Group items tagged

"The strategy that has worked best for me over the years has been to create a non-threatening atmosphere in which teachers can experiment and explore without repercussions as they become more familiar with technology tools. The key is to cultivate a climate of discovery and experimentation as opposed to one of judgement and unattainable standards. After all, we don't expect our students to be perfect the first time around. We encourage them to experiment and take risks. If everything had to be perfect right away, we'd never get anything done!" Interesting post to share with teachers

"He cites Socrates's parable of the Egyptian god Theuth and how he invented writing, offering it as a gift to the king of Egypt, Thamus, who met the present with defiant indignation: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

""What's the sine of π/2?" I asked my first-ever trigonometry class. "One!" they replied in unison. "We learned that last year." So I skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn't really know what "sine" even meant. They'd simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn't a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game. Trigonometry was just a collection of non-rhyming lyrics to the lamest sing-along ever. Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding."

"Solving a math problem means unfolding a mystery, enjoying the pleasure of discovery. But in every geometry lesson that year, I blundered along and blurted out the secret. With a few sentences, I'd manage to ruin the puzzle, ending the feast before it began, as definitively as if I'd spat in my students' soup. Math is a story, and I was giving my kids spoilers." This post speaks directly to math, but can be applied to any content. When we provide students with the answers rather than developing lessons that let the students ask (and answer questions), we take the fun out of learning.

For math people, this guy is very solid on how you develop the patterns of thought and understanding.

"Students asking questions and then exploring the answers. That's something any good teacher lives for. And at the heart of it all is curiosity."