Group items tagged

Asking good questions and encouraging students to build on one another’s thinking gives students voice and enables them to become more critical thinkers in mathematics.

students move into pairs to write their ideas, solutions, and strategies. A variety of materials, such as linking cubes and two-colour counters, are available for students to choose from when constructing mathematical models, making conjectures, and connecting their ideas.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves -- who can take initiative and be the solution to problems. They need people who can build trust and get along with others, and solve complex challenges in teams without much supervision.

"Partnerships between schools and parents in educating the whole child, which includes developing both the character strength and the competencies required to really succeed in the 21st Century."

A.B. Combs Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina

The kind of product I shall pick on here has the form of a game: the player gets into situations that require an appropriate action in order to get on to the next situation along the road to the final goal. So far, this sounds like "tainment." The "edu" part comes from the fact that the actions are schoolish exercises such as those little addition or multiplication sums that schools are so fond of boring kids with. It is clear enough why people do this. Many who want to control children (for example, the less imaginative members of the teaching profession or parents obsessed with kids' grades) become green with envy when they see the energy children pour into computer games. So they say to themselves, "The kids like to play games, we want them to learn multiplication tables, so everyone will be happy if we make games that teach multiplication." The result is shown in a rash of ads that go like this: "Our Software Is So Much Fun That The Kids Don't Even Know That They Are Learning" or "Our Games Make Math Easy."

What is worst about school curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge into little pieces. This is supposed to make learning easy, but often ends up depriving knowledge of personal meaning and making it boring. Ask a few kids: the reason most don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.

game designers have a better take on the nature of learning than curriculum designers. They have to. Their livelihoods depend on millions of people being prepared to undertake the serious amount of learning needed to master a complex game. If their public failed to learn, they would go out of business. In the case of curriculum designers, the situation is reversed: their business is boosted whenever students fail to learn and schools clamor for a new curriculum!

We’ve all got a limited amount of working memory, so when we have to handle information in more than one way, our load gets heavier, and progressively more challenging to manage.

when you lighten the load, it’s easier for students’ brains to take information in and transform it into memory.

The duplicated pieces of information--spoken and written--don’t positively reinforce one another; instead, the two effectively flood students’ abilities to handle the information.