This is an extended version of a previous post. In describing education as a social invention, Jerome Bruner observed, “each generation must define afresh the nature, direction, and aims of education to assure [that] freedom and rationality can be attained for a future generation” (1966, 22). He went on to detail how new discoveries in Read More
Social justice education is an idea that has captured the attention of teachers, scholars, leaders, and other in recent years. I have tried to find just what it means for me for some time. For context, I am a white, heterosexual male with grey hair; while I was raised in a weakly-practicing Protestant family, I Read More
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
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
Just what are educators supposed to teach? Better yet, what are students supposed to learn? These are questions that educators must consider at a much deeper level than my teachers did when I was college student in the 1980’s, and even when I was a graduate student 10 then again 20 years later. For generations, Read More
Many varieties of web 2.0 tools have been available since the late 1990’s; these tools are all designed to make it easy for users to publish information to the web and to interact with others via posts and responses. Many of these are built into LMS, so can easily be incorporated into virtual classrooms. The Read More
71 The Three Agogos The Greek word agogos means leader. We still encounter the work today when we refer to the work done by teachers. Traditionally, the craft of teaching is called pedagogy, a word that combines “ped” for children and “agogos” for leader, so (loosely) one’s pedagogy is what one does to be a Read More