Vientiane College Cyberspace Learning Community

David Ausubel once said, "If I had to reduce all of the educational psychology to just one principle, I would say this: 'The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly.' (1968). Students may be given the same task but may have to go about solving it differently.

Grant Wiggins said, "The most common mistake is when educators fail to link the feedback to a specific agreed upon goal."

Wiggins provided the following essentials to effective feedback to students, teachers and school leaders. It needs to be:  Goal-Referenced Tangible and Transparent Actionable User-Friendly Timely Ongoing Consistent

Because when you're writing in only 25 minutes, you don't have time to develop a clear, complex idea. You don't have time to think about an audience. It makes students think of writing in the most simplistic, reductive ways. It emphasizes length of writing. It emphasizes use big words and be sure to follow a very simple formula.

if you are hired as a scorer, what you have to be able to do is to read 20 essays in an hour, which is three minutes per essay. And if you are trying to earn extra money, you get a bonus if you can read 30.

The learning is the center of our world, not the teaching.

It’s a crucial moment in teaching: how do you respond to an unhelpful remark in a way that 1) dignifies the attempt while 2) making sure that no one leaves thinking that the remark is true or useful?

Here is a famous Saturday Night Live skit, with Jerry Seinfeld as a HS history teacher, that painfully demonstrates the challenge and a less than exemplary response.

I immediately made a mental note: always, always dignify the question – even if it means slyly evading the particulars; return the conversation to a certain plane without making a questioner or commenter feel dumb; control your facial expressions to always look appreciative of the contribution.

We talk about inferences. We make inferences all the time. We tell kids to make inferences. When pushed, we can even define inferences… [Yet] the problem with comprehension, it appeared was that kids could not make inferences…

They would not connect an ethics reading to their own lives; they could not follow the argument the author was making; they had great difficulty seeing that two authors were addressing the same issue from different points of view. Like young Beers, I had naively assumed that if the students engaged with the text that they would make the inferences needed to grapple with the ideas in the text.

They often wrongly assume their students know how to think about what they are learning

Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything

I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises.

We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates. Knowledge, when it comes, is a later arrival, flaring up, when the time is right, from the sparks good teachers have implanted in their students’ souls.