Teaching is a fascinating profession; it comprises individuals who were all successful as students. Implicit in our concept of teaching is replicating for our students what proved successful for us. The reality, however, is that most of our students are not on the same path we are on (there are exceptions to this especially in Read More
School and technology leaders spend great amounts of time trying to figure out what they should prioritize; this guides their decisions about where resources are used and which efforts receive attention. Despite their insistence that they are data-driven, many school leaders seem to ignore much that we know about how the phenomena they are trying Read More
Early in the 1940’s, biology was a science being revolutionized by the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). English biologist D’Arcy Thompson commented, “We have come to the edge of a world of which we have no experience, and where all of our preconceptions must be recast” (cited in Gould 1998, 404). In many ways, Thompson’s Read More
In the 1992 book The Work of Nations, Robert Reich suggested the basic work skills necessary for future workers would include: abstraction which includes the ability to make meaning of complicated and unfamiliar situations system thinking which includes the ability to deconstruct the abstractions, and make logical predicts and develop rational strategies experimentation which includes Read More
In recent decades, there is rich evidence that cooperation rather than competition is a strategy associated with long-term survival of life. Lynn Marguilis and Dorian Sagan point to evidence that mitochondria and chloroplasts (organelles found in multicellular organisms such and plants and animals) were originally independent organisms that formed cooperative relationships with other organisms to Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable | RSS.com The title of this post appears to be a cryptic message, perhaps an arcane relationship from a long-forgotten physics textbook. In reality, it summarizes one of the most important ideas about learning to be articulated in the last 10 years or so. The relationship makes perfect sense to many teachers Read More
A colleague and I sat together to see if we could agree on a collection of statements about learning. This is what he and I beleive to be true about learning: Learning happens in the brains of individuals; Learning extends into the social and technological environments; Learning is a multi-dimensional process involving perception, recollection, analyzing, Read More
Your professional experiences in the field will serve you well as you teach. Your examples and stories will help your students understand the context of the ideas they study, see connections, and they will make your class more engaging and effective. Your experiences will limit you, also. We all adapt to the culture in which Read More
Your experience with teachers and learning has been unique to you. The strategies your teachers used and the approaches you brought to your learning worked for you; you would not be in the position of teachers otherwise. Do not be fooled into thinking your path to becoming educated is the path that will work for Read More
There is no lack of ideas about how to restructure and reorganize schools and classrooms. Educators are very familiar with the never-ending series of “buzz words” that emerge, capture the attention of leaders for a few years, then fade into disuse when the next term distracts leaders. In recent years, the derisive label “buzz word” Read More