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Steve J. Moore

InformIT: The Business of Understanding > Ode to Ignorance - 1 views

www.informit.com/...article.aspx

shared by Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11 - No Cached
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      This is what all of public education is struggling with right now. How do we legitimize the asking of questions and the pursuit of understanding rather than the bubbling in of "answers" we don't really get?
  • I'm a success when I do something that I myself can truly understand
  • the most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Giving yourself permission not to know everything will make you relax
  • preconceptions
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      In technical writing, we must sort out all prior knowledge and place it before us and then step away from it so we can recreate it anew.
  • binary choice: I could teach about what I already knew, or I could teach about what I would like to learn
  • My expertise has always been my ignorance, my admission and acceptance of not knowing. My work comes from questions, not from answers.
  • The focus on bravado and competition in our society has helped breed into us the idea that it is impolitic, or at least impolite, to say, "I don't understand."
  • Understanding should be thought of as a continuum from data to wisdom
  • at this end of the spectrum, understanding gets increasingly personal until it is so intimate that it cannot truly be shared with others
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      So, is "technical writing" about creating information out of data (a set message) or structuring data so that others can interpret their own information from it (a personalizable message)?
  • "One of the best ways of communicating knowledge is through stories, because good stories are richly textured with details, allowing the narrative to convey a stable ground on which to build the experience."
  • Without context, information cannot exist, and the context in question must relate not only to the data's environment (where it came from, why it's being communicated, how it's arranged, etc.), but also from the context and intent of the person interpreting it.
  • rganization creates, or at least, shapes meaning
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      How do we tell "data" from "info" in our teaching practice? What does this paragraph tell you about assessing student learning and work?
  • Technology forms a near-disastrous distraction from real information and knowledge issues.
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      What is it about technology or tools that distract us from teaching kids how to learn skills in a "technical" setting?
  • complexity
  • education is so notoriously difficult: because one cannot count on one person's knowledge to transfer to another
  • This is what education should be about, but too often it is only focused on information—and worse, data—simply because those are the only forms that are easy to measure.
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      THIS.
  • Knowledge
  • experience design
  • discover processes for creating these experiences
  • Without the opportunity, willingness, or openness to interact on a personal level, much of the power of these experiences are not made available to us.
  • Wisdom is as personal as understanding gets—intimate, in fact—and it is a difficult level for many people to reach
  • sharing of wisdom is next to impossible.
  • What can only be shared is the experiences that form the building blocks for wisdom, but these need to be communicated with even more understanding of the personal contexts of our audience than with information or knowledge.
  • We cannot trick ourselves into becoming wise, and we cannot allow someone else to do it.
    • Steve J. Moore
      Steve J. Moore on 10 Aug 11
       
      What is one piece of wisdom you have learned about yourself in your own learning?
  • we need to expose people to the processes of introspection, pattern-matching, contemplation, retrospection, and interpretation so that they will have the beginnings of the tools to create wisdom
hperetz

Cooperative Catalyst - 15 views

coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/...center-of-authentic-assessment

grading meaningful assessment

shared by hperetz on 18 Sep 11 - No Cached
Ruth Howard liked it
  •  I believe it is ideal to invite the student to participate in understanding and creating the goals of their learning.
  • We should allow them to be an active part of the conversation and thinking around the what, how and why of their learning.
  • By always dictating the outcomes, we turn our leaning into checklist to be completed, passively learning what is expected of us and never reaching beyond the boundaries of the rubrics or standards.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • should be utilized as sign posts or maps of where learning can and might go. I personally believe that rubrics and standards can be as limiting as they are useful.
Ted Sakshaug

Why should we check the accuracy of information on a web page? - 0 views

21cif.com/...accuracy

web accuracy information literacy education

shared by Ted Sakshaug on 02 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Ted Sakshaug on 02 Apr 09
     
    a quick one page guide for checking accuracy of web page information. With a game attached
Michael Walker

Progressive Education - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...progressive.htm

progressive education alfiekohn

shared by Michael Walker on 11 Jul 09 - Cached
  • As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed, “Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning, multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
  • Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people
  • Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model.
  • A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own coun
  • “What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
  • Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
  • students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
  • Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
  • they design it with them
  • what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.
  • A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
  • A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning — they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
  • Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
  • Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of initiative.
  • For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12]  But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
Ted Sakshaug

The Why Files | The Science Behind the News - 0 views

whyfiles.org

science news education reference research learning tools knowledge

shared by Ted Sakshaug on 20 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Ted Sakshaug on 20 Jul 09
     
    The science behind the news
Fabian Aguilar

What Do School Tests Measure? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/...what-do-school-tests-measure

nytimes all_teachers math science

shared by Fabian Aguilar on 12 Aug 09 - Cached
  • According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago.
  • Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
  • Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate.
  • Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know.
  • An almost exclusive focus on raising test scores usually leads to teaching to the test, denies rich academic content and fails to promote the pleasure in learning, and to motivate students to take responsibility for their own learning, behavior, discipline and perseverance to succeed in school and in life.
  • Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.
  • Students, families and groups that have been marginalized in the past are hurt most when the true purposes of education are not addressed.
  • lein. Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
  • The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
  • This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows.
  • Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking.
  • First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills.
  • Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
  • Reliable and valid standardized tests can be one way to measure what some students have learned. Although they may be indicators of future academic success, they don’t “prepare” students for future success.
  • Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
  • Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
  • The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
  • While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world.
  • Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it.
  • The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
Jerrid Kruse

The Wired Campus - Duke Professor Uses 'Crowdsourcing' to Grade - The Chronicle of High... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...7538

Assessment grading

shared by Jerrid Kruse on 04 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.
  • "Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system," Ms. Davidson wrote Sunday in a blog post detailing her strategy on hastac.org (pronounced "haystack"), the acronym for  "humanities, arts, science, and technology-advanced collaboration.," which she co-founded.
  • It's important to teach students how to be responsible contributors to evaluations and assessment. Students are contributing and assessing each other on the Internet anyway, so why not make that a part of learning?"
Ric Murry

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009080702046_2.html

attrition education teachers

shared by Ric Murry on 09 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Ric Murry on 09 Aug 09
     
    4-year teacher leaves the profession.
Ed Webb

C. Wright Mills on blogging | Savage Minds - 0 views

savageminds.org/...c-wright-mills-on-blogging

mills blogging blogs craft scholarship practice praxis philosophy education

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Aug 09 - Cached
  • On Intellectual Craftmanship. I was amazed how clearly the reasons why scholars blog were laid out in the opening paragraphs. In what follows I have changed none of Mills’s original language except for replaced ‘journal’ and ‘file’ with ‘website’ and ‘blog’. Clearly Mills didn’t envision the files he advocates as public documents, but other than that the parallels are uncanny
Rob Jacobs

Op-Ed Columnist - Swimming Without a Suit - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22friedman.html

shared by Rob Jacobs on 23 Apr 09 - Cached
  • There are some hopeful signs. President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.
    • Rob Jacobs
      Rob Jacobs on 23 Apr 09
       
      Why do we need money to use great strategies?
Ted Sakshaug

Web 2.0 and Why! - 0 views

docs.google.com/ViewDoc

2.0 tools education schools k-12 all_teachers bestpractices curriculum technology

shared by Ted Sakshaug on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Ted Sakshaug on 04 Jun 09
     
    As we explore these and other new tools, we must ask ourselves; How do we incorporate these into our classrooms in meaningful and useful ways?
anonymous

Top News - School of the Future: Lessons in failure - 0 views

www.eschoolnews.com/...index.cfm

education edtech

shared by anonymous on 11 Jun 09 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Jun 09
     
    From eschoolnews, this article about the Philly School of the Future and why it wasn't the huge success that they had envisioned. I think this is a must-read for folks who are considering one-to-one programs. Learn from the mistakes of others. Interesting comments from readers, too.
  • anonymous on 11 Jun 09
     
    Interesting read about assumptions, a well-meaning program, and the lessons learned
Vicki Davis

Why You May Not Be Able to Claim Your Facebook Page Username Come Saturday - 0 views

mashable.com/...facebook-page-usernames

education facebook edu_news

shared by Vicki Davis on 11 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Vicki Davis on 11 Jun 09
     
    OK< after all the hooplah about being able to claim a special username for your page -- the fine print says you have to have 1000 fans on Facebook to claim your name. This seems a bit high to Mashable and to others. Oh well, facebook is, well facebook.
Amy Kelly-Graham

By Sarah Fine -- Why I Left Teaching Behind - washingtonpost.com - 8 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009080702046.html

shared by Amy Kelly-Graham on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • When I talk about the long hours, for example, what I mean is that, over the course of four years, my school's administration steadily expanded the workload and workday while barely adjusting salaries. More and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported. One afternoon this spring, when my often apathetic 10th-graders were walking eagerly around the room as part of a writing assignment, an administrator came in and ordered me to get the class "seated and silent." It took everything I had to hold back my tears of frustration.
    • Amy Kelly-Graham
      Amy Kelly-Graham on 14 Oct 09
       
      I would expound upon this notion bu the author was very clear in making her point.
Toby Fischer

Op-Ed Columnist - The New Untouchables - NYTimes.com - 12 views

www.nytimes.com/...21friedman.html

21st century skills article nytimes untouchables Global Economy friedman pink 21c grad class

shared by Toby Fischer on 06 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Toby Fischer on 06 Nov 09
     
    Great article telling why we need to change our schools.
anonymous

Diigo conversations push kids deeper - Reflections of a Techie - 21 views

teachingtechie.typepad.com/...rsations-push-kids-deeper.html

diigo-in-education

shared by anonymous on 25 Nov 09 - Cached
Ed Webb liked it
  • But I have to tell you that despite all the pain in my neck this has been, I'm LOVING Diigo.&nbsp; We are annotating the blogs as we read them and then dissecting what they mean.&nbsp; Now imagine my little kids (6th graders you know) trying to understand that the geochemistry of this sediment can tell scientist about the cycling of sea levels...and this cycling is important to the coastal cities survival throughout the world.&nbsp; We're just at the most basic places, but they are digging through...asking me questions and pulling out info they think is relevant.I have them write summaries and email those summaries from Diigo to me each weekend.&nbsp; OK...not all are great.&nbsp; But most of these kids "get it" and are pretty interested in the science being conducted.&nbsp; I think they are also grooving on the conversation we get from highlighting important things from the blogs and then chatting (via the annotation commenting feature) about why it's important and what are the next things we should look for.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 09
       
      This is VERY good! Congratulations! I LOVE to read about teachers who are experimenting out of their comfort zone with technologies like Diigo that produce such positive results. This experiment you're doing with your kiddos is something that will change forever how they view online resources. And, it will change how they look at the web. All very positive, and all skills that will last far into their education. Yes, it is, as you say, the BEST.
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