Tag Archives: education
Some surprising conclusions regarding creativity and innovation
Howard Gardner is well known for his theory of multiple intelligences. He is less well known for a fascinating book on creativity. [This is obviously anecdotal, but I don’t know a single educator who has even heard of this book.] In his Creating Minds (1993), Gardner explores the lives of seven famous persons from the 20th […]
America’s Education Politics: A Crass and Explicit Example
As if we didn’t have enough examples of the highly politicized nature of American educational reform, along comes another illustration that reaches new lows for crassness and audacity. Jonah Edelman is a leader of Stand for Children, a well-known and influential educational reform movement based in Oregon. The “grassroots child advocacy organization” is said to […]
Aspects of Effective Teaching
I recently read an analysis of education practice entitled Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? from the American Fordham Institute. In Chapter 5, Professor Mark C. Shug discusses the qualities of a good teacher. It’s an interesting analysis because Shug points out something that I have observed since the days of my own teacher training: […]
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 – […]
Exploring Direct Instruction
One of the deepest tensions in modern education is between “student centered learning” and “teacher centered learning”. I’m interested in exploring more about this topic, and today I will set the framework for my exploration. The student centered or “minimally guided” approach is characterized as self-paced and interactive, and aims to replace “lectures with active […]
Ramping up the Rage: You know it’s contract time when
… BC’s corporate media sector starts ramping up the rage against teachers. Yesterday, the two BC dailies – both owned by the PostMedia group – headlined two separate anti-teacher stories. The Province featured an article about certain BCTF bargaining demands, based upon the employer’s utterly compromised interpretation. The Sun then offered a College of Teachers […]
More ruminations on 21st century learning and the concept of change
As usual in the distributed learning (DL) world, the month of June is absurdly hectic. Students who’ve enjoyed the right to create their own learning schedules realize, at the end, that no right exists without a corresponding responsibility. And now – as their asynchronous bliss meets the realities of graduation, post-secondary timetables and the rigours […]
Personalized Learning? Unlikely…
The latest buzz-phrase in education is “personalized learning”. Like so many other education bandwagons, it has enjoyed a surge in popularity in university education programs, the provincial Ministry of Education, and recent education conferences. In December of 2010, the BC Ministry of Education and the Premier’s Technology Council [PTC] published its Vision for 21st Century […]
Ben Levin’s thoughts on education
The presentation below, by Ontario professor Ben Levin, makes some interesting points about modern education. The first point is that many of the elements that differentiate the education systems of Canada and the USA – and lead to better PISA results in Canada – are macro-factors outside the control of individual teachers. Levin points to […]
Schools as Factories? Contrary to Sir Ken
Sir Ken Robinson’s RSA presentation on “Changing Education Paradigms” (see below) is a well-meaning critique of the “factory model” of education. Nevertheless, I think his alternative is much more flawed than the system he attacks. At the core of Robinson’s argument is a familiar counter-Enlightenment, romantic critique of modern education. In a bid to standardize […]