Group items tagged

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”And thus began our ten-week course.This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact."

while it is necessary (and possible) to teach facts to people, it comes with a price. And the price is this: facts learned in this way, and especially by rote, and especially at a younger age, take a direct root into the mind, and bypass a person's critical and reflective capacities, and indeed, become a part of those capacities in the future.When you teach children facts as facts, and when you do it through a process of study and drill, it doesn't occur to children to question whether or not those facts are true, or appropriate, or moral, or legal, or anything else. Rote learning is a short circuit into the brain. It's direct programming. People who study, and learn, that 2+2=4, know that 2+2=4, not because they understand the theory of mathematics, not because they have read Hilbert and understand formalism, or can refute Brouwer and reject intuitionism, but because they know (full stop) 2+2=4.I used the phrase "it's direct programming" deliberately. This is an analogy we can wrap our minds around. We can think of direct instruction as being similar to direct programming. It is, effectively, a mechanism of putting content into a learner's mind as effectively and efficiently as possible, so that when the time comes later (as it will) that the learner needs to use that fact, it is instantly and easily accessible.

Social and Emotional Learning: Making a Case in an NCLB World"

Target audience: Educators in the elementary and secondary grades interested in evidence for the value of social and emotional learning and practical ideas for implementing it

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important -- there's no doubt of that. But it takes more than those basic academic skills for students to grow into happy, successful adults.

Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal.

it may also be that in an age where every conceivable user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories for the tasks they do

While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them

though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them