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Contents contributed and discussions participated by jeffery heil

jeffery heil

Workers, soldiers or nomads - what does the Gates Foundation want from our ed... - 0 views

  • The why of education should be the first question that we answer in any discussion in the field.
  • Sadly, it seems to be very difficult to say anything about “what learning is” and “why we educate our children”.
  • but it’s pretty tough to create a system that both trains people to do what they are told and to also critically assess their culture.
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  • Memory is the representation of the things that we ‘know’ as a culture
  • The worker was the original goal of the public education system.
  • The worker needs to remember things without understanding them.
  • Learning for a worker is about compliance.
  • Our education system currently does a very good job of creating workers.
  • The soldier
  • They are the defenders of memory.
  • They are the ones who establish what things we currently know that the worker should remember, and then establish the system by which we will measure that knowing.
  • They decide which parts of the past will be valued
  • soldiers really can decide what they want to have valued.
  • Soldiers defend the status quo
  • The nomad is trying to do what I call ‘learning’.
  • Learning for the nomad is the point where the steps in a process go away.
  • It is what Wynton Marsalis calls ‘being the thing itself’
  • In order to create an educational system that allows for nomads we can’t measure for a prescribed outcome.
  • Rhizomatic learning
  • It is designed for a world where there aren’t ‘things people should know’ but rather ‘new connections to be made’.
  • If we want a society of innovators, of creatives, we can’t think of success as an act of compliance
jeffery heil

Will · Learners not Knowers - 0 views

  • But I am saying my kids don’t (won’t) need teachers any more to get them to pass the test.
  • If nothing else, the new iPhone’s integration of Siri is a clear indicator of how far technology has come in terms of understanding semantic cues and interactions.
  • If it’s all about test scores and “student acheivement” measured by test scores, immersing kids into Knewton-type environments is by far the easiest, cheapest, path of least resistance for the system’s current definition of “learning.”
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  • This is why we should all be feeling an acute urgency right now to take back the definition of what “learning” really is in a world filled with content and teachers and personalization.
  • Knewton doesn’t develop learners. It develops knowers.
  • We’re in serious trouble if that’s all we value.
jeffery heil

SpeEdChange: If school isn't for collaborating, why does anyone come? - 0 views

  • If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an "expert," they have no reason to come to school.
  • For years we've talked about (or we may have even been) kids who've only come to school because of team sports, or music groups, or theatre, or even hanging out at lunch.
  • If school isn't about doing things together, just about everyone has better places to spend their day.
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  • The world of work has moved on, but the educational structure, despite the efforts of many individual teachers and administrators, crawls along
  • Bill Gates favorite boy Salman Khan, believe that kids sitting alone, working by themselves, with canned, inflexible data in front of them, is the best preparation for life in the present and future.
  • So here is what your classroom, and your school, needs to offer kids:
  • 1. A learning environment in which students make most decisions.
  • 2. A time environment in which students learn and work along a schedule which makes sense to them
  • 3. A technological environment which supports collaboration across every barrier.
  • 4. A social environment where adults do not rank students according to their oppressive standards.
  •  
    If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an "expert," they have no reason to come to school. They can do a lot better at home, or at their local coffee shop or even the public library, where both the coffee and the WiFi connection will be better.
jeffery heil

5 Traits of the 21st Century Teacher - 0 views

  • Driven to Learn
  • A Media Creation Expert
  • A Digital Navigator
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  • An Empathetic Mentor
  • A Technology Harmonizer
  • It is no longer acceptable to teach only from a textbook, to rely on the same worksheets an methods year after year without at least questioning them and researching why they are the best resource available.  
  •  Powerpoint and Word are becoming antiquated as newer and more powerful presentation and editing suites become available to teachers.
  • This means having social media accounts and understanding how they are used, even if you don’t use them specifically for learning.
  • This student-centered focus also creates learning opportunities for the teacher to learn with students, developing their teaching and collaborative skills
  • One of the keys here is that we work at making the technology work (in the best way we can) so the lesson becomes about the learning instead of the management of machines.
jeffery heil

Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better? : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • For my specialized cases, I’ve come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solution
  • For the others, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary.
  • What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development
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  • Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.
  • Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.
  • Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.
  • The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction
  • Doctors understand expertise in the same way.
  • We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.
  • Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.
  • Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.
  • “My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”
  • The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.
  • Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.
  • So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes
  • For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.
  • Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.
  • alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,
  • Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.
  • But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.
  • Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.
  • One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective
  • Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.
  • Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.
  • Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components
  • It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.
  • She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.
  • The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.
  • Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice
  • I’d had no outside ears and eyes.
  • Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.
  • Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches
  • The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate
  • We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.
  • But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.
  • What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.
  • We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.
  • The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure
  • But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.
  • Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.
  • “Most surgery is done in your head,”
  • we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely
  • Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance
jeffery heil

The Blur Between Leading and Teaching - 0 views

  • Anything that we do with technology has to be focused on learning first.
  • We need to always focus on “why” we are doing something before we focus on what and how.  We also need to clearly be able to articulate that to those we work with.
  • Any plans that we create must help to build capacity within schools so that all stakeholders benefit.
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  • I saw a distinct parallel between the characteristics of great teaching and great leadership.
  • Give trust, gain trust. As soon as you show that you trust people to do great things, they are more likely to do them.
  • Provide some clear goals and objectives to the work you are doing.  With those in mind, ensure there is flexibility in the way people achieve those goals.
  • Let people build and share their strengths and interests.
  • We can learn much more from a group than we ever could from only one.  Do your best to bring people together and empower them to be leaders.
  • If you look at the list above, there should be no distinction between what falls under leadership or teaching; they clearly work in both areas.
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