Consider my friend and former colleague Mrs. D. Until recently, she was a first and second grade students teaching for decades. She knows the students that arrive in her classroom are diverse; some are readers and writers, some some are still trying to learn the alphabet. Mrs. D. is always looking for the next thing Read More
If tests are presented as a measure of professional knowledge, and if students and teachers prepare for the tests in the manner that professionals do, then there is a greater likelihood that students will both develop a healthier relationship with tests and they will perceive them as a serious measure of their skills and knowledge.
Multiple choice test questions and students’ answers to them seem perhaps the simplest data we encounter as teachers. We pose a question. Students read it. Students give the correct answer or the incorrect answer. Tally the correct answers to measure each student’s understanding. We can deconstruct the process into three components. We assume students: Understood Read More
Collaboration has become a buzzword in education; it has become something that is to be valued, and so any initiative or endeavor undertaken by educators is described as a project that “requires collaboration.” In many cases, advocates for the initiative conflate working together with collaboration. Other endeavors are truly collaborative as seen in several characteristics: Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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