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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.
Martin Leicht

Distracted Minds: 3 Ways to Get Their Attention in Class - 11 views

www.chronicle.com/...o-get-their-attention-in-class

shared by Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Attention is reciprocal.
  • The more distracted I am in my interactions with you, the less likely you are to give me your full attention.
  • importance of having students share their strengths and values with you at the beginning of a semester
    • Martin Leicht
      Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21
       
      NOTE - Everyone is their own individual and bring a lot to your class. The more you know about them, the better chance you can find out how to motivate them.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Recognize their individuality
  • The researchers also asked students whether it mattered to them that the instructors knew their names, and more than 85 percent of them said it did
  • because making good use of the full physical space of a classroom is one of the most straightforward ways to keep both professor and students attentive.
    • Martin Leicht
      Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21
       
      NOTE - I taught from the back. We showed a lot of videos and did demonstrations. So, it was easy to "teach" from the back. ON ZOOM - how do you teach from the back of the class?
  • One advantage of the Zoom classes that many of us are teaching right now is that the names are all right there on the screen
  • Speak to all corners of the room
  • They bring their unique life stories and experiences, which can help provide new perspectives on familiar questions and challenges.
  • Tell you about an important value
    • Martin Leicht
      Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21
       
      NOTE - Maybe it doesn't need to be all writing? Maybe it can be images and audio or video recordings to accompany them.
  • Tell you about a unique perspective or life experience
  • Describe their greatest academic strength
  • The obvious solution here is to break that barrier
  • Use their names regularly.
    • Martin Leicht
      Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21
       
      NOTE - Notoriety means power or maybe at least the power to capture their attention.
  • She encourages children first to recognize and write their own names and then to compare the letters and syllables in their own names with those of the other names on the grid
    • Martin Leicht
      Martin Leicht on 12 Jan 21
       
      NOTE - Author's previous post about CLOSE READING. Really spend some time on the name.
  • What is most deserving of our attention in the classroom, of course, are the other human beings in our presence
Javier E

Getting Into the Ivies - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...getting-into-the-ivies.html

admission university foreign globalization

shared by Javier E on 28 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard — or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges — than it was when today’s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994.
  • The share for any individual college is minuscule, of course. In 2012, about 33 out of every 100,000 American 18- to 21-year-olds were attending Harvard, down from 45 per 100,000 in 1994. These changes in the share tell you how much harder, or easier, admission has become for American teenagers on average. Between 1984 and 1994, it became easier at many colleges. The college-age population in this country fell during that time to 14.1 million in 1994 from 16.5 million in 1984, and the number of foreign students was relatively stable.
  • For students from the Northeast applying to elite colleges in the region, college admissions have probably become even more difficult in recent decades than these statistics suggest. Not only have colleges globalized, they have also become less regional, admitting more students from states like North Carolina, Texas and Washington.
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  • Over the last 20 years, several large colleges, like N.Y.U. and the University of Southern California, have improved markedly, effectively increasing the number of seats on elite campuses
  • On average, about 15 percent of students at elite colleges receive Pell grants, which as a rule of thumb go to students in the bottom half of the income distribution.
  • Low-income applicants are left to compete for the remaining slots with applicants who have the highest test scores, most impressive extracurricular activities and most eloquent essays.
  • Michelle Wendt on 29 Apr 14
     
    After reading this i felt I could assuage the parents group at my daughter's school who were heartbroken that their siblings were not accepted into the school as well.
Maureen Greenbaum

The Future of College? - The Atlantic - 29 views

www.theatlantic.com/...375071

future college education pedagogy

shared by Maureen Greenbaum on 16 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • proprietary online platform developed to apply pedagogical practices that have been studied and vetted by one of the world’s foremost psychologists, a former Harvard dean named Stephen M. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2012.
  • inductive reasoning
  • Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and Bonabeau displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them.
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  • subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.
  • felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag
  • One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)
  • because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn
  • adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.
  • past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge
  • fellow edu-nauts
  • Lectures are banned
  • attending class on Apple laptops
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”
  • Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.
  • “Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”
  • One imagines tumbleweeds rolling through abandoned quads and wrecking balls smashing through the windows of classrooms left empty by students who have plugged into new online platforms.
  • when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.
  • Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”
  • “The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.
  • What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?
  • methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices
  • Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.
  • We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.
  • memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks
  • he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based
  • ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.
  • e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.
  • pedagogical best practices Kosslyn has identified have been programmed into the Minerva platform so that they are easy for professors to apply. They are not only easy, in fact, but also compulsory, and professors will be trained intensively in how to use the platform.
  • Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—
  • a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.
  • he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,
  • Lectures, Kosslyn says, are pedagogically unsound,
  • I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.
  • The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”
  • certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous
  • Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.
  • MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.
  • It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”
  • part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”
  • “hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”
  • I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.
  • it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.
  • for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.
  • Its seminar platform will challenge professors to stop thinking they’re using technology just because they lecture with PowerPoint.
  • professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship
  • The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.
Patrick Higgins

Why Undergrads Aren't Writing Enough - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 49 views

chronicle.com/...31800

writing composition higher education

shared by Patrick Higgins on 04 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them. When it comes to writing assignments in non-writing-oriented courses, students don’t like them to run too long and neither do teachers. Writing is just too much work for both sides. For every upper-division class in the humanities, 25 pages of finished out-of-class writing is a proper minimum. But for most students, that sounds like a daunting total—and an unjust one. For teachers handling three or more classes with 25 or more students, grading all those pages conscientiously (which means giving substantive feedback) keeps them up all night three weeks every semester. For those lucky teachers on a 2-2 load with 25 students or less per course, they feel the publish-or-perish mandate and all those pages of student prose turn into a road block.
    • Patrick Higgins
      Patrick Higgins on 08 Feb 11
       
      This is an interesting section.  My feeling is that there has to be a way to increase what's viewed as "writing."  Does writing have to live solely in the 20+ page paper?  Can not the cumulative total of writing be considered?  
  • When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them.
Deborah King

Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can't Search | Magazine - 204 views

www.wired.com/...st_thompson_searchresults

website_evaluation research information_literacy

shared by Deborah King on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
Kate Pok liked it
  • how savvy
  • If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school.
  • intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.
  • “The big thing in assessing search results is authorship—who put it there and why have they put it there?”
  • “This is learning how to learn.”
  • , mastering “crap detection 101,”
  • One prerequisite is that you already know a lot about the world.
  • Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less
  • But, crucially, she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist.
  • she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist.
  • she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist
  • she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist.
  • kids grok the intricacies
  • A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing
  • Gil Anspacher on 09 Nov 11
     
    All subjects need to teach students how to search for, analyze and utilize digital information within the subject area. This is where students will be getting info until someone pulls the plug or locks them in a bookmobile.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 13 Nov 11
     
    "We're often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? ,,, High school and college students may be "digital natives," but they're wretched at searching."
Dave Fones

Japanese Real Estate Bubble Recoverry? - 0 views

www.doctorhousingbubble.com/g-its-way-to-the-united-states

real estate real estate bubble Japan

shared by Dave Fones on 17 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • look at economic trends
  • it is becoming more apparent that we may be entering a time when low wage jobs dominate and home prices remain sluggish for a decade moving forward.
  • looking at the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, growth of lower paying jobs, baby boomers retiring, and the massive amount of excess housing inventory we start to see why Japan’s post-bubble real estate market is very likely to occur in the United States.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • both economies had extraordinarily large real estate bubbles.
  • Massive real estate bubble (check) -Central bank bailing out banks (check) -Bailed out banks keep bad real estate loans on their books at inflated values (check) -Government taking on higher and higher levels of debt relative to GDP (check) -Employment situation stabilizes with less secure labor force (check) -Home prices remain stagnant (check)
  • the United States had never witnessed a year over year drop in nationwide home prices since the Great Depression.
  • home prices are now back to levels last seen 8 years ago.  The lost decade is now nipping at our heels but what about two lost decades like Japan?
  • the U.S. has such a large number of part-time workers and many of the new jobs being added are coming in lower paying sectors signifies that our economy is not supportive of the reasons that gave us solid home prices for many decades. 
  • young Japanese workers, some in their late 20s or early 30s, already resigned that they would never buy a home.
  • The notion that housing is always a great investment runs counter to what they saw in their lives.  Will they even want to buy as many baby boomers put their larger homes on the market
  • many of our young households here are now coming out with massive amounts of student loan debt.
  • Lower incomes, more debt, and less job security.  What this translated to in Japan was stagnant home prices for 20 full years.  We are nearing our 10 year bear market anniversary in real estate so another 10 is not impossible.  What can change this?  Higher median household incomes across the nation but at a time when gas costs $4 a gallon, grocery prices are increasing, college tuition is in a bubble, and the financial system operates with no reform and exploits the bubble of the day, it is hard to see why Americans would be pushing home prices higher.
  • Dave Fones on 17 Jul 12
     
    Explains how Japan has responded to the breaking of their real estate market bubble and the effect it has had on Japan's economy
Christian Howd

How to Make American Teens Smarter - The Daily Beast - 51 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...what-teens-are-really-reading

reading reading strategies language arts

shared by Christian Howd on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."
  • That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.
  • Christian Howd on 21 Jul 10
     
    Americans may be reading more words today than ever before, but the content is less challenging. Dana Goldstein on kids' dismal reading scores-and a movement to get them to put down Twilight and pick up nonfiction.
  • Joyce Uglow on 23 Jul 10
     
    You're absolutely right! Our students need to be provided opportunities to read a variety of text!
danthomander

Teach Less, Learn More - Have We Achieved It? | Media Coverage | Newsroom | National In... - 32 views

www.nie.edu.sg/...learn-more-have-we-achieved-it

singapore education teach

shared by danthomander on 12 Nov 14 - Cached
  • The problem is compounded by parents who expect their kids to do well in school and would resort to any help they can get, including tuition or enrichment classes for their children.
  • danthomander on 12 Nov 14
     
    Singapore's self-assessment
anonymous

The Water's Edge » Will MOOCs Revolutionize Higher Education? - 1 views

blogs.cfr.org/...revolutionize-higher-education

MOOCs higher education

shared by anonymous on 23 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • husiasm for MOOCs seems to follow the trajectory of New Year’s diet resolutions. More than half of the students who enrolled in MIT’s circuits course didn’t even bother to complete the first assignment, and just 7,157 students (or less than 5 percent of enrollees) passed the course.
  • More than half of the students who enrolled in MIT’s circuits course didn’t even bother to complete the first assignment, and just 7,157 students (or less than 5 percent of enrollees) passed the course.
Jennie Snyder

83 The Bigger You Are, The More You Should Connect - 36 views

georgecouros.ca/...3626

cpchat suptchat social media connected

shared by Jennie Snyder on 09 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • As I think about how big schools and districts can be, we have to less “automation” and more “personalization”.  Technology can either dehumanize or humanize; it depends how we use it.  The “social” is really the most important part of “social media” and we need to take advantage to not only share what we are learning, but to build connections in new ways.
  • If used correctly, that “machinery” can bring us more “humanity” than ever.
meghankelly492

Culture of East Africa | USA Today - 1 views

traveltips.usatoday.com/culture-east-africa-17227.html

world Music

shared by meghankelly492 on 03 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Up until the 15th century, the cultures of Eastern Africa lived in relative isolation, building up kingdoms and empires, spreading agriculture and civilization throughout the region.
  • n the 15th century, the Portuguese began exploring the coast of East Africa, seeking to seize control of the spice trade from the Muslim presence in the Middle East. Islamic resistance to this led to a large-scale Arab colonization of the coast, which lasted until European colonialism began in earnest in the 19th century.
  • There are hundreds of languages spoken throughout East Africa, ranging from those spoken by only a few thousand to those spoken by millions. The most widely-spoken language, by far, is Swahili, with more than 5 million native speakers, and millions more who speak it as a secondary trade language. The island nations of East Africa, such as Madagascar, do not speak Swahili, instead speaking their own native languages, such as Malagasy.
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  • Clothes are brightly colored and consist of simple wraps, covering either only the lower body or both the lower body and upper body. In Islamic regions, covering is more substantial, and daily wear includes a head wrap
  • The legacy of Islamic rule along the coast of East Africa remains strong, and the majority of those on the coast and in North-East Africa are practicing Muslims
  • East African music consists of simpler instrumentation than Central Africa or West Africa, with a heavy reliance on percussion and basic horns, and less in the way of complex bowing. Since the 1980s East Africa has produced a great deal of fusion music, incorporating elements from Western music to create mash-ups of traditional and modern. Many countries in North-East Africa draw on Arabic influence in their music as well, incorporating elements such as religious poetry into the songs.
Benjamin Allen

Getting A Job Is Not The Purpose Of School - 41 views

www.teachthought.com/...ose-school-is-not-to-get-a-job

educational philosophy vocational training

shared by Benjamin Allen on 21 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • By calling it “school” (rather than learning), and “a job” (rather than work), we’re unwittingly creating a tone of drudgery and compliance that centers the institutions and their processes (grades, academic success and performance), and de-centers the end result (skills–>understanding–>creativity–>wisdom).
  • the vast majority of social ills that plague us–as a planet, not just in one country–stem from a surplus of bad work
  • And because we’ve all had jobs that sucked, it’s easy to shrug it off as a necessary evil in life, but it’s not. Work that demeans, dehumanizes, mechanizes, and depersonalizes individuals also, by design, demean, dehumanize, mechanize, and depersonalize society at large, and telling people to “be thankful they have a job” is an antiquated response that misses the point.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The curse of social conditioning and norm-referencing here is also at play
  • Wendell Berry in a letter he wrote responding to the idea of a “work-life” balance
  • Only in the absence of any viable idea of vocation or good work can one make the distinction implied in such phrases as “less work, more life” or “work-life balance,” as if one commutes daily from life here to work there.
  • If such questions are not asked, then we have no way of seeing or proceeding beyond the assumptions of (the author) and his work-life experts: that all work is bad work; that all workers are unhappily and even helplessly dependent on employers; that work and life are irreconcilable; and that the only solution to bad work is to shorten the workweek and thus divide the badness among more people.”
  • no matter what sort of values a family promotes, the learning process, by design, changes a person
  • Doesn’t the quality of a culture rely in part on a deep, dynamic interaction between those who are adults now, and those who will be soon?” And in that intersection sits education.
  • Getting a job is not the purpose of school. Good work is a shared core of both education and social improvement. I’m not entirely sure what this means for learning on a practical level, but I keep having the idea of diverse learning forms embedded in authentic local communities as a kind of first response.
Sharin Tebo

Building Attention Span - The New York Times - 75 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-building-attention-span.html

shared by Sharin Tebo on 16 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • ou toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
    • Sharin Tebo
      Sharin Tebo on 16 Jul 15
       
      This is a connection for me to the technology and devices article we read today and did a quotation mingle around during our Disciplinary Literacy Institute. No kidding that we get a shot of dopamine or 'high' when our phone goes ding, or it vibrates. 
  • Online life is so delicious
  • You live in a state of perpetual anticipation because the next social encounter is just a second way.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • xpert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
  • Fluid intelligence
    • Sharin Tebo
      Sharin Tebo on 16 Jul 15
       
      I've never heard this before!
  • Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
  • Crystallized intelligence
    • Sharin Tebo
      Sharin Tebo on 16 Jul 15
       
      Something else i have never heard of.
  • Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.
    • Sharin Tebo
      Sharin Tebo on 16 Jul 15
       
      So maybe this kind of intelligence, then, is the "learning is a consequence of thinking"?
Marti Pike

RTI Talks | RTI for Gifted Students - 9 views

rtinetwork.org/...24

shared by Marti Pike on 02 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • learning contracts with the student focused on work that takes the students interests in to account may be helpful.
    • Marti Pike
      Marti Pike on 02 Aug 17
       
      Genius Hour
  • "Up from Underachievement" by Diane Heacox
  • Gifted learners are rarely "globally gifted
  • ...59 more annotations...
  • From a parent's perspective (and sometimes from the child's), this can seem like we are "de-gifted" the child.
  • The most important thing is that you have the "data" that shows what the student needs and that you are matching this with an appropriate service.
  • Be very explicit with what the differentiation is and how it is addressing the needs
  • A major shift with RTI is that there is less emphasis on the "label" and more on the provision of appropriate service.
  • When a child has met all the expected benchmarks
  • independent reading
  • reading log
  • small group for discussions using similar questions.
  • long-term solutions might include forming a seminar group using a
  • program like "Junior Great Books."
  • Ideas for differentiating reading for young children can also be found at: http://www.k8accesscenter.org/training_resources/readingdifferentiation.asp http://www.appomattox.k12.va.us/acps/attachments/6_6_12_dan_mulligan_handout.pdf
  • enrich potential
  • to plan appropriate instruction, based on data that show the learners' needs.
  • additional enrichment and challenge in their area(s) strength.
  • Tiers 2 or 3
  • As the intensity of the needs increase, the intensity of the services also increases.
  • our ability to nurture potential in students prior to formal identification
  • appropriately scaffolded activities through Tier 2 support.
  • , with high-end differentiation and expectations, we are able to support the development of potential in all students.
  • This body-of-evidence can be used to support the nomination process and formal identification when appropriate.
  • likely to be of particular benefit for culturally and linguistically diverse, economically disadvantaged, and twice exceptional youngsters who are currently underrepresented within gifted education.
  • Tier 1 include:
  • Tier 2 include:
  • Tier 3 include:
  • universal screening
  • Aspergers
  • gifted children with learning disabilities?
  • If we provide enrichment activities for our advanced students, won't that just increase the acheivement gap?
    • Marti Pike
      Marti Pike on 02 Aug 17
       
      Grrrrrrrrr
  • Educational opportunities are not a “zero sum” game where some students gain and others lose.
  • the needs of all learners.
  • One is focusing on remediation, however the second approach focuses on the nurturing of potential through creating expectations for excellence that permeate Tier 1 with extended opportunities for enrichment for all children who need them at Tier 2. With the focus on excellence, the rising tide will help all students reach their potential. This is the goal of education.
  • make sure that the screener is directly related to the curriculum that you are using and that it has a high enough ceiling to allow advance learners to show what they know.
  • recognizing that students who are above grade level, or advanced in their academics, also need support to thrive
  • all students deserve to attend a school where their learning needs are met
  • seek out ways to build the knowledge and skills of teachers to address the range of needs
  • This includes learning about differentiated instruction within Tier 1and creating additional opportunities for enhancements and enrichments within Tier 2.
  • first
  • This often means that the district views the school as a “high-needs” school and does feel that many children would qualify for gifted education services (thus no teacher allocation is warranted). If this is the case, then this is a problematic view as it perpetuates the myth that some groups of children are not likely to be “gifted”.
  • These five differentiation strategies are as follows: Curriculum Compacting (pre-assessment of learners to see what they know)  The use of Tiered Assignments that address: Mastery, Enrichment, and Challenge  Tiered Learning Centers that allow children to further explore skills and concepts  Independent and Small group learning contracts that allow students to follow area of interest  Questioning for Higher Level thinking to stretch the minds of each child.
  • RTI was,
  • first proposed as a way to help us better identify students who continue to need additional support in spite of having appropriate instructional opportunities to learn.
  • The primary issue is the need for measures of potential as well as performance.
  • an IQ measure
  • portfolio
  • that sometimes occur outside of school
  • children with complex sets of strengths and needs require a comprehensive evaluation that includes multiple types, sources, and time periods to create the most accurate and complete understanding of their educational needs.
  • a "diamond" shaped RTI model
  • confusing
  • use the same icon to represent how we address the increasing intensity of academic and behavioral needs for all learners.
  • English Language Learners?
  • Differentiated instruction is part of a strength-based approach to Tier 1, providing enriched and challenging learning opportunities for all students. However, a comprehensive RTI approach for gifted learners will also need strong Tier 2 and 3 supports and services.
  • Tracking, or the fixed stratification of children into learning levels based on limited data (placing children in fixed learning groups based on a single reading score), is the opposite of RTI.
  • off grade level trajectories
  • this may includ
  • assess the slope and speed of learning and plot the target from there.
  • content acceleration and content enrichment.
  • independent or small group project of their choice.
  • renzullilearning.com.
  • additional learning opportunities that both challenge the learner and address high interest learning topics.
Javier E

Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Sp... - 0 views

spp.sagepub.com/...1948550610385872

studying methods research deliberate practice grit spelling expertise academic achievement

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The expert performance framework distinguishes between deliberate practice and less effective practice activities. The current longitudinal study is the first to use this framework to understand how children improve in an academic skill.
  • Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure. Rated as the most effortful and least enjoyable type of preparation activity, deliberate practice was increasingly favored over being quizzed as spellers accumulated competition experience. Deliberate practice mediated the prediction of final performance by the personality trait of grit, suggesting that perseverance and passion for long-term goals enable spellers to persist with practice activities that are less intrinsically rewarding—but more effective—than other types of preparation.
Ryan Trauman

The Astro Banshees | Blog | Closing Argument - 0 views

ryantrauman.com/...87

shared by Ryan Trauman on 21 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • In Dennis Burgess article ‘ObesityPproblem stems from Laziness’, he adresses the root cause of obesity. Burgess claims the root of obesity to be laziness. He argues that America does not have an ‘obesity problem’, rather a ‘laziness problem’. More specifically, Burgess makes mention of the correlation between children and parents concerning obesity. ‘As a child, I would go outside and “play”. This involved getting up off the couch and exerting myself. But many of today’s children don’t participate in this type of play. And many of today’s parents sit on the couch right next to them’ (Dennis B. Burgess). Burgess makes the correlation by stating that the parents often times discourage active play by not setting the example. Parents would rather sit with their kids on the couch than take the initiative and go outside with their kids and take a walk or play ball. Parents do indeed play a role in their children’s health and ultimately have some effect on their children’s health. Healthy kids most often have healthy parents who encourage their kids good health by setting the example well and partaking in activity with their kids.
    • Ryan Trauman
      Ryan Trauman on 21 Apr 11
       
      Excellent work here, Lizzy. You stick nice and close to the quotation that you actually introduce. Then you reflect on it some. Then you offer your own position. This is a great job.
  • Andrea Freeman addresses the issue of fast food in her article ‘Fast Food: Oppression Through Poor Nutrition.’ Freeman considers fast food in respects to low- income families. ‘Fast food has become a major source of nutrition in low- income, urban neighborhoods across the United States’ (Freeman, pg. 1). Less privelaged families must make do with their current financial situation. The easiest most convenient food source for low- income families is that of fast food. Therefore, parents have a direct effect on their children’s health.
    • Ryan Trauman
      Ryan Trauman on 21 Apr 11
       
      This quotation is less successful. You really don't reflect on Freeman's quotation at all.
Mary Glackin

Report: Teachers Better at Using Tech than Digital Native Students -- THE Journal - 59 views

thejournal.com/...n-digital-native-students.aspx

teachers tech students

shared by Mary Glackin on 14 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Today's school-age learners are no more technology savvy than their teachers.
  • teachers' technology use experiences surpassed students whether it [was] inside or outside of school
  • eacher age had no impact on the kinds of technology skills they have. The gap between them and their students lies with how little opportunity students get to practice technology beyond pursuing their personal interests
  • Mary Glackin on 14 Nov 14
     
    learners are less tech savvy than their teachers
Marc Safran

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants - 1 views

www.twitchspeed.com/...l%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.htm

digitalnatives web2.0 pedagogy prensky article pd professionaldevelopment integration

shared by Marc Safran on 30 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
  • today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors
  • we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The importance of the distinction is this: As Digital Immigrants learn - like all immigrants, some better than others - to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past.
  • There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. 
  • our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language
  • Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been, and that the same methods that worked for the teachers when they were students will work for their students now. But that assumption is no longer valid. Today's learners are different.
  • So what should happen?  Should the Digital Native students learn the old ways, or should their Digital Immigrant educators learn the new? 
  • methodology
  • learn to communicate in the language and style of their students
  • it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other thing
  • kinds of content
  • As educators, we need to be thinking about how to teach both Legacy and Future content in the language of the Digital Natives.
  • Adapting materials to the language of Digital Natives has already been done successfully.  My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
  • "Why not make the learning into a video game!
  • But while the game was easy for my Digital Native staff to invent, creating the content turned out to be more difficult for the professors, who were used to teaching courses that started with "Lesson 1 – the Interface."  We asked them instead to create a series of graded tasks into which the skills to be learned were embedded. The professors had made 5-10 minute movies to illustrate key concepts; we asked them to cut them to under 30 seconds. The professors insisted that the learners to do all the tasks in order; we asked them to allow random access. They wanted a slow academic pace, we wanted speed and urgency (we hired a Hollywood script writer to provide this.)   They wanted written instructions; we wanted computer movies. They wanted the traditional pedagogical language of "learning objectives," "mastery", etc. (e.g. "in this exercise you will learn"); our goal was to completely eliminate any language that even smacked of education.
  • large mind-shift required
  • We need to invent Digital Native methodologies for all subjects, at all levels, using our students to guide us.
  • Marc Safran on 30 Jul 09
     
    Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
D. S. Koelling

Views: What's High School For? - Inside Higher Ed - 35 views

www.insidehighered.com/...sharfman

dual enrollment concurrent enrollment

shared by D. S. Koelling on 04 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
  • In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
  • The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • As a result, classes that used to be termed “college-prep” are now seen as college proper.
  • In practice, however, courses covered in a high school setting on a high school calendar are often vastly different in practice.
  • This is not a criticism of high school teachers. Many are excellent educators and care deeply about students. But they often teach more classes than college faculty do, have myriad extracurricular responsibilities, and lack the requisite training that enables college faculty to introduce best practices in the field. In contrast, college faculty members expect a higher level of work from students, including having them study independently, write in the discipline and be exposed to the latest research. They are less likely to offer extra credit, or evaluate students based on an inflated high school norm.
  • High school students, especially sophomores and juniors, are not like college students. A collection of 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds are normally at a different stage of intellectual and moral development than are college students. Treating a high school student like a college student does not always do them a favor.
  • This student, as a sophomore in high school, earned a “C” in a “college” English course, which exempts her from our basic English 111 College Writing class. Even though her ACT score indicates her writing skills are deficient, we are limited in what we can do. Like many students who have already passed a “college” class, she thinks she already has the necessary writing skills to be successful in college. We know she very likely does not. Our willingness to increase student access by accepting transfer credit means that, without taking this student’s credits away, we cannot help her with her writing. Instead, by virtue of an average performance as a high school sophomore, this student will be placed into college classes for which she is unprepared.
  • Most colleges willingly accept credits from like institutions because we trust that our courses are equivalent and that our faculty are credentialed. I doubt that same trust applies to high schools. The best service a high school can provide is to prepare students for college, not substitute for it.
  • D. S. Koelling on 04 Jan 11
     
    High school dual enrollment programs may not be helping students succeed in college.
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