The challenge lies not in attracting smart, personable people to teaching, but in retaining them

Continuity and consistency are as vital for students as for teachers trying to establish relationships with their charges and develop teaching and learning strategies.

Groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” — the willingness of the group to let all its members take turns and apply their skills to a given challenge — were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,”

What our results indicate is that people with social skills are good for a group — whether they are male or female.

We also think it’s possible to improve the intelligence of a group, by either changing the members of a group, or teaching them better ways of interacting

we have gotten the cart before the horse. We are less concerned with whether students learn the right thing than whether they learn in the way that we rely upon to measure how well they learn when compared to their peers. We do this without even having considered whether the measurement is even useful, much less necessary or even counter-productive.

We do it for no better reason than tradition, habit, and inertia.

I no longer teach programming by teaching the features of the language and asking the students for original compositions in the language. Instead I give them programs that work and ask them to change their behavior. I give them programs that do not work and ask them to repair them. I give them programs and ask them to decompose them. I give them executables and ask them for source, un-commented source and ask for the comments, description, or specification.