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“Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.”

they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners

Sitting passively and taking notes is just not a way of learning. Yet lectures are 99 percent of how we teach!

To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration.

eachers provide prompts

they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another.

The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride.

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time.

Perhaps of all the humanities, the creative arts come closest to valuing failure. Poets and painters don't expect to get it right the first time. That's the idea of workshopping as a pedagogy, right? Still, there's a real difference. I'd be willing to bet that most creative writers bring a piece of work into a workshop secretly hoping it's a success. Sure, they know they need help on aspects of their story or poem, but that's not the same as failing. A computer program that doesn't run is a failure. A program that produces no usable data about the text it was set up to analyze is a failure. Why don't those failures devastate the developers? Because each time their efforts fail, the developers learn something they can use to get closer to success the next time.

The details of this chart are less important than the process of creating it. After playing with the iPad, reading/watching how others use it in the classroom, and trying it out with your own students, get together with a few other educators and fill out your own chart. Here's a blank chart we give out as a part of a Think-Pair-Share. You might want to divide it into sections and consider the affordances and constraints by user (teacher/student/special needs student/administrator), use (reading/word processing/movie making/note taking/etc.), subject, or taxonomy (Bloom/SAMR/etc.). Hopefully you'll revise the chart as you use the tool in a wider variety of ways. This can definitely be combined with ideas of balancing technology, content and pedagogy. (Check out this podcast on TPaCK and SAMR.)

Current research indicates that teacher expertise is the most significant school-based influence on student learning.

Model what you expect teachers to do.

We use a 'landscape/frame/gateway' approach that overlays freedom and agency onto a sophisticated curated learning landscape that takes 100s of hours to set up. 

Audacious. 180 kids, 1 space, NO TEACHERS. They put precautionary measures in place. No gap in duty-of-care. But: one huge risk. An audacious risk. Step back. Create space. Allow agency. Truth is, for the rest of the year it will be: 180 kids, 6 to 8 teachers, 1 space, and a virtual learning platform to rival the Khan Academy.

"Students and faculty have to have this sense that they can truly connect with each other," he concludes. "Only through that sense of connection do you have this sense of community."