My grandfather graduated from the University of Vermont in 1939 and I have some of his textbooks on my bookshelves along with the textbooks I used while an undergraduate student at the same institution 49 years later. The content of the textbooks (we both studied biology) is vastly different, but the literacy skills useful for Read More
In general, humans like to categorize using dichotomies; an object is placed in one group or another. As an undergraduate student preparing to be a science teacher, I classified plants using dichotomous keys for a particular botany class, hours examining specimens (usually alone and with coffee) to decide if each demonstrated a trait described in Read More
“The Standard Model” of education is a theme that has bee developed on this blog. See these posts: The (Overturned) Standard Mode of Education Alternatives to the Standard Model of Education This posts continues the theme with an excerpt addressing an another alternative: Research focusing on learning in informal situations (Lemke, Lecusay, Cole, & Michalchik, Read More
123: Which #edtech Tools Get Used? | RSS.com Because new information technologies (including hardware, software, and new uses of both) emerge very quickly compared to the periodicity of schools (new technologies appear several times during a typical school year), teachers must adopt and adapt to them constantly. When deciding which technologies to use, teachers are Read More
One of the first steps I took as an undergraduate student to become in independent intellectual—which I define as taking an active role in defining the course of one’s own learning—was to begin reading essays by scientists. At the time, there were Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould who were regular contributors. It was a Read More
173: Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction As an educator, I see so many theories or frameworks or models of advocated by school leaders, scholars, vendors, philanthropists, and others. I share the frustration of those educators who wish their endless series of “innovative” (an adjective used by the advocates) practice would end, and we would decide Read More
Scarmelia and Bereiter (2006) contrasted 20th century instruction that as supported by ICT (in which ICT was assumed to be equivalent to print-based information) to knowledge building. For Scarmelia and Bereiter, ICT can support knowledge building as a social endeavor in which ideas are improved, and the community comes to more clear understanding of ideas Read More
122: Deeper Learning Principles More than 15 years ago, Collen Carmean and Jeremy Haefner (2002), scholars from the western United States, suggested that curriculum and instruction in the 21st century will be characterized by five properties that they refer to as deeper learning principles that appear to be associated with students who more clearly understand Read More
112: Naturalistic Approaches to Research and Teaching In their seminal book on Naturalistic inquiry, Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba (1985) argued that much scientific research is based on a reduction of the problem according to positivist principles, and that those assumptions are increasingly insufficient to describe many problems in the social sciences, including education. Whereas, Read More
109: Why Standardized Testing Flopped In the fall of 2018, an article appeared in my news feed multiple times. Peter Greene, a contributor to Forbes magazine posed the question “Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop?” in the title of his article. No educator (or parent, or higher education professional, or employer) is Read More