Group items tagged

formative feedback

body of evidence

cross-disciplinary

authentic work

we'd like to see a number of things tried so we can have a good discussion that's informed by rational experiment and collected data. Beyond these individual experiments, one class at a time, I think it would be great to have one or two departments really try to integrate an online experience into their core curriculum so we can understand how that works, so we can provide students more options

Many of these first round of MOOCs were produced with a webcam by an individual instructor using a tablet PC. That's on the order of a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Maybe. Certainly, it's extremely inexpensive compared with a laptop 5 years ago. So the cost of the technology is lower. There's good software for editing video -- we're in an era where producing video is similar to word processing. And everyone is used to interacting with people online in different ways than were prevalent 10 to 15 years ago. The kind of discussion you can have online is more sophisticated. People understand social conventions for how to contribute constructively to an online discussion. Those factors really contribute to the effectiveness of a MOOC or a smaller scale online course.

I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered

Research shows that learners who are interested in what they are learning, achieve higher order learning outcomes.

Research shows that among friends and peers, young people fluidly contribute, share, and give feedback to one another, producing powerful learning.

Peer culture and interest-driven activity needs to be connected to academic subjects, institutions, and credentials for diverse young people to realize these opportunities.

moving away from a one-size-fits-all system, in which students largely follow the same calendar and curriculum on their way to collecting 120 credits for a bachelor's degree

More of the decisions colleges make about their direction must be rooted in data.

Now the data exist to track students, the classes they took, how they performed, and their outcomes after graduation—all of which can inform decisions.

One of the things that made Solidarność so remarkable was that "Solidarity" was not just a slogan or a philosophy: the movement involved an empirical overcoming of long-standing divides between right and left, Catholics and Marxists; workers and intellectuals.

What the various totalitarian experiments tell us quite clearly is that most people most of the time are formed by the circumstances in which they find themselves. That does not mean that individual personality variables do not exist, or that there will not always be exceptions. There will always be extraordinary people like Władysław Bartoszewski, who seems to have emerged from childhood with an uncanny moral lucidity. But as a general rule: if you put people in bad circumstances, you will not, on a large scale, get good outcomes.

I wanted to write about historical periods prior to1989. But I was, of course, personally experiencing the post-Communist period: as I was sitting in the archives reading about the 1930s, I was also living in the 1990s. So I had this dual experience of discovering the past along with the present.

The Taste of Ashes is about how the past lingers and about what the afterlife of totalitarianism has been.

One of the first, most naïve questions I wanted to understand was: Why was there no “happily ever after”?

I thought that coming to Eastern Europe would be like arriving at a non-stop party, that everybody would be celebrating his or her liberation. Of course, it was nothing like that. The 1990s were in some ways not very happy times at all. There was a sense that now people were suffering and being exploited in entirely different ways from the ways in which they had suffered and been exploited under communism. And there was a sense of the past as tormenting.  

In some ways this book is my attempt to explain why the fall of communism in Eastern Europe was not a fairy tale's happy ending.

I think this kind of attempt to find a safe place for ourselves in the world will always fail. There is something rootless about the human condition.

The idea that Eastern Europe after communism was an empty space to be filled with things borrowed from the West is not convincing.

became necessary when it was blatantly apparent that not all students in U.S schools had equal opportunity to learn

standards are necessary but insufficient

depends on teachers and leaders knowing how to expertly implement them

high-stakes testing that accompanies the standards

Administrators need to take the lead

Become discerning readers and writers.

Do more read-alouds of excellent literature.

Standards do not transform teaching and learning

Organize curriculum through emphasizing big ideas and important concepts.

Embed shared experiences in your teaching.