Tag Archives: learning
A few thoughts on returning to school in the age of Covid-19
If British Columbia and other jurisdictions are serious about a “continuity of learning”, then it’s clear that distance or distributed learning (DL) will play an integral part. As such, I would like to offer the following suggestions based on my 27 years as a secondary public-school teacher, seven of which were in DL. I certainly […]
A Review of Tom Bennett’s Teacher Proof
[D]on’t let the fashions crush you. And so many of them are so, so very bad. The thrill of innovation, the desire for simple answers, and the mistaken belief that educational research will shine a guiding light to a smarter, more efficient system, has proven the undoing of us, and will undermine us further if […]
Reflections on a 21st Century School
I recently had the opportunity to spend a day at Thomas Haney Secondary School in Maple Ridge, BC. The school is known for its commitment to flexible, personalized, learn-at-your-own-pace education, and is touted by many as an exemplar of progressive pedagogy. As a teacher curious about the phenomenon of “21st century learning”, but also a little […]
Personalized Learning = Pre-Packaged Learning
Last year, when the notion of “personalized learning” started to become a popular topic here in British Columbia, I questioned its practicality. I asked how a secondary teacher could possibly create, supervise and assess 200 or so separate learning programs for his or her students. I concluded that teachers couldn’t possibly pull off such a […]
Questioning Progressive Education’s Sacred Cows
As someone who blogs, tweets, wikis, flickrs and youtubes [and turns nouns into verbs], I suppose I’m a fairly modern teacher. But I’m also very suspicious of “student-centered learning” and the sort of unyielding optimism that its adherents seem to possess. Maybe I’m just an old crank, but modern education seems consumed by a cheery […]
Summary notes on “Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work…”
As I noted in my previous entry, there is considerable disagreement over the efficacy of “student centered learning”, despite its popularity with the Twitterati. For example, in a 2006 article* from the journal Educational Psychologist, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark argue that student centered learning – which includes constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching – […]