After more than 30 years in education, I have become convinced that the systems we have created are grounded in an incorrect assumption of what constitutes human thinking. As educators, our goal is to increase and enhances students’ cognitive abilities. When they leave our classrooms, they should be able to observe more and more sophisticated Read More
We how work in education have been thrown into chaos this past year. The chaos has not been as bad as our reaction to it, but that is a topic for another post. What has become clear in the past year has been educators’ assumptions about teaching and learning and schooling. As often happens, my Read More
One of the issues I’ve seen raised in recent months, and one that I expect will become more common as we move into the “post-COVID” era of education is academic freedom. Specifically, I refer to the argument by faculty that they have the “right” to teach in any manner they see fit and that any Read More
Cognitive load is a well-known and established theory. Basically, it posits humans have a limited amount of cognitive processing power available at any moment; game theorists would declare our cognitive capacity is a zero-sum quantity. What is used for one purpose is unavailable for other purposes. In classroom, we want to limit extraneous cognitive load Read More
Education is about changing humans. When our students leave, we hope they can do things, see things, and think things they could not before the class. That reality is rich with the potential for abuse and history shows it has been abused, but there is equal reality that education can be co-opted for other goals. Read More
I’ve read an interesting article recently that challenges what appears to be to orthodox view that performance on tests and other assessments is predictive of long-term learning and the ability to apply what one has learned on other situations. Among the several points that support the authors’ claims are seemingly contrary observations. Latent learning is Read More
Recent decades have found educators sharply focusing on performance. This arises from the dominance of standards to guide curriculum. At all levels of education, we define what it is that students are supposed to know and do, translate that into learning objectives, then check students’ performance on assessments that (ostensibly) measure the degree to which Read More
The foundational idea of education is that students are able to “do something” after the process is complete that they could not do before. What students can do depends on the experiences that comprise their education. There seems to be two competing versions of what we hope our students will be able to do after Read More
Like many, I have been thinking a lot about freedom of speech lately. My purpose in this post is not to comment on that freedom. I have always been a strong advocate for free speech, but speech and actions are not the same. These events have brought me back to my high school days. I know how faulty Read More
The names given to chunks can contribute to the ease of navigating your online classroom. By giving chunks meaningful and descriptive names, instructors both make it easier to find materials and introduce organizing themes to the course. Consider these names that could be applied to a course in which students are learning to use various Read More