007) and augmented reality games (Klopfer, 2008).
To read more…
by Sam Dillon, in The New York Times
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs released on Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations for what students should master in English and math as they move from the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is that state’s 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the new standards were preferable to her home state’s. “It’s not that the standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it’s just that there are so many of them,” she said. “These are more user-friendly.”
To read more…
By Stephen Brill, in The New York Times
Michael Mulgrew is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.
To read more…
By Winnie Hu, in The New York Times
Pelham, N.Y. — In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions — the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.
Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.
To read more…
Picture Courtesy of Benjamin F. Carlson, in The Atlantic Wire
By Karoli, in Crooks and Liars
On May 19th, the Texas Board of Education will meet to approve the final Social Studies curriculum and textbook changes that caused such a stir back in March.
Since that meeting, even more changes have been proposed which, if adopted, promise to rewrite history for Texas schoolchildren to the conservative narrative. Uber-winger Don McLeroy’s proposals:
- Undermine the doctrine of separation of church and state. McLeroy wants to substitute an unintelligible standard asking students to “contrast the Founders’ intent relative to the wording of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, with the popular term ‘Separation of church and state.’”
To read more…
Global Student Mobility in the Asia Pacific: Mobility, Migration, Security and Wellbeing of International Students, edited by Peter Kell and Gillian Vogl
Over 2.7m students study in a country other than their own. Most of those students come from the Asia-Pacific region and undertake study in universities in the developed world. This trend is predicted to grow exponentially but features many dilemmas. In the post-9/11 global environment, international students experience hostility and harassment as well as ambivalence about their value to the academy.
Some live an uncertain life of poverty and alienation. Many also struggle to come to terms with living and studying in a foreign land where there are concerns about international students eroding academic standards, having poor English language proficiency and being unable to “integrate” and contribute to their new communities. But some also seek to make new homes in their host countries.
To read more…
By Alan Greenblatt, on NPR
Tenure is under attack. The century-old system of protecting experienced teachers from arbitrary dismissal — long viewed as sacred — has triggered hot political debates in several states.
“Teacher effectiveness” has emerged as the biggest buzz phrase in education policy circles. Because teachers have such potential for affecting the quality of children’s education, some people are starting to argue that it must become easier to get bad teachers out of the classroom.
“There seems to be a lot of drive to do away with tenure,” says Sandy Kress, who helped write federal and state education laws as an adviser to George W. Bush and other policymakers. “Tenure has proved to be just a horrible barrier to getting rid of that small percentage of teachers who are just not effective.”
To read more…
By Stephanie Clifford, in The New York Times
Milpitas, Calif. — When Kevin Jenkins wanted to teach his fourth-grade students at Spangler Elementary here how to use the Internet, he created a site where they could post photographs, drawings and surveys.
And they did. But to his dismay, some of his students posted surveys like “Who’s the most popular classmate?” and “Who’s the best-liked?”
Mr. Jenkins’s students “liked being able to express themselves in a place where they’re basically by themselves at a computer,” he said. “They’re not thinking that everyone’s going to see it.”
To read more…
By James Shreeve in National Geographic
The ancient Egyptians thought so little of brain matter they made a practice of scooping it out through the nose of a dead leader before packing the skull with cloth before burial. They believed consciousness resided in the heart, a view shared by Aristotle and a legacy of medieval thinkers. Even when consensus for the locus of thought moved northward into the head, it was not the brain that was believed to be the sine qua non, but the empty spaces within it, called ventricles, where ephemeral spirits swirled about. As late as 1662, philosopher Henry More scoffed that the brain showed “no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet, or a bowl of curds.”
Around the same time, French philosopher René Descartes codified the separation of conscious thought from the physical flesh of the brain. Cartesian “dualism” exerted a powerful influence over Western science for centuries, and while dismissed by most neuroscientists today, still feeds the popular belief in mind as a magical, transcendent quality.
To read more…
By David Nagel, in The Journal
Elementary and middle school students in Indiana will have an online alternative beginning in the 2010-2011 school year.
Rural Community Academy, in partnership with Connections Academy, is launching a statewide virtual public school that will serve students in grades 1 through 8. Dubbed Indiana Connections Academy Virtual Pilot School (INCA-VPS), the online school will provide a tuition-free education to Indiana students, providing teachers, support staff, and learning coaches for students.
To read more…
From Abby Goodnough, in The New York Times
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
To read more…
From Lesli A. Maxwell and Michele McNeil, in Education Week
By selecting just two states as first-round Race to the Top winners, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is leaving $3.4 billion on the table for the remaining states to vie for in round two.
Delaware and Tennessee beat out 14 other finalists last week to win the first grants awarded in the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund competition.
Mr. Duncan praised the two states, which edged out front-runners Florida and Louisiana, for mustering strong district and teachers’-union support for their plans, for having superior data systems, and for submitting comprehensive proposals that touched “every single child” statewide.
To read more…
From Routledge Taylor and Francis Group
About the Book
Are there evidence-based answers to the broad question “What explicit knowledge about language in teachers and/or students appears to enhance literacy development in some way”? Distinguished by its global perspective, its currency, and its comprehensiveness, Beyond the Grammar Wars:
- provides an historical overview of the debates around grammar and English/literacy teaching in four settings: the US, England, Scotland and Australia
- offers an up-to-date account of what the research is telling (and not telling) us about the effectiveness of certain kinds of grammar-based pedagogies in English/literacy classrooms
- takes readers into English/literacy classrooms through a range of examples of language/grammar-based pedagogies which have proven to be successful
- addresses metalinguistic issues related to changes in textual practices in a digital and multimodal age, and explores the challenges for educators who are committed to finding a “usable grammar” to contribute to teaching and learning in relation to these practices.
All of the contributors are acknowledged experts in their field. Activities designed for use in language and literacy education courses actively engage students in reflecting on and applying the content in their own teaching contexts.
For more book reviews…
From Three-Toed Sloth: Slow Takes from the Canopy (My Very Own Internet Tradition)
Anyone who wanders into the bleak and monotonous desert of IQ and the nature-vs-nurture dispute eventually gets trapped in the especially arid question of what, if anything, g, the supposed general factor of intelligence, tells us about these matters. By calling g a “statistical myth” before, I made clear my conclusion, but none of my reasoning. This topic being what it is, I hardly expect this will change anyone’s mind, but I feel a duty to explain myself.
To summarize what follows below (”shorter sloth”, as it were), the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can’t tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there are only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn’t distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.
To read more…
From Annie Murphy Paul, in The New York Times
You’ve probably heard it at one time or another: Most of us use only 10 percent of our brains. More factoid than fact, a claim of unknown provenance and dubious accuracy, the idea sticks around because of the enduring appeal of its underlying premise. We’d all love to think that we’re in possession of tremendous untapped potential, of latent mental powers just waiting to be activated. It seems so convenient, like falling in love with the person you’re already married to, or whipping up dinner from what’s already in your kitchen. You don’t have to leave home, or even change out of your pajamas.
To read more…
From The Forum For Education and Democracy
Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way. - Ted Sizer
As individuals with decades of experience in improving public education at all levels, the Conveners of The Forum for Education and Democracy view the upcoming debates over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as offering the opportunity to finally get it right. After a decade of tinkering around the edges and avoiding the hard questions, the so-called No Child Left Behind version of ESEA has done little to improve schools. In fact, our schools look much like they did when the act was passed – and many think that NCLB hindered school improvement efforts that were going on prior to its passage.
To read more…
From Henry Rollins, in Vanity Fair
From a letter to Thomas Jefferson written by John Adams, January 23, 1825:
“Books that cannot bear examination certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws…. The substance and essence of Christianity as I understand it is eternal and unchangeable and will bear examination forever but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination and they ought to be separated.”
Perhaps the powers that be in Texas consider Thomas Jefferson an extraneous ingredient and will seek to extract our third president and other major figures in American history from their school’s textbooks. It seems that there will be a bit of revision in Texas, and I fear it will be big—as things often are in the Lone Star State.
To read more…
From Sam Dillon in The New York Times
The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.
By announcing that he would send his education blueprint to Congress on Monday, President Obama returned to a campaign promise to repair the sprawling federal law, which affects each of the nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. His plan strikes a careful balance, retaining some key features of the Bush-era law, including its requirement for annual reading and math tests, while proposing far-reaching changes.
To read more…
From Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today
When I was in primary school, my math teacher used to be very lenient on girls who struggled with their math assignments, because - as I realize in hindsight - he was of the impression that girls were simply not as capable of doing math as he thought boys to be. Likewise, my German teacher wouldn’t fuss as much about sloppy handwriting with the boys as she would for the girls, since boys - in her opinion - were naturally not as good at writing neatly between the lines. Neither of my primary school teachers, were “sexist” (as far as I was able to tell as a then 8 year-old), and most likely they were simply drawing on their past experiences as teachers, regarding the distribution of “natural inclinations” and “abilities” which they had observed.
I don’t think you can really blame them for making such inferences, although there is an obvious problem with such behavior: It is a problem of self-perpetuating stereotypes in which teachers think girls are worse at math, girls get away with lesser effort in their math classes, which reduces average math scores for girls, which makes teachers think that girls are worse in math, and so on…
Sometimes, poor science, or even pseudo-scientific data add to the anecdotal observations, such as when George Roman announced in 1887 “that mental abilities were secondary sex characteristics attributable to brain size” (not quite the statistician, he seemed to have neglected the fact that brain size correlates with women’s average smaller body size and lesser weight…), or when Eleanor Maccoby concluded in 1974 that “gender differences in mathematics performance were scientifically well established” when she showed data that “boys and girls acquire early number concelts similarly in the preschool years, [...] and that their performance throughout elementary school was similar, (thus apparently indicating similar early math socialization) but that then “boys’ skills in mathematics increased faster than girls’ beginning around 12 or 13 years of age, creating a significant gender gap in performance by high school”.
To read more…
From Laura Miller in Salon
David Shenk’s new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we’re either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today’s popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it’s profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn’t caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they’re discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.
To read more…
From Elizabeth Green, in the New York Times
On a winter day five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.
To read more…
From Spencer Michels in PBS Newshour
A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California’s Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he’s become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
To read more…
From The Huffington Post
Stephen Colbert interviews a Columbia professor regarding the banning of certain textbooks:
To read more…
From Sarah Firisen in 3 Quarks Daily
The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
To read more…
From Russell Shorto, in The New York Times
Last month, a week before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.
Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
To read more…
From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
…
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
For the article…
This week in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning renowned media scholar James Gee talks with Heather Chaplin, author of Smartbomb, about how games influence learning.
Q: I know you always say you’re not advocating the use of games for learning in particular, but rather that games offer a model for effective learning. Why are games such an important model for us to be looking at? Why are they a good model for understanding learning?
A: First of all, it’s a good model because games are about problem solving, and they’re not about just learning facts. You learn the facts as tools to solve the problems. And we know if you teach people just facts, you have no guarantee they can solve problems, but if you teach them to solve problems, we do know they have to learn the facts to solve the problem. That’s all games are: sets of problems in an interesting environment.
The second thing is games give situated meaning. That is, they tie words to images, actions, dialog, experience, not just other words. We know from research on the brain that humans learn better when words are associated with images and actions and experiences and not just definitions or other words.
More…
