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Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • 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.
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  • 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?
  •  
    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).
  •  
    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
mrshathaway

Evaluating a Website or Publication's Authority - Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - 25 views

  • most of us would like to ascribe authority to sites and authors who support our conclusions and deny authority to publications that disagree with our worldview
  • Wikipedia’s guidelines for determining the reliability of publications. These guidelines were developed to help people with diametrically opposed positions argue in rational ways about the reliability of sources using common criteria.
  • defined by process, aim, and expertise.
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  • fact-checkers of all political stripes are happy to be able to track a fact down to one of these publications since they have reputations for a high degree of accuracy, and issue corrections when they get facts wrong.
  • a reliable source for facts should have a process in place for encouraging accuracy, verifying facts, and correcting mistakes
  • Process
  • researchers and certain classes of professionals have expertise, and their usefulness is defined by that expertise
  • Expertise
  • while we often think researchers are more knowledgeable than professionals, this is not always the case
  • Reporters, on the other hand, often have no domain expertise
  • Aim
  • Aim is defined by what the publication, author, or media source is attempting to accomplish
  • One way to think about aim is to ask what incentives an article or author has to get things right
  • In general, you want to choose a publication that has strong incentives to get things right, as shown by both authorial intent and business model, reputational incentives, and history
anonymous

Taylor & Francis Online :: Supervision and scholarly writing: writing to learn-learning... - 0 views

  • students’ difficulties with the academic genre should be considered to be the norm, rather than the exception.
    • anonymous
       
      Step away from problematising writing and toward it being normal to seek help
  • mechanical errors r
  • errors in the microstructure of writing
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  • inconsistencies in writin
  • macrostructure of writing
  • quality and clarity of purpose
  • substantive general writing errors
  • publication, authorship, training and fairness
  • plagiarism
  • formal writing courses and reading lists, writing activities, and peer writing groups
  • Ideally, the supervisor provides a writing role mode
  • fallacious to assume that supervisors are necessarily scholarly writers
    • anonymous
       
      relying on spvrs to be writing mentors does not always work, may have own issues with writing/lack of confidence
  • apprenticeship model can be ineffective
  • a passive role in improving their writing
  • tudents and supervisors need to master a range of writing task
  • benefit of naming what will be attended to and framing its context accrues through the process of planning, action and reflection
  • implicit contractual relationship between my students and me
  • supervisor
  • provide feedback
  • conceptu
  • methodological
  • I conceived postgraduate students’ writing as similar to that of an academic co‐author.
    • anonymous
       
      assumed they were more developed as writers than they actually were
  • initially corrected all errors
  • ttle emphasis to these errors in subsequent interactions
  • explored whether these were careless errors or whether the students had difficulty with particular aspects of writin
  • students assumed some responsibility for proofreading
  • cholarly writing in a thesis involves much more than a set of discrete writing tasks
  • heightened awareness of individual differences in students as writers
  • dependent writer
  • ‘writer’s block’ that could be overcome by breaking writing down into subtasks
  • copious notes
  • detailed note‐taking limited her interaction
  • brief summary of the key points on my written response to her drafts
  • action plan
  • writing block initially posed a major ethical dilemma for me because the ethical guidelines of authorship restrict the writing that should be undertaken by a superviso
  • not writing per se that underpinned Denise’s writing block but a lack of knowledge about the content and organization of a particular writing task.
    • anonymous
       
      Writers block can come from lack of knowledge/confidence in the writing process, rather than lack of subject knowledge
  • confident writer
  • published during his doctoral studies
  • nadvertently engaged in unethical writing behaviour by including me as a co‐author without my permission
  • difficulties with all aspects of the macrostructur
  • epeat sections of writing from earlier chapters
  • replace repeated text with concise summaries or use cross‐referencing
  • tendency to rush through corrections, which often resulted in many issues identified on a previous draft remaining unresolved
  • writing was often submitted and returned electronically using the ‘comments’ and ‘track changes’ tools in Microsoft Word.
    • anonymous
       
      use of technology to produce tracked drafts/version control
  • resistant writer
  • acknowledged herself to be a poor write
  • writing supp
  • oral and written feedback
  • email guidance, sessions where writing was modeled and her writing scaffolded, and handouts on writing style.
  • specialist assistance
  • r lack of commitment to improving the quality of subsequent drafts
  • argumentative stance towards writing feedback
  • my colleague and I decided that we were no longer prepared to supervise Rita.
  • imited writing progress
  • , Rita had failed to adequately demonstrate her writing capability as a doctoral candidat
  • sporadic writer
  • repeatedly failed to meet negotiated deadlines
  • supervisor, it was difficult to maintain interest in and respond to Sherry’s work because of the time lag between each piece of writing
  • enlisted an experienced supervisor to act as my mentor
  • forewarned
  • Sherry’s approach to writing was likely to result in a lengthy completion time and she needed to accept the responsibility for managing her writing tasks.
  • emotional excitement of writing up a thesis and the ensuing motivation
  • lacked
  • This trail of documentation
  • importance of
  • highlighted student‐centred writing issues
  • dentified broader issues that also needed to be accommodated in supervision
  • confidence in writing does not necessarily equate with capability.
  • uture directions
  • upport students
  • ncouraging them to participate in activities designed to support scholarly writing,
  • community of support for each othe
    • anonymous
       
      rationale for peer support groups
  • Technology
  • virtual community of student writers
  • Ethical writing
  • cant attention in postgraduate training to ethical practices in writing
  • explore the ethical standards that are in operation in our local academic community.
  • underpinned by a performance‐orientation
  • ssues of concern related to students’ scholarly writing were identified.
  • eper understanding of the breadth of issues related to the supervision of postgraduate writing
Mr. Eason

Educational Leadership:Reading: The Core Skill:The Challenge of Challenging Text - 131 views

  • The new standards instead propose that teachers move students purposefully through increasingly complex text to build skill and stamina.
  • higher-order thinking in reading depends heavily on knowledge of word meanings.
  • Students' ability to comprehend a piece of text depends on the number of unfamiliar domain-specific words and new general academic terms they encounter.
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  • If students are to interpret the meanings such complex sentence structures convey, they need to learn how to make sense of the conventions of text—phrasing, word order, punctuation, and language.
  • Students who are aware of the patterns authors use to communicate complex information have an advantage in making sense of text.
  • maintaining understanding across a text.
  • Students' background knowledge, including developmental, experiential, and cognitive factors, influences their ability to understand the explicit and inferential qualities of a text.
  • building skills, establishing purpose, and fostering motivation.
  • even students who have basic decoding skills sometimes struggle to deploy these skills easily and accurately enough to get a purchase on challenging text. To help these students develop reading fluency, teachers should give them lots of practice with reading the same text, as well as instruction to help them develop a stronger sense of where to pause in sentences, how to group words, and how their voices should rise or fall at various junctures when reading aloud.
  • A final determinant of text difficulty, however, depends on the reader's prior knowledge.
  • pair repeated readings of the same text with questions that require the student to read closely for detail and key ideas.
  • Ongoing, solid vocabulary instruction
  • also on general academic words.
  • also explore the connections among words,
  • In contrast, in reading history and literature, readers need to be concerned with not just the causes of events, but also the human intentions behind these causes.
  • teachers should not convey so much information that it spoils the reading or enables students to participate in class without completing the reading; rather, they should let students know what learning to expect from the reading.
  • Teachers may be tempted to try to make it easier for students by avoiding difficult texts. The problem is, easier work is less likely to make readers stronger.
  • You need to create successive successes.
  • Students experience success in the company of their teacher, who combines complex texts with effective instruction.
  •  
    What makes text difficult and how to teach skills for successful comprehension.
Dallas McPheeters

Esther Wojcicki: Revolution Needed for Teaching Literacy in a Digital Age - 52 views

  • teach students to master the production of knowledge, not just the consumption of knowledge.
    • Dallas McPheeters
       
      Would be interesting to know what the author believes this looks like. Who are the producers? Who are the consumers? How does the knowledge economy work? I'll have to think about this one.
Marc Patton

Digital Promise - Accelerating Innovation in Education - 39 views

  •  
    Digital Promise is a bipartisan independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation authorized by Congress "to support a comprehensive research and development program to harness the increasing capacity of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy."
Carol Ansel

The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views

  • Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
  • 4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
  •  
    Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
Miguel Rodriguez

A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education | Edutopia - 0 views

  • A Textbook Example of What's Wrong with Education A former schoolbook editor parses the politics of educational publishing.by Tamim Ansary var addthis_options = 'delicious, digg, facebook, google, reddit, stumbleupon, twitter, more'; Print Forward addthis_pub = 'glef'; Share Comments(38) Comment RSS Click to enlarge pictureThe Muddle Machine Credit: Monte Wolverton Some years ago, I signed on as an editor at a major publisher of elementary school and high school textbooks, filled with the idealistic belief that I'd be working with equally idealistic authors to create books that would excite teachers and fill young minds with Big Ideas. Not so. I got a hint of things to come when I overheard my boss lamenting, "The books are done and we still don't have an author! I must sign someone today!" Every time a friend with kids in school tells me textbooks are too generic, I think back to that moment. "Who writes these things?" people ask me. I have to tell them, without a hint of irony, "No one." It's symptomatic of the whole muddled mess that is the $4.3 billion textbook business. Textbooks are a core part of the curriculum, as crucial to the teacher as a blueprint is to a carpenter, so one might assume they are conceived, researched, written, and published as unique contributions to advancing knowledge.
    • Miguel Rodriguez
       
      I have worked as an editor for an educational publisher myself and, let me tell you, a lot of this sounds really familiar!
anonymous

Emerald | The loneliness of the long distance researcher - 1 views

  • cross a threshold in their understanding
    • anonymous
       
      being part of a writing group may necessitate a change in how the person thinks about their writing or themselves as a writer
  • acilitate a speedy response from a peer audience
  • factors of a CoP or CoW is the development of trust
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  • willingness to share knowledg
  • CoW break down the walls of these rooms and provide an open space or arena for collaboration?
  • virtual CoPs need to make good use of internet standard technologies and users need to possess ICT skills.
  • CoW members would need to develop a sense of belonging
  • After initial enthusiasm, where a number of co-authors introduced themselves, things fell quiet, and I myself was as guilty as anybody else in not checking the forum any more after a few weeks of inactivity
  • – the collaborative writing of the final chapter – was moved to Google docs,
  • used a blog and wiki to write a 1,500 word essay in her discipline online and in real time.
  • http://anessayevolves.blogspot.com/
  • On the wiki, topic-related material was explored and drafts were constructed
  • In the online environment contributions were overwhelmingly supportive, non-hierarchical and candid.
  • wiki as a framework to create a comprehensive online knowledge base which covers the entire veterinary curriculum.
  • As part of the wiki, students maintain a personal profile which allows them to reflect on the experience
  • COPYEDITING-L (https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A0=COPYEDITING-L)
  • How would their writing contributions – often practice based – fit in a CoW inhabited by academics writing for scholarly publications?
  • . Firstly, the need to find a medium for your CoW that works, that is widely used, and with which the would-be participants are familiar and comfortabl
  • ow is a CoW initiated? Can it be self-perpetuating or does it need leaders/mentors to drive it?
  • degree of intervention.
  •  
    Development of online writing communities, hosted by libraries. Covers emotional aspects of writing as well as technical
Dennis OConnor

James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education the Knowledge Web - 89 views

  • Welcome to the home page of the James Burke Institute for Innovation in Education and its flagship project, the Knowledge Web.
  • Founded by James Burke, the author, host, and narrator of the acclaimed television series Connections, the Institute exists to encourage innovative uses of educational technology.
Chai Reddy

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say - NYTimes.com - 17 views

  • Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.
  • “I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”
Kelly Sereno

SIRS: Making Students Literate in Digital Age - 70 views

    • Kelly Sereno
       
      Pro - Argument #1
  • The American Library Association encourages schools and libraries to think twice before keeping kids off social media, saying such prohibition "does not teach safe behavior and leaves youth without the necessary knowledge and skills to protect their privacy or engage in responsible speech." Their policy statement on the topic says that instead of restricting access, librarians and teachers "should educate minors to participate responsibly, ethically and safely."
  • Perhaps the biggest objection to widespread use of social sites is the likelihood that kids will encounter irrelevant or even offensive material--a fear that many teachers say is overblown. While the Web can seem like "a sea of pornography and idiots," says James Lerman, the author of several books on educational technology, schools must help students figure out how to navigate it so they "can get to the good stuff" that's applicable to school.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The American Library Association encourages schools and libraries to think twice before keeping kids off social media, saying such prohibition "does not teach safe behavior and leaves youth without the necessary knowledge and skills to protect their privacy or engage in responsible speech.
Nathan Hopson

Thoreau - Walking - Webtext - 41 views

  • When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due south-west, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-south-west. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks, would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free.
    • Nathan Hopson
       
      West = new + free, East = old + constrained Not a reference to world history, but to the American context (West = frontier). The Americas were the West (to Europe) and the West was America (as Turner/Billington argue).
  • I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.
    • Nathan Hopson
       
      See above...
Matt Renwick

Annie Murphy Paul on Why 'Digital Literacy' Can't Replace The Traditional Kind | TIME.com - 117 views

    • Matt Renwick
       
      The F-pattern when reading online could have been helpful for the reader in this article.
  •  
    Both the author of the article and the people she criticizes are making a fundamental mistake. It is an illusion that kids once learned facts in some deeper way. If the tree octopus had been presented in a book, the kids would have made the same mistake. Much of traditional teaching was not about absorbing certain facts but about learning techniques for accessing those facts. The internet and google really have changed the way we access information. The real challenge is how to restructure knowledge itself to take advantage of the new forms of accessibility. And as for using technology in the classroom: banning computers is like forcing kids to memorize arithmetic tables in an age when everyone has a calculator. We don't need slide rules nor an abacus and there is no reason to teach kids how to use them.
Jennie Snyder

The Principal of Change - 0 views

  • The schools that have someone (or a group of people) helping to push the boundaries of what can be done in schools seem to move a lot quicker with a larger amount of “buy-in” through the process.
  • I do not believe change is solely dependent upon their skills, but also the culture in which they exist.
  • So although a change agent can trigger growth in an organization, the culture in which they exist or are brought into has a huge bearing on their success.  If a school embodies itself as a true learning organization, change will happen much quicker.
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  • individuals that are really successful in helping to be a catalyst for change certainly embody some similar characteristics
  • a “change agent” does not have to be the person in authority, but they do however have to have a clear vision and be able to communicate that clearly with others.
  • it is essential to tap into the strengths of the people you work with and help them see that there are many ways to work toward a common purpose.
  • To have sustainable change that is meaningful to people, it is something that they will have to embrace and see importance.
  • he persistence comes in that you will take opportunities to help people get a step closer often when they are ready, not just giving up on them after the first try.
  • When that solution is someone else’s, there is no accountability to see it through.
  • character and credibility”; they are not just seen as good people but that they are also knowledgeable in what they are speaking about.
  • If you want to create “change”, you have to not only be able to articulate what that looks like, but show it to others.
  • How can you really know how “kids learn” or if something works if you have never experienced it?
  • All of the above, means nothing if you do not have solid relationships with the people that you serve.
  • People will not want to grow if they do not trust the person that is pushing the change.
  • Trust is also built when you know someone will deal with things and not be afraid to do what is right, even if it is uncomfortable.
  • positive change is not reserved to be the responsibility of any position.
  • The best leaders may have all of these qualities but also empower others to be those “change agents” as well to build a culture of leadership and learning.
Amy Burns

OpenStax CNX - 10 views

  •  
    A collaborative community of education resources. Like MIT courseware.
  •  
    Connexions is: a place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute: authors create and collaborate instructors rapidly build and share custom collections learners find and explore content
  •  
    "Discover learning materials in an Open Space. View and share free educational material in small modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports or other academic assignments. "
Chai Reddy

Teaching for America - NYTimes.com - 24 views

  • 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.
  • Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
  • Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
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  • All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill.
k lieneke

CriticalThinking.org - Teaching Tactics that Encourage Active Learning - 126 views

  •  
    "Tactics that Encourage Active Learning Use the following tactics during class to ensure that students are actively engaged in thinking about the content. Students should be called on randomly (using the deck of cards method for instance) so that everyone participates. When students do not know when they will be called on they are much more likely to remain alert and engaged in the learning process. Students should be routinely called upon to: Summarize or put into their own words what the teacher or another student has said. Elaborate on what they have said. Relate the issue or content to their own knowledge and experience. Give examples to clarify or support what they have said. Make connections between related concepts. Restate the instructions or assignment in their own words. State the question at issue. Describe to what extent their point of view on the issue is different from or similar to the point of view of the instructor, other students, the author, etc. Take a few minutes to write down any of the above. Write down the most pressing question on their mind at this point. The instructor then uses the above tactics to help students reason through the questions. Discuss any of the above with a partner and then participate in a group discussion facilitated by the instructor."
  •  
    powerup21net4s
Ed Webb

How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds - WSJ.com - 2 views

  • what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy
  • it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time
  • Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.
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  • students cannot apply generic "critical thinking skills" (another voguish concept) to new material unless they first understand that material
  • Trying to use "reading strategies" -- like searching for the main idea in a passage -- will be futile if you don't know enough facts to fill in what the author has left unsaid.
  • what is being taught in most of the curriculum -- at all levels of schooling -- is information about meaning, and meaning is independent of form
  • At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra
    • Ed Webb
       
      But if you learn dancing AND algebra, you may be better at both, or at least approach each in a more interesting way.
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.
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