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A nice little essay by a university professor about what he sees as the goals of teaching.

Some interesting thoughts about teachers and change.

David Perkin's keynote address from the International Conference on Thinking. It is quite long (an hour) so I haven't watched it yet but think it should be worthwhile.

It is very interesting especially as he gives a clear overview of the development of the 'teaching thinking' movement. What I found the most interesting is his focus on getting students alert and motivated before expecting them to deal with thinking tools (starts at 39.01) . If anyone is interested in watching this but unwilling to deal with the unreliable Internet at school, I downloaded the file so you can get a copy from my computer.

This TED talk is about the question formation technique which we experimented with on ADS/NZ this year.

This makes it a bit more clear. You did this as an orientation activity, right? I think we should do it earlier and more often.

What do you think of these three pillars of Web literacy? I wonder if this year we can do even better at highlighting the importance of these in IL. The section about the use of Diigo is interesting. We exploited last year as an information sharing site but perhaps we need to approach it more as a personal library???

Part of the NY Times' Learning Network, this series on English language teaching offers ideas and plans for using newspaper articles in the classroom. Nothing groundbreaking here, but a nice selection of scalable activities.

Although written about English language learners in a middle school environment, this article has a lot of practical ideas about teaching morphology (word forms) that could apply to our students as well. Plus, on the first page there are quotes from Jebediah Springfield and George W. Bush.

Yo, Jeremy! This requires a login. What gives?

Interesting TED Talk about how we don't need a teacher, but we need interest and collaboration to learn.

Some practical ideas about finding our 'blind spots' in the classroom. The comment section at the bottom is interesting too, especially the discussion of teacher/student responsibility...

Some of these might be interesting to consider not only for ourselves but also if we want to come up with our own set of Habits of Mind which are most applicable to our students....resilience, grit, etc.

""Opinions don't affect facts. But facts should affect opinions, and do, if you are rational." (Ricky Gervais)"

integrating citizenship and 'global education' into a school.

This is a good reminder of why we teach. This is exactly what I wrote my Master's thesis on because education has lost it's inherent citizenship component. It seems as though politicians and policy makers think education only exists as a means of market value, or the market feeds off the exchange of knowledge for capital, thereby generating cultural capital, which can be commodified and further traded. I think people forget that the citizen arrived in the nation state only after the French Revolution and the restructuring of Merchantilism, which could be called proto-neoliberalism. The people revolted to create a center in which the citizen held certain entitlements to life and community built on education that challenged the state through reason, or what Immanuel Kant called, "Sapere Aude", that is, the courage to use your own reason. However, this center has been manipulated by education systems to systemize reason without courage, reason with exchange value, and reason for irrational privilege based on ethnocentrism (the creators of the world system) and technocracy (the maintainers of the world system). Finally, to answer your question, I do think this is an appropriate role for our college. I think education must question the possibility of education, and where it fits in the world we choose to live in. We must support our students and ourselves in the continuous investigation of our citizenship; therefore, our education.

I just read a quote from H.G Wells- "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." (The Outline of History, 1920). The quote is at the top of a paper dealing with the role of education in 'mending broken Britain' and how education can contribute to a more cohesive society. The paper was a summary of a national conference held in response to the anarchic riots of 2011 in England. The conference concluded that educational contributory factors leading to the riots were a lack of moral education, deficiency in the creative curriculum and an insufficient priority given to citizenship education. A sense of alienation and disenfranchisement amongst the youth of disadvantaged communities and a more general feeling that their voice is not being heard were also cited as major factors. The overarching conclusion of 'Mending Broken Britain- Educations' response' is clear- that schools play a central role in shaping our youth and in creating moral, constructive, rational, responsible and active citizens who feel included in our diverse and interdependent society- and that if education fails in this fundamental role, we can expect more (and worse) riots and social breakdown in the future.Prof. Gus John gves an interesting analysis of how our youth have reached this stage and cites 'the grotesque influence of the culture of the street' which has displaced the respect for self and for others and he asks the question: 'How? How have we failed to guide and assist our children in standing for something and in letting that something reflect the basic human values of respect, fairness, justice, interdependence, compassion and integrity?'The conference recognised that schools are not merely the means of transferring knowledge and content, to be absorbed and regurgitated for assessment purposes, but are the key vehicles for the development of values, skills and attitudes.

A good website- biggest network of teachers in the world.

This is pretty direct, and it hits on the point of education as transformative instead of distributive or directive. I think his reference to Winnicot's "holding environment", and it's awkward maternalism could be supplemented by good ol' Vygotsky's ZPD, Zone of Proximal Development, and his general theory of intersubjectivity, which provides us with the common term "scaffolding". Plus, I like that both Vygotsky and Piaget regard this portion of cognitive development as continuous and culturally recursive.

This post adds to my thinking about how we can facilitate classroom discussions appropriately.

"Again, intellectual virtues are the character traits required for good thinking and learning. They presuppose no controversial moral commitments. " Yes. This. An important distinction to keep in mind. If we come in to the classroom teaching moral or even civic character directly, then we rightly run the risk of being accused of educational imperialism. But, if the moral and civic values we may hold have any real worth, then the inherent value of them should be revealed through the application of intellectually virtuous learning and thinking actions.

and if moral/ethical positions are reached (or deconstructed) either in the classroom, or outside, through the sound application of intellectual actions, they have validity. Anything does not go, not all opinions, values etc... are valid unless we can expose the process by which they were reached and allow that process to be scrutinized.

I know this is just a bit of redundancy, but this suggests that not all values are created equal, and they are not. The must have good reason. Good might be defined imperialistically as Jeremy stated, in that a unilateral agency imposes them, but a reciprocal communicative action may prevail, especially within the ideal or virtuous framed by intellectual character. I have been accussed of esoteric comments, but I think this warrants a visit from Habermas: "We can only exercise tolerance towards other people's beliefs if we reject them for subjectively good reasons. We do not need to be tolerant if we are indifferent to other opinions and attitudes anyway or even appreciate the value of such 'otherness'. The expectation of tolerance assumes that we can endure a form of ongoing non-concurrence at the level of social interaction, while we accept the persistence of mutually exclusive validity claims at the cognitive level of existentially relevant beliefs." In other words, Habermas believes you can't just say, "I don't care" or "This doesn't matter" or "This doesn't happen here" and claim tolerance. You must engage to be tolerant, and you must engage in a way that presents your ideas or beliefs in contrast to the other, and that contrast must be relatable, or what Habermas means by "relevant" is communicable in the logical sense that rational ideas are modular, and they may be fitted into intellectual chains of rational arguments and "ongoing non-concurrence" in social interactions. Through this lens, intellectual virtues occupy toleration/tolerance because intellectual virtues "naturally" lend themselves or, as Jeremy stated, display the inherent value of the ideas through engagement and action which must be communicable and reciprocal, i.e. function as tolerant.

Habits of mind....

How many times in a class do you say the word 'think"?