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Jennie Snyder

Design Thinking in Schools: An Emerging Movement Building Creative Confidence in our Yo... - 46 views

  • design thinking is a set of tools, methods, and processes by which we develop new answers for challenges, big and small.
  • Through applying design thinking to challenges, we learn to define problems, understand needs and constraints, brainstorm innovative solutions, and seek and incorporate feedback about our ideas in order to continually make them better. The more we apply design thinking to the challenges we see, the deeper we strengthen the belief in our ability to generate creative ideas and make positive change happen in the world.
  • If you are interested in finding a program or resources to help integrate design thinking in your school, the directory offers a great set of organizations already listed for inspiration and new connections.
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  • We are living in an age of increased complexity, and are facing global challenges at an unprecedented scale. The nature of connectivity, interactivity, and information is changing at lightening speed. We need to enable a generation of leaders who believe they can make a difference in the world around them, because we need this generation to build new systems and rebuild declining ones. We need them to be great collaborators, great communicators, and great innovators.
  • As we help today’s students build their foundation of core academic knowledge and skills, we also need to look at the ways we are helping our youth build their confidence in their abilities to create.
Maureen Greenbaum

Education Week: Fighting the Enemies of Personalized Learning - 57 views

  • Most educators agree that the one-size-fits-all curriculum needs addressing
  • emergence of technology in education has certainly created a renewed interest in personalizing learning and providing teachers with the tools necessary for differentiating curriculum.
  • True personalization requires more than just looking at achievement levels and trying to compensate for deficiencies
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  • achievement levels, information about student interests, learning styles, and preferred modes of expression allow us to make decisions about personalization that take multiple dimensions of the learner into account.
  • differentiation of content requires adding more depth and complexity to the curriculum rather than transmitting more or easier factual material.
  • Respect for learning-style variations can be achieved by using instructional strategies such as simulations, Socratic inquiry, problem-based learning, dramatizations, and individual and small-group investigations of real problems. Expression-style preferences can be accommodated by giving students opportunities to communicate visually, graphically, artistically, and through animatronics, multimedia, and various community-service involvements.
  • Our obsession with content mastery and Skinner's behavioral theory of learning are slowly but surely giving way to an interest in personalization and differentiation.
  • While it is understandable that our early use of technology was mainly an adaptation of Gutenberg-online and a teaching-machine mentality of what learning is all about, we now have both the pedagogical rationale and technological capability to use the many dimensions of student characteristics that clearly and unequivocally result in higher engagement, enjoyment, and enthusiasm for learning.
trisha_poole

Using Reading Prompts to Encourage Critical Thinking | Faculty Focus - 118 views

  • “Students can critically read in a variety of ways: When they raise vital questions and problems from the text, When they gather and assess relevant information and then offer plausible interpretations of that information, When they test their interpretations against previous knowledge or experience …, When they examine their assumptions and the implications of those assumptions, and When they use what they have read to communicate effectively with others or to develop potential solutions to complex problems.
  • Identification of problem or issue
  • Making connections
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  • Interpretation of evidence
  • Challenging assumptions
  • Making application
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    A quick overview of using reading prompts to encourage critical thinking.
D. S. Koelling

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher E... - 40 views

  • at least 45 percent of undergraduates demonstrated "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills in the first two years of college, and 36 percent showed no progress in four years."
  • What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
  • students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
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  • Increasingly, undergraduates are not prepared adequately in any academic area but often arrive with strong convictions about their abilities.
  • It has become difficult to give students honest feedback.
  • As the college-age population declines, many tuition-driven institutions struggle to find enough paying customers to balance their budgets. That makes it necessary to recruit even more unprepared students, who then must be retained, shifting the burden for academic success away from the student and on to the teacher.
  • Although a lot of emphasis is placed on research on the tenure track, most faculty members are not on that track and are retained on the basis of what students think of them.
  • Students gravitate to lenient professors and to courses that are reputedly easy, particularly in general education.
  • It is impossible to maintain high expectations for long unless everyone holds the line in all comparable courses—and we face strong incentives not to do that.
  • Formerly, full-time, tenured faculty members with terminal degrees and long-term ties to the institution did most of the teaching. Such faculty members not only were free to grade honestly and teach with conviction but also had a deep understanding of the curriculum, their colleagues, and the institutional mission. Now undergraduate teaching relies primarily on graduate students and transient, part-time instructors on short-term contracts who teach at multiple institutions and whose performance is judged almost entirely by student-satisfaction surveys.
  • Contingent faculty members, who are paid so little, routinely teach course loads that are impossible to sustain without cutting a lot of corners.
  • Many colleges are now so packed with transient teachers, and multitasking faculty-administrators, that it is impossible to maintain some kind of logical development in the sequencing of courses.
  • Students may be enjoying high self-esteem, but college teachers seem to be suffering from a lack of self-confidence.
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    So many issues here to deal with. Good read.
Shelley Hull

Microsoft Word - BlockingSchedules.rtf - CAREI BlockingSchedules.pdf - 25 views

    • Shelley Hull
       
      " Early advocates of bloc scheduling identified the block schedule as the ca talyst, or vehicle, for bringing about desired changes in secondary education (Carroll, 1990; Canady and Rett ig, 1995)"
  • Research examining student achievement in block-scheduled schools compared to traditional schools showed mixed and inconclusive results
  • Most research about block scheduling and classroom instruction, as with research on school climate, used student, teacher, and parent questionnaires and surveys.
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  • The levels of engagement were much better in the first year under the block schedule, while in the second year the ratings were the same as under the traditional schedule.
  • Students reported “thinking hard about ideas” and “having indepth discussion” significantly more often under block schedules.
  • his may also be supported by Bexell (1998) who found teachers on block schedules using teaching strategies requiring more interaction than teachers on a traditional schedule
  • It would seem that the small amount of change in the way teachers teach after switching to a block schedule would be disappointing to block scheduling advocates
  • Important questions hover over these findings. What is an effective amount of teacher lecture? Or group work? Or individual work?
  • One thing that is missing from the observation instrument used in this study is any judgment about the quality of a lecture, quality and depth of a discussion, or the complexity of group or individual work
Dallas McPheeters

Online Discussions: Tips for Instructors - 56 views

  • Online Discussions: Tips for Instructors Online discussions are much like face-to-face discussions: they require preparation and active management in order to facilitate student learning. However, added complexities exist in the online environment, such as getting students comfortable with the conferencing system and helping them to communicate clearly without the aid of nonverbal communication cues. This tips sheet outlines the benefits of online discussions, then provides tips for both planning and facilitating such discussions. Tips to pass on to your students are also included at the end.
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    Nearly complete and concise explanation with strategies for successful online discussions. Excellent resource. Needs only a rubric to round out fully.
Maureen Greenbaum

15 Surprising Discoveries About Learning - InformED : - 59 views

  • Conscientiousness and Openness have the biggest influence on academic success.
  • people learn better when using multiple, short training episodes rather than one extended session
  • participants who held jobs with higher levels of complexity with data and people, such as management and teaching, had better scores on memory and thinking tests
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  • Students who walked in another experiment doubled their number of novel responses compared with when they were sitting.
  • Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar,
  • . You can improve your learning by expecting to share it with others.
  • Findings suggest that simply telling learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a test.
Diego J. Vigueras Gonzalez

Infografía sobre Teorías del aprendizaje - 6 views

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    Infografía sobre Teorías de Aprendizaje - Pin de Carmen Quiñones en Educar | Pinterest http://t.co/8wooe4Ix8P
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    Theories of Learning - A learning theory is an attempt to describe how people learn, helping us understand this inherently complex process.
anorred79

Learn Genetics - 73 views

    • anorred79
       
      Cloning section has two great interactive sites for students - mouse cloning activity is the best!
    • anorred79
       
      Cloning section has two great interactive sites for students - mouse cloning activity is the best!
    • anorred79
       
      Genetics and the brain has a great lab on neurons.
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    Very cool site with interactive animations that show very complex scientific concepts in an easy to understand format.
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    Great resources for genetics-Science of addiction lesson
anonymous

Curriculum21 - Annotexting - 62 views

  • We would also like to share this DISCUSSION RUBRIC (2007) that you can use as students submit annotations and begin to draw conclusions about what their evidence is pointing to.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      An idea or resource perhaps...
    • anonymous
       
      Start off modeling what you expect students to do.  Then, move more toward asking students to look at a text with a certain set of questions in mind.  Finally, just share a simple short list of terms or words which will guide student reading/annotating.
  • These annotations, rather than being on paper, can be collected with different web tools so that students can collaborate
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    • anonymous
       
      Great use of Diigo or Google documents!
  • Students submit their annotations via their smart phones or other digital devices, and then analyze each other’s notations collectively.  They could be looking for main ideas, thematic and literary elements, or big ideas from the work.   They could be looking for evidence of connections to other texts, their own experiences, or world issues. They could simply be searching for meaning to support them when reading complex texts.
    • anonymous
       
      Reading, analyzing, and collaborating about annotations helps open the eyes of readers and provides feedback which promotes even more thinking.
    • anonymous
       
      FABULOUS way to utilize Google docs and tools!
  • annotexting will allow students to engage with other audiences in tasks with an expanded purpose
    • anonymous
       
      Anytime something is shared and ideas are discussed and shared, there seems to be more of a 'real-life' purpose for digging in and completing the task.
  • In order to get students to own this process, we have to relinquish some control. Let them think, let them make mistakes and respond. Let them draw conclusions even they are not the conclusions we would have drawn. We can be there to coach them through misconceptions.
    • anonymous
       
      Step back!  It is amazing to learn from the student's perspective.  Then, if the thinking is not focused toward the goal or objective of the teacher's lesson, a bit of guidance and coaching is all that is needed to steer students toward that goal/objective.
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Teaching for the 21st Century:21st Century Skills: The Challenge... - 119 views

  • the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
  • Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history
  • What's actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills
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  • Many reform efforts, from reducing class size to improving reading instruction, have devolved into fads or been implemented with weak fidelity to their core intent. The 21st century skills movement faces the same risk.
  • some of the rhetoric we have heard surrounding this movement suggests that with so much new knowledge being created, content no longer matters; that ways of knowing information are now much more important than information itself. Such notions contradict what we know about teaching and learning and raise concerns that the 21st century skills movement will end up being a weak intervention for the very students—low-income students and students of color—who most need powerful schools as a matter of social equity.
  • First, educators and policymakers must ensure that the instructional program is complete and that content is not shortchanged for an ephemeral pursuit of skills
  • Second, states, school districts, and schools need to revamp how they think about human capital in education—in particular how teachers are trained
  • inally, we need new assessments that can accurately measure richer learning and more complex tasks
  • Skills and knowledge are not separate, however, but intertwined.
  • In some cases, knowledge helps us recognize the underlying structure of a problem.
  • At other times, we know that we have a particular thinking skill, but domain knowledge is necessary if we are to use it.
  • if skills are independent of content, we could reasonably conclude that we can develop these skills through the use of any content. For example, if students can learn how to think critically about science in the context of any scientific material, a teacher should select content that will engage students (for instance, the chemistry of candy), even if that content is not central to the field. But all content is not equally important to mathematics, or to science, or to literature. To think critically, students need the knowledge that is central to the domain.
  • The importance of content in the development of thinking creates several challenges
  • first is the temptation to emphasize advanced, conceptual thinking too early in training
  • Another curricular challenge is that we don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
  • But experience is not the same thing as practice. Experience means only that you use a skill; practice means that you try to improve by noticing what you are doing wrong and formulating strategies to do better. Practice also requires feedback, usually from someone more skilled than you are.
  • We must plan to teach skills in the context of particular content knowledge and to treat both as equally important.
  • education leaders must be realistic about which skills are teachable. If we deem that such skills as collaboration and self-direction are essential, we should launch a concerted effort to study how they can be taught effectively rather than blithely assume that mandating their teaching will result in students learning them.
  • teachers don't use them.
  • Even when class sizes are reduced, teachers do not change their teaching strategies or use these student-centered method
  • these methods pose classroom management problems for teachers.
  • These methods also demand that teachers be knowledgeable about a broad range of topics and are prepared to make in-the-moment decisions as the lesson plan progresses.
  • constant juggling act
  • greater collaboration among teachers.
  • But where will schools find the release time for such collaboration?
  • professional development is a massive undertaking.
  • Unfortunately, there is a widespread belief that teachers already know how to do this if only we could unleash them from today's stifling standards and accountability metrics. This notion romanticizes student-centered methods, underestimates the challenge of implementing such methods, and ignores the lack of capacity in the field today.
  • The first challenge is the cost.
  • measures that encourage greater creativity, show how students arrived at answers, and even allow for collaboration.
  • When students first encounter new ideas, their knowledge is shallow and their understanding is bound to specific examples. They need exposure to varied examples before their understanding of a concept becomes more abstract and they can successfully apply that understanding to novel situations.
Gloria Maristany

Motivating the Child with Attention Deficit Disorder - 3 views

  • live very much in the present. Therefore, long-term goals and rewards (e.g., grades and report cards) are often ineffective motivators.
    • Gloria Maristany
       
      Reason for immediate rewards/consequences.
  • basically two time frames — now and not now.
  • This Now/Not Now worldview causes great frustration for the child, his teachers, and his parents, and must be seriously considered when designing activities and approaches for motivating the child with ADD.
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  • respond more positively to a curriculum that allows him choices and options. He will also be more likely to participate actively in tasks when there is a degree of creativity and novelty
  • the presentation should be creative, colorful, multimodal, and enjoyable.
  • pervasive and complex disorder that impacts nearly all of the child's activities and interactions.
  • The child's impulsivity ("Ready, fire, aim!") can present serious safety concerns; his distractibility makes it extraordinarily difficult for him to understand and follow instructions; his memory difficulties make even rote learning troublesome; his executive processing problems (ability to plan and prioritize) present great challenges when he attempts to plan simple daily activities; his organizational deficiencies cause him tremendous problems with homework, household tasks, and long-term projects.
  • two most important words when dealing with these special children: "support" and "challenge."
  • The adult should continually challenge the child by presenting him with activities designed to improve his behavior and his learning, while simultaneously providing him with the support that he requires to meet these goals. Support without challenge is meaningless. Challenge without support is equally ineffective.
  • Among the specific teaching strategies that may foster the child's motivation are:
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    Good description of the limitations they have and how it affects them in school.
Cathie Howe

Not So Far, Far Away - 169 views

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    An excellent resource Kit of ideas for exploring Persuasive texts through a Fairytale context
Christian King

CoughDrop - Every voice should be heard - 53 views

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    In beta, allows complex communication for users with a disability, using communication boards that can be customised.
Kristine Goldhawk

Any plans to add tablet PC "inking" functionality to Diigo? - 77 views

I third it! Demetri Orlando wrote: > Just wondering if Diigo developers are considering the possibility of adding inking functionality to allow Tablet PC users to insert digital ink on web pages. I...

tablet ink

Clint Heitz

This Is How The Way You Read Impacts Your Memory And Productivity - 17 views

  • Studies have shown that taking notes by longhand will help you remember important meeting points better than tapping notes out on your laptop or smartphone. The reason for that could be that “writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clarity to the fore the information we’re focusing on
  • says one explanation for the benefit of reading analog books may come down to something called metacomprehension deficit. “Metacomprehension refers to how well we are ‘in touch with,’ literally speaking, our own comprehension while reading,” says Mangen. “For instance, how much time do you spend reading a text in order to understand it well enough to solve a task afterwards?”
  • “Length does indeed seem to be a central issue, and closely related to length are a number of other dimensions of a text, e.g., structure and layout. Is the content presented in such a way that it is required that you keep in mind several occurrences/text places at the same time?” says Mangen. In other words, she says, complexity and information density may play a role in the importance of the medium providing the text.
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  • “It is not–and should not be–a question of either/or, but of using the most appropriate medium in a given situation, and for a given material/content and purpose of reading,”
  • As the study cited above mentions, like other digital readers, you probably think you are absorbing the information better than you actually are, and thus move through the book faster.A simple solution to this is to simply slow down and take more time reading the material, and you might absorb the information just as well as those who naturally take longer to read a paper book.
grayberg

Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education - 48 views

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    This article is one of the many written by D. Randy Garrison on the value of e-learning both as an independent entity and (as in this article) part of the blended learning environment. The authors are Dr. D. Randy Garrison, professor and academic director of Learning Commons at the University of Calgary; and Dr. Heather Kanuka, professor and academic director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Alberta. Both authors have written extensively on the topic of e-learning, distance education, and adult education. This article discusses the potential of blended learning in higher education. The authors conclude that blended learning can have a substantial benefit for the student both in terms of logistics and educational satisfaction. "Blended learning is about rethinking and redesigning the teaching and learning relationship." However, it requires that the program's administrative and leadership issues are addressed and a solid action plan is in place. A "community of inquiry" must be formed by good course design which can be at the same time quite simple and yet complex. This topic is of great interest to me as I would like to reinstate a successful blended learning program at the college where I teach.
Sharin Tebo

Creating a Culture of Inquiry | Edutopia - 78 views

  • Inquiry
  • creating a culture of inquiry takes constant work. Teachers need to establish it from the first day in the classroom, and work to keep it vital throughout the year. Here are some important things to know about creating that culture, and some ideas that you might consider.
  • Culture
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  • Questioning
  • When we make a change or set an expectation for how a classroom will operate, we begin to affect the climate. It takes time for something to become a part of the culture
  • culture of inquiry
  • Scaffold
  • A culture of inquiry will not happen overnight, but the right climate for it is much easier to establish.
  • Teachers should use a variety of strategies, such as structured protocols and question starters and stems, to support students in asking effective questions.
  • One great tool for building a culture of inquiry is essential questions that drive learning.
  • Rather than focusing on the answer, they should focus on the process of inquiry that begins when the question is asked.
  • we have to make sure that our assignments also mirror and honor inquiry
  • Do our assignments focus on complexity and justification? Do we honor student voice and choice in these assignments? Are students allowed choice in what they produce and voice in what the assignment will look like? Do we create assignments and assessments that allow students to investigate their own questions aligned to the content that we want them to learn?
  • A culture of inquiry can only become the classroom norm if there is commitment from all stakeholders -- parents, students, teachers, administration, and more. Simply saying that we are an inquiry-based classroom and doing an occasional inquiry-based activity is not indicative of a culture of inquiry.
meghankelly492

Culture of East Africa | USA Today - 1 views

  • 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.
Frederick Eberhardt

Powerful Learning: Studies Show Deep Understanding Derives from Collaborative Methods |... - 85 views

  • In essence, students must learn how to learn, while responding to endlessly changing technologies and social, economic, and global conditions.
  • students learn more deeply if they have engaged in activities that require applying classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems.
  • developing inquiring minds
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  • Studies of problem-based learning suggest that it is comparable, though not always superior, to more traditional instruction in teaching facts and information. However, this approach has been found to be better in supporting flexible problem solving, reasoning skills, and generating accurate hypotheses and coherent explanations.
  • design challenges need to be carefully planned, and they emphasized the importance of dynamic feedback.
  • When students have no prior experience with inquiry learning, they can have difficulty generating meaningful driving questions and logical arguments and may lack background knowledge to make sense of the inquiry.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Absolutely true. I discovered this when I used inquiry-based methods with my students in Qatar who were used to rote learning. They truly did not know where to start. They first needed to learn *how* to be inquisitive.
  • Requiring students to track and defend their thinking focused them on learning and connecting concepts in their design work
  • All the research arrives at the same conclusion: There are significant benefits for students who work together on learning activities.
  • groups outperform individuals on learning tasks and that individuals who work in groups do better on later individual assessments.
  • In successful group learning, teachers pay careful attention to the work process and interaction among students.
  • "It is not enough to simply tell students to work together. They must have a reason to take one another's achievement seriously.
  • She and her colleagues developed Complex Instruction, one of the best-known approaches, which uses carefully designed activities requiring diverse talents and interdependence among group members.
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Interesting... worth checking out.
  • They require changes in curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices -- changes that are often new for teachers and students.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    A scholarly article with tremendous real-world practical implications and suggestions. Love this.
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    Vocational Education meets Research in the dynamic classroom of Linda Darling-Hammond, 2008. The students are doing the research, teaching and learning. They control their own destiny and they are taking the world by storm! They are not waiting to be taught, they are teaching each other and themselves as teams of researchers. Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Powerful learning: what we know about teaching for understanding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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