Teachers know “proficiencies” are coming to dominate as the buzzword that is attracting the attention of educational leaders and policy makers. (Some might characterize this as a distraction of attention from important issues and needs, but I will proceed without comment on that speculation.) One of the disputes I have with how this is being Read More
I am in the middle of rereading Carl Bereiter’s 2002 book Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. Among the intriguing ideas is the book is his confrontation of the “mind as a container” metaphor. Recent generations of educators have operated under the assumption that one’s brain is a container and that what we know Read More
54: Cognitive Lod Theory This post complements this earlier one on The Lens of Cognitive Load Theory While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011) (CLT) predicts and explains technology use once it has been adopted. CLT is Read More
There has always been something suspicious to me about “learning styles.” As teachers, we are supposed vary our delivery, so that each student can learn through the style that works best for the individual. The idea seemed too simple, and it seemed that it did not really explain what I observed with my students. “Learning Read More
I have been reviewing Technology-Rich Instruction: Classrooms in the 21st Century, my book that was published in 2015 and discovering how much of it seems dated. (This observation is despite my desire to write a book that would inform teachers and education leaders for longer than the typical 6-18 months we can expect from a Read More
Appropriate Proper Reasonable Reflexivity was originally used to describe the effects of social science researchers on the situations they were studying; the presence of researchers affects the behavior of subjects, thus the observations made. More recently, the term has been used to describe the influence of ICT on how people use information and how they Read More
When schools are providing the type of experiences students really need, teachers are likely to feel unprepared to answer students’ questions. This is what I felt when Andrew told me he wanted to do an internship at his family’s towing and automotive repair business and start a used parts business for his project. There are Read More
Bloom’s taxonomy has been a staple of educational theory for decades. Most educators first encounter the concept during their undergraduate preparation, and it is used as a model to ensure learning objectives are expressed in terms that encourage more sophisticated types of understanding. While Bloom originally used the image to the right to capture the Read More
43: Media and Attention The emerging sophistication of digital media and the accompanying sophistication of media skills are captured in the observation of Seels, Fullerton, Berry, and Horn (2004) that interest in and attention to media is characterized by a bell-shaped curve. Media that are familiar, simple, redundant, and expected are associated with low interest Read More
Teacher education has traditionally been informed by a framework comprising the content dimension (what is to be taught or the curriculum) and the pedagogy dimension (how it is taught or instruction). Shulman (1987) suggested teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge cannot be developed in isolation, so he proposed “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK) to describe the Read More