The lesson of the research is that even little kids react to ambiguity in a systematic and specific fashion. Their mode of playing is really a form of learning, a way of figuring out how the world works. While kids in the unambiguous condition engaged in just as much play as kids in the ambiguous condition, their play was just play. It wasn’t designed to decipher the causal mechanisms of the toy.
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Every Child Is A Scientist | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views
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The drive for the "correct answer" undermines the role of ambiguity in promoting creativity and critical thinking in students.
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According to the psychologists, the different reactions were caused by the act of instruction. When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.
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In our drive to "cover the material," we too often destroy the very curiosity of our students that we so much want to encourage. And public ed has done such a fine job of destroying curiosity with its battery of standardized tests (one correct answer only), that even if we college profs try, we have to work against the learned behaviors and attitudes of our students, esp. our best students who have thoroughly learned & mastered the rote learning game. Free writing can help us create a space in our classes for experimentation and risk-taking, for creativity and critical thinking.
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Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.
The 21st-Century Digital Learner: How Tech-Obsessed iKids Would Improve Our Schools| Th... - 2 views
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I've heard some teachers claim that this is nothing new. Kids have always been bored in school. But I think now it's different. Some of the boredom, of course, comes from the contrast with the more engaging learning opportunities kids have outside of school. Others blame it on today's "continuous partial attention" (CPA), a term coined by Linda Stone, who researches trends and their consumer implications. Stone describes CPA as the need "to be a live node on the network," continually text messaging, checking the cell phone, and jumping on email. "It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis," she writes. "We pay continuous partial attention in an effort not to miss anything."
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Stone's definition of "continuous partial attention" hits the whole philosophy behind connectivism and rhyzomes on the head!
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The sub-text here, forgive the pun, is that the primacy of the textbook in class (and a lecture derived from the textbook) is deadly. As an out-of-class reference, ok, but as the focus of a class period, NO.
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The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek - 0 views
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The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
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Creativity is key to success in 21st Century, but are we creating opportunities for creativity in our classrooms?
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The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
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Problem-based learning matches QEP's emphasis on moving content-delivery out of the classroom to replace it with classroom activities that apply the content to problem solving and critical thinking.
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The creative problem-solving program has the highest success in increasing children’s creativity
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Creative problem-solving? Is creativity a part of critical thinking? What's the benefit in separating them?
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What's shocking is how incredibly well Torrance's creativity index predicted those kids' creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance's tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance's data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.
Frontal Cortex | Wired Science | Wired.com - 0 views
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Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
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This suggests one of the strengths of reflective writing & ungraded writing: a space where people can be free to fail without a grade penalty and then reflect on that failure and learn from it. This works very much against our usual drive to transfer the "right answer" to our students.
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The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
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Let's find ways to reward those who are willing to stretch into failure and then learn from those experiments-NOT those who seek only the safe, sure answer.
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The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Bohr's quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn't magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.
How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education | Magazine - 0 views
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Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She's now on her way to "flipping" the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan's videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids' own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It's when they're doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to. And now Thordarson can tell just when this grappling occurs: Khan Academy provides teachers with a dashboard application that lets her see the instant a student gets stuck.
Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Jailbreaking Education - 0 views
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Currently, we have a mass production model of education. But until we personalize things and require each student to learn. Until we do things in creative ways that make sure kids each learn and have to think and process, we will continue to have the select few do the thinking. It is human nature. Education shouldn't be one size fits all. I don't think that getting outside the standardized work we do in education should be considered jailbreaking. But for now, in most schools it is.
Career Column: Why Social Media Isn't Just For Interns | Toronto Standard - 1 views
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For a while, it’s been okay to be less than an expert in social media. It’s time to get on board. Regardless of your age, your survival in the workplace depends on your intimate knowledge of social media.
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The reasons for this are myriads. Social media has profoundly changed a company’s public face. And with game-changing implications for sales, human resources, public relations, marketing and customer service, virtually nobody is left out of the matrix that touches social media.
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Social media continues to redefine business in every way. This is further evidence that we need to teach our students and faculty how to create a "professional" online presence.
How to Create Nonreaders - 1 views
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have kids read (and write) mostly on their own -- if your goal were to cause them to lose interest in what they’re doing.
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The point of a PLN is to encourage our students to write to other people (teachers too seldom qualify as other people in the minds of students).
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every single study that has examined grades and intrinsic motivation has found that the former has a negative effect on the latter.
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If we tie writing and critical thinking to grades, we will undermine both.
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What matters is not what we teach; it’s what they learn,[14] and the probability of real learning is far higher when the students have a lot to say about both the content and the process.
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The point is not to cover content, but to spark knowledge in students.
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I'd like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is "Motivating Students" by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students. … What a teacher can do - all a teacher can do - is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people.
Can We Teach Creative and Critical Thinking? - Education - GOOD - 1 views
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Critical thinking is, among many things, the ability to understand and apply the abstract, the ability to infer and to meaningfully investigate. It’s the skills needed to see parallels, comprehend intersections, identify problems, and develop sustainable solutions.
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We have not adequately accounted for abstraction in our discussions of CT or investigation. I wonder if CT is such a large, amorphous category as to be almost meaningless? Perhaps not, but it is clear to me that almost every discussion of CT must begin with a clear delineation of just what we mean when we say critical thinking.
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sound critical thinking is imperative to social progress.
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This social imperative is somewhat troubling to me. Is not good critical thinking its own reward?
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Cultivating critical thinking may be accomplished with modeling
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Modeling is a promising technique, but how often do teachers expose their own thinking processes to students? Don't we usually let them see only the polished final product of our thought, and not the messy critical thinking we went through prior to our polished position?
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But how is creative or critical thought defined and taught? And by what assessment can we measure it, if at all?
From Degrading to De-Grading - 0 views
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Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. Given that students may lose interest in what they’re learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they’re also apt to think less deeply. One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades. The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded. Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn’t help: the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
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what grades offer is spurious precision – a subjective rating masquerading as an objective evaluation
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Grades spoil students’ relationships with each other. The quality of students’ thinking has been shown to depend partly on the extent to which they are permitted to learn cooperatively (Johnson and Johnson, 1989; Kohn, 1992). Thus, the ill feelings, suspicion, and resentment generated by grades aren’t just disagreeable in their own right; they interfere with learning.
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In QEP, we seek to enable students to connect to one another. Grading systems that promote competition among students tend to undermine that willingness to connect and collaborate.
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- ...4 more annotations...
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Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. Given that students may lose interest in what they're learning as a result of grades, it makes sense that they're also apt to think less deeply. One series of studies, for example, found that students given numerical grades were significantly less creative than those who received qualitative feedback but no grades. The more the task required creative thinking, in fact, the worse the performance of students who knew they were going to be graded. Providing students with comments in addition to a grade didn't help: the highest achievement occurred only when comments were given instead of numerical scores (Butler, 1987; Butler, 1988; Butler and Nisan, 1986).
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The spurious nature of grading seems particularly true in the case of writing. Most any piece of writing can, and often does, receive any grade.
The Importance of Teaching Technology to Teachers - TheApple.com - 0 views
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Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to: > 1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology > 2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally > 3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes > 4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information > 5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts > 6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
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This sounds right on track with our QEP mission!
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Teachers are hungry to use technology in their classrooms. But they don’t. While part of this lack of usage stems from problems with education reform that emerges from administrators and education boards not fully understanding the technologies themselves, another part of teachers not using technology in the classroom comes from the simple fact that they don’t know how to use the technologies, let alone how to incorporate these technologies into their classrooms. In some cases, the teachers don’t know about the technologies at all.
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How in god’s name can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we’re not talking 21st Century skills for educators first? (URGENT: 21st Century Skills for Educators (and Others) First )
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OnFiction: Lights, Cameras, Fiction - 1 views
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to discuss the psychology of fiction in light of the blurring boundaries between fiction and nonfiction.
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I'm not sure that the kids "fictionalized" the beating. I would go with another term such as hyper- or meta- reality. Or what's that other term -- not virtual reality but amended, enhanced, or embellished reality? Or maybe this is "re-created reality"?
Would You Hire Your Own Kids? 7 Skills Schools Should Be Teaching Them| The Committed S... - 1 views
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"First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions," Parker responded. "Our business is changing, and so the skills our engineers need change rapidly, as well. We can teach them the technical stuff. But for employees to solve problems or to learn new things, they have to know what questions to ask. And we can't teach them how to ask good questions - how to think. The ability to ask the right questions is the single most important skill."
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This is an example of the need for critical thinkers in the real world!!
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"All of our work is done in teams. You have to know how to work well with others. But you also have to know how to engage the customer -- to find out what his needs are. If you can't engage others, then you won't learn what you need to know."
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Connectivism at work!
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Where in the 20th century, rigor meant mastering more -- and more complex -- academic content, 21st century rigor is about creating new knowledge and applying what you know to new problems and situations.
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