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
Teaching can be deconstructed into two types of activities: Those that introduce new ideas, and Those that help ideas become known. In many classrooms, we teaching proceeds from “new to known.” The teacher introduces an idea and explains it to the point that students can begin to practice the idea, work with it, and (we Read More
Beginning in 2011, the Department of Labor awarded four rounds of grants under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program. This was designed to designed to support community colleges as they developed resources and programs for workforce development purposes. For full disclosure: I was employed under a TAACCCT grant as a Read More
The learning science is a relatively new field of study. The major journals in the field began publishing in the early 1990’s and the first conferences recognizing this field also date to that time. Learning science emerged out of the cognitive sciences as field dedicated to the problem of designing classroom and other learning spaces Read More
In the early 1990’s, I was a fan of HyperCard, the program from Apple that allowed users to create “cards,” each with text, images, and buttons (along with other controls) that could be programmed using an easy to understand scripting language. My students and I wrote scripts to simulate genetics experiments, explore probability, and draw Read More
Paulo Freire, an educator who worked in Brazil in the 1960s, is well-known for several essays including “Education as the Practice of Freedom” and “Extension and Communication” (Freire 1974). In these works, Freire argues that meaningful learning occurs when the learner reaches critical consciousness which enables the learner to reflect on and understand not only Read More
As educators recognize they need to prepare students for a far different future than they ever imagined, they are beginning to recognize that the traditional models of “offering a course” or “teaching a lesson” to fill the gaps in students’ preparation is untenable. We cannot possibly provide all of the knowledge, skills, habits, and experiences Read More