if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.
When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer.
My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!
Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers.
A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.
"A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached
by the gardener's art compared with a fine, dark green one growing vigorously
in the open fields."
omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted
spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks
In Literature, it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another
name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet
and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the
Schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful
than the tame, so is the wild-the mallard-thought, which, 'mid falling
dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural,
and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower
discovered on the prairies of the west, or in the jungles of the east.
I confess that
I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and
development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect.
all good things are wild and free
The seeds
of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like
seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made
the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left
to sow before they become submissive members of society.
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
Do Ivy League students just know how to cheat better?
Who are the best customers? "Not to anyone's surprise, but my best clients are from Ivy and top tier schools. I guess the more perfect people think you are, the more likely in life you are to cheat to keep that perception."
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
Not all information is created equal. The bottom layers (the most ubiquitous, whose sources are the most ephemeral, and with the least amount of validation) lead to layers with greater dependability, all the way to the highest layers, made up mostly of academic resources maintained and validated by academic publishers that use multiple peer reviews, trained editors, and scholarly reviewers. When the system is effective, the layers serve to reinforce one another through clear pathways that allow queries to move from one layer to another with little resistance.
Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia.
That makes perfect sense. Through user-generated efforts, Wikipedia is comprehensive, current, and far and away the most trustworthy Web resource of its kind. It is not the bottom layer of authority, nor the top, but in fact the highest layer without formal vetting. In this unique role, it therefore serves as an ideal bridge between the validated and unvalidated Web.
Most of the nearly 2,500 students who responded said they consult Wikipedia, but when questioned more deeply, it became clear that they use it for, as one student put it, "pre-research." In other words, to gain context on a topic, to orient themselves, students start with Wikipedia.
My opinion of Wikipedia, like the tool itself, has radically evolved over time. Not only am I now supportive of Wikipedia, but I feel that it can play a vital role in formal educational settings
The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.
C. Grathwohl argues that Wikipedia plays a vital middle layer of authority for students conducting pre-research; scholars, he says, should work to assure that links in Wikipeida lead students to more advanced research that's been validated by the academic community.
Are you a teacher? Sign up now. It's free!
As a teacher you create a network for you and your students.
Share inspiration, ideas, readings, thoughts
Post discussions, deadlines, homework
Embed pictures, links and video
Keep parent
Twitter-like website for educators and children to use as a class or school. Embed text, images, videos, links and even Google Docs files. The site has a live chat functure open to just the class.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
What other people are saying: By Jennifer Alman for the Emergent Technologies in a collaborative class at Full Sail University. Features and benefits of using Twiducate for collaboration in an educational setting. Are you a teacher? Sign up now. It's simple and free!twiducate is the perfect solution for elementary and secondary students.
The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat-that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
First, students tend to lose interest in
whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up,
motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try
to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult
assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a
top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less
impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even
long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of
traditional grades.
Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely
different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades
used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to
sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to
figure out who is better than whom)
Standardized tests often have the additional
disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the
classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate
answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more
than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot,
high-anxiety basis.
The test
designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage
to answer correctly.
the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely
to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
1. Students come to regard learning as a
chore.
intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation
tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing
something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had
to do to get the reward.
2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
they’re just being rational. They have
adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual
exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional
grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other
incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are
unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see
what they’re capable of doing.
This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
They seem to be
fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump
they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re
helpless to do anything about it.
When the point isn’t to
figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to
cope with being less than good.
It may be the systemic demand for high
achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even
if the failure is only relative.
But even when better forms of assessment are
used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less
important than why she thinks she got that score.
just smart
luck:
tried hard
task difficulty
It bodes well for the future
the punch line: When students are led to focus on
how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their
performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
In their
study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that
teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and
keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to
attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside
their control, such as a lack of ability.
When students are made to
think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to
explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard
they tried.
And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as
"smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will
bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect
on other kids.
The upshot of all this is that beliefs about
intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure
matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how
confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how
they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher
standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores
and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make
sense of those results.
the problem with tests is not limited
to their content.
if too big a deal is made
about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to
think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
As Martin
Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have
concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the
pursuit of excellence."
Only now and then does it make sense for the
teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how
they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should
be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized
tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in
learning.
the findings
of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are
thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the
students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm
for learning is apt to wane.
The underlying problem concerns
a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work
in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the
difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and
focusing on what you’re doing.
The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course,
but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
But when we get carried away with results, we wind up,
paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
Unfortunately,
common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to
dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and
design of the most common forms of assessment--both within
classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous
consequences.
grades, which by their very
nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not
that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students
have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to
school.
research indicates that the use of traditional
letter or number grades is reliably associated with three
consequences.
The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
Created specifically for education and absolutely no adult content allowed this site is perfect for classroom blogging. You can create students accounts with no email necessary and have your students collaborating or keeping your parents informed in no time.
"So suggests Dr. Dylan William in his excellent new book, Embedded Formative Assessment (published by Solution Tree Press, and recommended). A common use for diagnostic questions is to find out whether participants have understood your instruction - telling you whether you can go onto another topic or need to spend more time on this topic. And if participants get it wrong, you want to understand why they have done so in order to correct the misconception. Good diagnostic questions involve deep domain knowledge, as you have to understand why learners are likely to answer in a particular way"
many brilliant, talented young people are dropping out of high school because they see high school as implicilty "college prep" and they cannot imagine anything more dreary than spending four more years bored in a classroom when they could be out actually experiencing and perfecting their skills in the trades, the skills, and the careers that inspire them.
The abolishing of art, music, physical education, tech training, and shop from grade schools and high schools means that the requirement for excellence has shrunk more and more right at the time when creativity, imagination, dexterity, adaptability to change, technical know-how, and all the rest require more not less diversity.
we make education hell for so many kids, we undermine their skills and their knowledge, we underscore their resentment, we emphasize class division and hierarchy, and we shortchange their future and ours,
There are so many viable and important and skilled professions that cannot be outsourced to either an exploitative Third World sweat shop or to a computer, that require face-to-face presence, and a bucketload of skills--but that do not require a college education: the full range of IT workers, web designers, body workers (ie deep tissue massage), yoga and pilates instructors, fitness educators, DJ's, hair dressers, retail workers, food industry professionals, entertainers, entertainment industry professionals, construction workers, dancers, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, landscapers, nanny's, elder-care professionals, nurses's aids, dog trainers, cosmetologists, athletes, sales people, fashion designers, novelists, poets, furniture makers, book keepers, sound engineers, inn keepers, wedding planners, stylists, photographers, auto mechanics, and on and on.
In general, I agree. However, novelists and poets don't need college?? And perhaps less so to artists and musicians? Perhaps... but what better way to learn the history and analysis of their Art, in order to place their own work in context?
I could not agree more with you Maureen. As a long time middle school teacher in Oakland and Mpls I am thoroughly convinced that our nation and our states are nuts to have cut all of the tech and arts classes out of elementary, middle and high schools. EVERY student should learn a trade/skill set in high school. The hs drop out rate is horrifying and no surprise that the crime rate follows. We have a nation of under achieving teens because the adults have not kept up with funding the myriad of opportunities that would capture and harness their interests and creativity. I look forward to reading your book Maureen and to following you on here.
Flow is important, indeed. See Csikszentmihalyi (1975) for more detail.
I've found that binaural beats can aid getting into the flow, but I still need a good source for high quality binaural beats.
Yeah well, for some this can be quite demotivating - having a clean and empty document on your computer that screams for attention and at the beginning shows nothing but the fact that you haven't done anything yet.
So instead of opening an empty document, I always suggest my students should use a good writing software that helps them to produce text naturally and "on the go". For this, my personal choice is Citavi.
A maths and thinking skills site with hundreds of word puzzles to ponder over. Perfect for lesson warm ups and improving mental maths.
http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths
When to Introduce New Technologies to Your Students: The New School Year
Whether school’s been in session for a few weeks or you’re starting after Labor Day, now is the perfect time to introduce your students to technologies you want them to use throughout the school year.
2. Create a “Teacher,” “Student,” and “Parent” account to see how students and parents will see your posts. Experiment with different features in each of these accounts so you are ready to answer questions and get students and parents “unstuck.”
3. Don’t go it alone. Find another teacher in your building who is willing to take the plunge with you. You can support each other, learn from each other, and try new things.
Sophia is the perfect place for anyone to share what they know. Whether an educator, tutor, professor, parent or subject expert, Sophia makes it easy to share your knowledge and make it available to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
