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Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

schoolingtheworld.org/...occupy

education education reform education system schooling pedagogy indigenous indigenous pedagogies knowledge alternative education standardization state standards national standards global standards power authority intellect

shared by Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13 - No Cached
Ant Heald liked it
  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
  • Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
     
    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
  • Andrew McCluskey on 11 Feb 13
     
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Lee-Anne Patterson

Our City Podcast - 1 views

www.learninginhand.com/...index.html

podcast podcasting web2.0 projects audio elementary edtech Our City news

shared by Lee-Anne Patterson on 28 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Lee-Anne Patterson on 28 Apr 09
     
    Our City Podcast is a podcast for kids and by kids. Students from around the globe are invited to submit a recording all about the city they live in (with the help of their teachers or parents).
psmiley

Education Week: Cities Should Embrace After-School Learning - 9 views

www.edweek.org/...29coleman.h32.html

education cities learning

shared by psmiley on 25 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • psmiley on 25 Apr 13
     
    After school learning is needed in our cities
Roland Gesthuizen

ISTE 2011 Conference - Philadelphia - 42 views

www.isteconference.org/2011

ISTE2011 conference event technology eLearning teaching education iste 2011

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 29 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 29 Jan 11
     
    ISTE is excited to return to the city of inspiration and innovation for our ISTE 2011 conference, dedicated to the theme of "Unlocking Potential." Philadelphia-a city known for historical firsts and the collaboration of great minds-is the perfect backdrop for the active, inquisitive educators who converge at ISTE's annual conference and exposition every year.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 29 Jan 11
     
    Great ICT and technology conference that I am attending this year.
Marc Hamlin

Reintroducing students to Research - 144 views

homepages.gac.edu/...LakeForest.html

research resources tools

shared by Marc Hamlin on 01 Dec 12 - Cached
  • First, we think research, broadly defined, is a valuable part of an undergraduate education. Even at a rudimentary level, engaging in research implicates students in the creation of knowledge. They need to understand that knowledge isn’t an inert substance they passively receive, but is continually created, debated, and reformulated—and they have a role to play in that process.
  • we recognize that research is situated in disciplinary frameworks and needs to be addressed in terms of distinct research traditions.
  • research is a complex and recursive process involving not just finding information but framing and refining a question, perhaps gathering primary data through field or lab work, choosing and evaluating appropriate evidence, negotiating different viewpoints, and composing some kind of response, all activities that are not linear but intertwined.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • learning to conduct inquiry is itself complex and recursive. These skills need to be developed throughout a research project and throughout a student’s education.
  • the hybrid nature of libraries today requires students to master both traditional and emerging information formats, but the skills that students need to conduct effective inquiry—for example, those mentioned in your mission statement of reading critically and reasoning analytically—are the same whether the materials they use are in print or electronic.
  • Too often, traditional research paper assignments defeat their own purpose by implying that research is not discovery, but rather a report on what someone else has already discovered. More than once I’ve had to talk students out of abandoning a paper topic because, to their dismay, they find out it’s original. If they can’t find a source that says for them exactly what they want to say—better yet, five sources—they think they’ll get in trouble.
  • In reality, students doing researched writing typically spend a huge percentage of their time mapping out the research area before they can focus their research question. This is perfectly legitimate, though they often feel they’re spinning wheels. They have to do a good bit of reading before they really know what they’re looking for.
  • she has students seek out both primary and secondary sources, make choices among them, and develop some conclusions in presentations that are far from standard literary criticism. One lab focuses on collecting and seeking relationships among assigned literary texts and other primary sources from the second half of the twentieth century to illuminate American society in that time period.
  • For this lab, groups of students must find ten primary sources that relate in some way to literary texts under discussion and then—here’s the unusual bit—write three new verses of “America the Beautiful” that use the primary sources to illuminate a vision of American society. Instead of amber waves of grain and alabaster cities, they select images that reformulate the form of the song to represent another vision of the country. At the end of the course, her final essay assignment calls upon all of the work the previous labs have done, asking students to apply the skills they’ve practiced through the semester. While students in this course don’t do a single, big research project, they practice skills that will prepare them to do more sophisticated work later.
  • Marc Hamlin on 01 Dec 12
     
    What are our assumptions about how students get research done in the humanities? How do those assumptions affect our instruction, and what really is our students' approach to research?
Javier E

Money Cuts Both Ways in Education - NYTimes.com - 19 views

www.nytimes.com/...10iht-letter10.html

education youth prospect inequality competition meritocracy self-image

shared by Javier E on 10 May 13 - No Cached
  • If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.
  • This power spending on the children of the economic elite is usually — and rightly — cited as further evidence of the dangers of rising income inequality.
  • But it may be that the less lavishly educated children lower down the income distribution aren’t the only losers. Being groomed for the winner-take-all economy starting in nursery school turns out to exact a toll on the children at the top, too.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • There is a lively debate among politicians and professors about whether the economy is becoming more polarized and about the importance of education. Dismissing the value of a college education is one of the more popular clever-sounding contrarian ideas of the moment. And there are still a few die-hards who play down the social significance of rising income inequality.
  • When you translate these abstract arguments into the practical choices we make in our personal lives, however, the intellectual disagreements melt away. We are all spending a lot more money to educate our kids, and the richest have stepped up their spending more than everyone else.
  • spending on children grew over the past four decades and that it became more unequal. “Our findings also show that investment grew more unequal over the study period: parents near the top of the income distribution spent more in real dollars near the end of the 2000s than in the early 1970s, and the gap in spending between rich and poor grew.”
  • But it turns out that the children being primed for that race to the top from preschool onward aren’t in such great shape, either.
  • “What we are finding again and again, in upper-middle-class school districts, is the proportion who are struggling are significantly higher than in normative samples,” she said. “Upper-middle-class kids are an at-risk group.”
  • troubled rich kids. “I was looking for a comparison group for the inner-city kids,” Dr. Luthar told me. “And we happened to find that substance use, depression and anxiety, particularly among the girls, were much higher than among inner-city kids.”
  • “I Can, Therefore I Must: Fragility in the Upper Middle Class,” and it describes a world in which the opportunities, and therefore the demands, for upper-middle-class children are infinite.
  • “It is an endless cycle, starting from kindergarten,” Dr. Luthar said. “The difficulty is that you have these enrichment activities. It is almost as if, if you have the opportunity, you must avail yourself of it. The pressure is enormous.”
  • these parents and children are responding rationally to a hyper-competitive world economy.
  • “When we talk to youngsters now, when they set goals for themselves, they want to match up to at least what their parents have achieved, and that is harder to do.”
  • we live in individualistic democracies whose credo is that anyone can be a winner if she tries. But we are also subject to increasingly fierce winner-take-all forces, which means the winners’ circle is ever smaller, and the value of winning is ever higher.
Thieme Hennis

About - Institute of Making - 28 views

www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/about

institute making maker movement science materials diy education

shared by Thieme Hennis on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • Thieme Hennis on 14 May 14
     
    The Institute of Making is a multidisciplinary research club for those interested in the made world: from makers of molecules to makers of buildings, synthetic skin to spacecraft, soup to diamonds, socks to cities. Annual membership of the institute is available to all UCL staff and students. Our programme of symposia, masterclasses and public events explores the links between academic research and hands-on experience, and celebrates the sheer joy of stuff. Its mission is to provide all makers with a creative home in which to innovate, contemplate and understand all aspects of materials and an inspiring place to explore their relationship to making. At the heart of the Institute of Making is the Materials Library - a growing repository of some of the most extraordinary materials on earth, gathered together for their ability to fire the imagination and advance conceptualisation. A place in which makers from all disciplines can see, touch, research and discuss, so that they can apply the knowledge and experience gained to their own practice. Alongside the collection is the MakeSpace - a workshop where members and guests can make, break, design and combine both advanced and traditional tools, techniques and materials."
robert morris

The API at the center of the museum | Cooper Hewitt Labs - 8 views

labs.cooperhewitt.org/...pi-at-the-center-of-the-museum

shared by robert morris on 11 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • robert morris on 11 Nov 14
     
    "Beneath our cities lies vast, labyrinthine sewer systems."
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 10 views

www.wired.com/altschool

shared by Lisa C. Hurst on 05 May 15 - No Cached
  • Lisa C. Hurst on 05 May 15
     
    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
anonymous

Schools shift from textbooks to tablets - US News and World Report - 57 views

www.usnews.com/...hift-from-textbooks-to-tablets

textbooks tablets

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
    • Matt Renwick
      Matt Renwick on 07 Mar 13
       
      No, individualized instruction will personalize learning for students.
  • "We must use technology to empower teachers and improve the way students learn," said Joel Klein, a former New York City schools' chief who now leads News Corp.'s education tablet program. "At its best, education technology will change the face of education by helping teachers manage the classroom and personalize instruction."
  • "We must use technology to empower teachers and improve the way students learn," said Joel Klein, a former New York City schools' chief who now leads News Corp.'s education tablet program. "At its best, education technology will change the face of education by helping teachers manage the classroom and personalize instruction."
  • ...6 more annotations...
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 13
       
      Isn't the concept that helping teachers manage the classroom by using technology a fresh perspective?  :)
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 13
       
      Our philosophy seems more reasonable in that we are utilizing what students already have in their possession and spending the funds toward enhanced online text "rental" and accessibility.  BYOT!
  • $20.5 million
  • $50 million
  • $500 million
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 11 Mar 13
       
      What happens when that device is out-of-date?  Cost of updating?
Lori Hollar

Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Online Petition: Oklahoma City Public Schools Must ... - 43 views

www.speedofcreativity.org/...net-content-filtering-policies

shared by Lori Hollar on 14 Feb 12 - No Cached
    • Lori Hollar
      Lori Hollar on 14 Feb 12
       
      What is the best way to handle the Internet in our schools? Here are some ideas.
Jennie Snyder

Pas de Deux: Chris Thinnes on Public & Private School Partnerships - EdLeader21 - 0 views

community.edleader21.com/...221-chris-thinnes

21st_century_learning partnerships education

shared by Jennie Snyder on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Jeff Weaver, the dynamic superintendent of the Upper Arlington City School District in Ohio, was planning to unveil the district’s vision for 21st century learners … at the first district leadership meeting of the year. So he had the vision statement printed on adhesive-backed vinyl, purchased a hundred inexpensive dinner plates, and affixed a copy of the vision to each of the plates. At that first district meeting, Weaver asked for the plates to be passed out to the district’s leaders, then stood at the lectern and said something like this: “The last few years, whenever I talk to you about 21st century skills — about the importance of creativity, collaboration, critical thought, and all the other proficiencies that phrase implies — you remind me how much we’re already trying to accomplish. You tell me, ‘I would grapple with this,  and make it work — but there is so little time, and there is already so much on our plate.’ You ask me, ‘How can we make room for this on our plate?’ . . . And so, I am letting you know you today that, moving forward, this is the plate. . .“
  • Jennie Snyder on 01 Mar 13
     
    "This is the plate" -- I love it! 
jariza67

Letter_Birmingham_Jail(1).pdf - 21 views

Engage NY

shared by jariza67 on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      Martin Luther King Jr. is BOTH a Reverend (priest) AND a Doctor of Theology (study of religion) at this time in his life.
  • From the Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned as a participant in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: Why was Dr. King sent to jail? What law(s) did he break?
  • Jr., wrote in longhand the letter which follows. It was his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eig
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • It was his response to a public statement of concern and caution issued by eight white religious leaders of the South.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: Why were the 8 religious leaders angry at Dr. King?
  • nwise and untimely
  • WHILE confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities "unwise and untimely."
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      Dr. King starts off his letter by addressing his critics in the opening of his letter. QUESTION: WHY DOES KING ADDRESS HIS CRITICS IN THIS MANNER? ("My Dear Fellow Clergymen:")
  • "unwise and untimely."
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: Why do the 8 white priests think King's protests are "unwise and untimely?" QUESTION: Why does King refer to this in his letter?
  • unwise
  • unwise
  • unwise
  • unwise
  • ctive
  • I would like to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: How has King set up his defense?
  • you are men of genuine good will
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: What are King's reasons for this remark?
  • "outsiders coming in."
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      QUESTION: Why is King considered an outsider?
  • I am here because I have basic organizational ties here.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      DISCUSSION QUESTIONS (REVIEW Para. 1-2) 1. How does King begin the letter? 2. What is the impact of King's word choices? 3. HOW DO SPECIFIC WORDS AND PHRASES CONTRIBUTE TO THE IMPACT OF KING'S OPENING? 4. What are King's reasons for being in Birmingham?
  • carried
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 5. consented (v.) - permitted, approved, or agreed.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: sought (v.) - tried or attempted
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 4. untimely (adj.) - happening too soon or too early.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      "My Dear Fellow Clergymen:" (Mr. Ariza's note) Dr. King originally addresses his famous "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" to 8 Alabama clergymen (priests) who (in a local newspaper ad) criticized King's protests and demonstrations, while also labeling King as "a law-breaker." With no paper in his jail cell, King used the margins of this newspaper to write his Famous reply to their criticisms of him. KING'S LETTER (written in August 1963) is what brought the world's attention to our country's problems with segregation and racism.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 6. Seldom (adj.) on only a few occasions; rarely, not often.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 1: fellow (adj.) -belonging to the same class or group; united by the same occupation, interests, etc.).
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 2. clergymen (n.) - religious leaders
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: 3. confined (adj.) - unable to leave a place because of illness, imprisonment, etc.
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      LINK FOR THE ORIGINAL LETTER WRITTEN TO KING BY THE 8 WHITE CLERGYMEN http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/09a/mlk_day/statement.html
    • jariza67
      jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
       
      VOCABULARY: Consented (v.) - permitted, approved, or agreed
  • jariza67 on 03 Feb 16
     
    Letter From a Birmingham Jail full text pdf w ANNOTATIONS Mr. Ariza/ Ms. Bozeman AUGUST MARTIN HS
Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...damnkids.htm

school alfie kohn students edreform education interest current commentary

shared by Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
  • Jason Schmidt on 17 Nov 10
     
    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Marianne Hart

Video in the Classroom.com -- About - 0 views

www.needleworkspictures.com/...index.html

shared by Marianne Hart on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • urban cities
    • Marianne Hart
      Marianne Hart on 14 Jul 09
       
      And in our rural communitites too!
  • analyze and synthesize information
    • Marianne Hart
      Marianne Hart on 14 Jul 09
       
      Media images children are exposed to include Sponge Bob, Hannah Montana, MTV and on and on.....
Dimitris Tzouris

Diagnosing the Tablet Fever in Higher Education - 17 views

chronicle.com/...20888

chronicle news apple ipad technology education

shared by Dimitris Tzouris on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • So it's worth taking a careful look at whether the company will once again create a new category of device that make waves in education -- as it did with personal computers, digital music players, and smartphones -- or whether the iPad and other tabletss might be doomed to remain a niche offering.
  • Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company's partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses -- watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won't later promote the iPad's use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.
  • the biggest impact of the iPad would be in the textbook market.
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  • only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.
  • The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.
  • If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.
  • Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.
  • He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said. Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.
James Spagnoletti

Göbekli Tepe - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine - 67 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...1

religion history anthropology WHAP

shared by James Spagnoletti on 17 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ruth Howard liked it
  • The Birth of ReligionWe used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
  • Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
  • At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
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  • Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.
  • Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages
  • Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
  • n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo
  • To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.
  • nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.
  • Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.
  • he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.
  • The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.
  • They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.
  • Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.
  • Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.
  • he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.
  • Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.
  • Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.
rbatie19

Chronic Absenteeism Can Devastate K-12 Learning (Opinion) - 7 views

www.edweek.org/...10

chronic absenteeism absent learning

shared by rbatie19 on 10 May 22 - No Cached
  • in a study of California students for Attendance Works, the organization that Hedy Chang oversees, only 17 percent of the students who were chronically absent in both kindergarten and 1st grade were reading proficiently by 3rd grade, compared with 64 percent of those with good attendance in the early years. Weak reading skills in the 3rd grade translate into academic trouble ahead: Students who aren’t reading well by that point are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2012 study released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
  • Chronic absence in middle school is another red flag that a student will drop out of high school. By high school, attendance is a better dropout indicator than test scores.
  • A recent report, “Absences Add Up,” also from Attendance Works, documents what many know from common sense: At every age, in every demographic, and in every state and city tested, students with poor attendance scored significantly lower on standardized tests. In our schools, this translates into weaker reading skills, failing grades, and higher dropout rates. Rather than looking at attendance as an administrative chore, schools can use the same data as a warning sign to change the trajectory.
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  • The results were significant. Students with mentors gained nine school days—almost two weeks—during the year. They were more likely to remain in school and maintain their grade point averages than similar students without mentors. The program worked at every K-12 level: elementary, middle, and high school, with the greatest impact on students struggling with poverty and homelessness.
  • The mentors had several simple but straightforward responsibilities. They greeted the students every day to let them know they were glad to see them at school. They called home if students were sick to find out what was happening. They connected the students and their families to resources to help address attendance barriers. Mentors participated in school-based teams that analyzed data and shared insights about students. And they also supported schoolwide activities, including assemblies, incentives, and contests, to encourage better attendance for all students.
  • Elementary schools set up attendance teams to identify and monitor the students with the worst attendance. Part-time social workers, hired with philanthropic and state dollars, connected with families. Principals and teachers promoted attendance at back-to-school nights, at parent-teacher conferences, and through regular calls home. This work led to a significant drop in absenteeism in all elementary grades, particularly in kindergarten. The percentage of chronically absent kindergartners fell from 30 percent in the 2011-12 school year to 13 percent in 2013-14. And reading scores began to climb.
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