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Deirdre DeAngelis began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp's students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students' inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.

This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  

His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.

He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.

Now I KNOW this article is about MATH and not writing, but please skim/read it over and apply what is being said here to what we know about the teaching of English -- grammar and writing -- and how we have our favored "old" way of learning and teaching and how that often contrasts with new and "improved" methods that we see.

Filtering is what helps us deal with the vast amount of information available to us. We try to filter information so that we end up with something that is relevant to us - it helps us learn something, it helps us solve a problem, it helps us develop a new hypothesis about the world around us. These are all connections - and this is what really drives value creation. However, we can't connect without some filtering going on.

The ability to spot existing or emerging patterns is one of the most (if not the most) critical skills in intelligent decision making, though we're mostly unaware that we do it all the time. Combining past experience, intuition, and common sense, the ability to recognize patterns gives us the ability to predict what will happen next with some degree of accuracy. The better able we are to predict what will happen, the more intelligent we become. So, you might say that the purpose of intelligence is prediction.

Students across the world are using the Twitter hashtag #tweetyourthesis to shrink their academic thesis work down to single 140-character posts.

A return to heaven . . . or to hell??

Example lesson for presentations using the pecha-kucha format.

In a traditional course, the educator hacks the trails to complex information landscapes. The educator's bias influences what is included and excluded. What we're talking about here is the ability for each learner to create their own narrative of coherence.

My daughter just shared this with me. I hope our group is seeing these!

Don't depend on someone else's interpretation of a document. Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. Listen to speeches and hear for yourself, who said what. Document based questions (DBQs) are a major focus in schools today. To be answered correctly, students must be adept at analyzing and synthesizing the information provided. They must be able to write coherent and logical essays. This site is meant to provide students with resources to develop the skills needed to effectively respond to DBQs.

New testing rationale -- in line with QEP.

I have noticed an emerging trend of what one goes through when adopting a PLN for the first time. I myself continue to look at the stages I am going through in adopting this new way of learning, interacting, and teaching in a collaborative, connected world.

Many benefits of blogging seem to become apparent over time. That has happened in my own learning journey as a blogger as well.  It is the reflective nature and the timeline of a blog, as well as the growing connections with readers that will reveal growth as a writer, the benefits of being a member of a network and a contributor to a global community.

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.

Over time, I'd like my students to become purveyors of their own work more and more.  The idea (and I'm sure it's not mine) is for the students to be able to critically analyze what each other written work to improve their own writing.