Wikipedia's Fate Shows How the Web Endangers Knowledge. The first thing teachers should do when school starts is talk about hatred in America. Here’s help. Rescue personnel help injured people after a car ran into counterprotesters after an white nationalist rally in Charlottesville on Saturday. (Steve Helber/AP) (Update: Adding more information) #CharlottesvilleCurriculum: That’s the new Twitter hashtag for educators, parents and anyone else looking for resources to lead discussions with young people about the violence that just erupted in Charlottesville, when white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members marched and clashed with counterprotesters.
One woman was killed and 19 were injured when a car rammed into the counterprotesters, and two state police officers assisting in the response died when their helicopter crashed on the outskirts of town. The 2017-2018 school year is getting started, and teachers nationwide should expect students to want to discuss what happened in Charlottesville as well as other expressions of racial and religious hatred in the country.
The hashtag #CharlottesvilleCurriculum was started by Melinda D. Critical Knowledge: 4 Domains More Important Than Academics. Critical Knowledge: 4 Domains More Important Than Academics by Terry Heick As academic standards shift, technology evolves, and student habits change, schools are being forced to consider new ways of framing curriculum and engaging students in the classroom, and project-based learning is among the most successful and powerful of these possibilities. Of course, content knowledge matters. It’s hard to be creative with ideas you don’t understand. Academics and their ‘content’–organized in the form of ‘content areas’ like literature, math, and science–are timeless indexes of the way we have come to understand the world around us through stories, patterns, numbers, measurements, and empirical data.
The idea here, though, is that we (i.e., the field of public education) have become distracted with academics–knowledge that is only useful insofar as students tend to use them as they grow into adults that live through doing so. 4 Knowledge Domains That Change Students & Communities 1. 2. 3. 4. Tools for Systems Thinkers: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking. In this series on systems thinking, I share the key insights and tools needed to develop and advance a systems mindset for dealing with complex problem solving and transitioning to the Circular Economy. I have taught thousands of hours of workshops in systems, sustainability and design, and over the years refined ways of rapidly engaging people with the three dimensional mindset needed to think and work in circular systems. My motivation for writing this online toolkit is to help expand the ability of professionals to rapidly adopt to a systems mindset for positive impact.
Words have power, and in systems thinking, we use some very specific words that intentionally define a different set of actions to mainstream thinking. Words like ‘synthesis,’ ‘emergence,’ ‘interconnectedness,’ and ‘feedback loops’ can be overwhelming for some people. Since they have very specific meanings in relation to systems, allow me to start off with the exploration of six* key themes. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Every Single Cognitive Bias in One Infographic. View the high resolution version of today’s graphic by clicking here. The human brain is capable of incredible things, but it’s also extremely flawed at times. Science has shown that we tend to make all sorts of mental mistakes, called “cognitive biases”, that can affect both our thinking and actions.
These biases can lead to us extrapolating information from the wrong sources, seeking to confirm existing beliefs, or failing to remember events the way they actually happened! To be sure, this is all part of being human – but such cognitive biases can also have a profound effect on our endeavors, investments, and life in general. For this reason, today’s infographic from DesignHacks.co is particularly handy. It shows and groups each of the 188 known confirmation biases in existence. What is a Cognitive Bias?
Humans tend to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from making rational judgments. These tendencies usually arise from: Cognitive Bias Examples Thank you! Oops. It’s Time to Rethink How We Are Educating Our Children. In Brief On the whole, the way we educate students hasn't gotten a major upgrade in more than a century. Technology has both revolutionized what we need to teach to children, but also the capabilities that we have at our disposal to teach. Educating for the Future Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars.
The school’s name is Ad Astra, meaning ‘to the stars’, and seems to be based around Musk’s belief that schools should “teach to the problem, not to the tools.” Musk’s decision highlights a bigger issue, how we educate people needs to change. Parents should be the most concerned. However for parents today things have gotten even more complicated. It starts by rethinking what a school is. The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in. Are Too Many Students Taking AP Exams? : NPR Ed : NPR. This week and next is a national rite of passage for stressed-out overachievers everywhere.
Nearly 3 million high school students at 22,000 high schools will be sitting down to take their Advanced Placement exams. Created by the nonprofit College Board in the 1950s, AP is to other high school courses what Whole Foods is to other supermarkets: a mark of the aspirational, a promise of higher standards and, occasionally, a more expensive alternative. AP courses promise to be the most rigorous a school has to offer. They can lift your GPA even higher than a perfect 4.0, thanks to the magic of transcript "weighting. " And if you spend $93 to take the exam, plus often hundreds of dollars for textbooks and lab fees, they may be exchangeable for college credit. Recently the AP has boomed. Participation doubled in the last 10 years, and also doubled in the decade before that.
Here are just a few important questions experts don't know the answer to: But, the study design also suggests a solution. How Schools Can Help Students Develop A Greater Sense Of Purpose | MindShift | KQED News. You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you. Comics Blog Books Shop Comics: Random Most Popular All Cats Grammar Food Animals Tech This is a comic about the backfire effect. Inspiration This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. USC Creativity and Brain Institute Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence By Sarah Gimbel and Sam Harris. Other fun reading Reddit - Change My View Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions Sources You Are Not So Smart Website Podcast USC Creativity and Brain institute Wooden teeth Slave teeth Latest Things Random Comics Home Quizzes About Contact.
How Schools Can Face The ‘Bad Habits’ That Inhibit Meaningful Changes | MindShift | KQED News. Making lasting change in schools is difficult not only because schools are communities made up of individuals with their own opinions about what’s best for kids, but also because, like most institutions, they are full of “bad habits” that can be tough to break. While habitual behavior can be good — like when it reinforces a positive culture or set of norms — it can also be a stubborn obstacle to enacting meaningful change. At the EduCon conference hosted by Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, a room full of educators easily listed common “bad habits” they’ve experienced in their work, such as siloed learning, homework just for the sake of it, spending time planning with no action, keeping the door closed and visitors out, poor communication between administrators and teachers, traditional professional development, fixing problems by mandate rather than by team problem solving and initiative overload.
One high school English teacher was resistant to technology at first. Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists | Education. Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists. Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.
They say it is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging as it can lead to a fixed approach that could impair pupils’ potential to apply or adapt themselves to different ways of learning. The group opposes the theory that learning is more effective if pupils are taught using an individual approach identified as their personal “learning style”. Some pupils, for example, are identified as having a “listening” style and could therefore be taught with storytelling and discussion rather than written exercises. Acceptable Alternatives in Assessment and Grading | All Things Assessment. Assessment orthodoxy is easy, but for those trying to lead (whether by title or by influence) the transformation of assessment and grading practices, orthodoxy often falls short of inspiring or assisting teachers in moving away from antiquated practices. The definitiveness with which some speak of sound assessment practices is great for keynote presentations, for blog posts, and for acquiring followers on social media; however, for those looking to take the first of what might be several steps toward modernizing their assessment and grading practices, assessment orthodoxy can feel quite foreign to the practices they’ve established throughout their career.
Righteous indignation of how standards-based one is in comparison to others is more divisive than inclusive. Here is one example. An acceptable alternative I’ve presented to many teachers, given the homework dilemma mentioned in the previous paragraph, is to grade homework temporarily. References: Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2010). Teachers back no-grade project. Teachers who are volunteering for a pilot project that will see some students in Squamish not receive letter grades are optimistic about the outcome. Starting next academic term, grades will become a thing of the past for some students in Grades 4 to 9 in School District 48. Serving Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton, the school board has recently voted to implement the Communicating Student Learning Pilot Project. This plan will see 25 teachers throughout the Sea to Sky Corridor move towards ongoing communication in the form of a minimum of five reports describing students’ progress.
These reports include providing descriptive information on students’ peer-to-peer interactions, contributions to classes, strengths and area to improve and where the teacher is planning to support each student moving forward, according to a report provided by the school district. “We believe there is no need to give letter grades to students,” said Hain. Sherlock added that they aren’t taking assessments away. Why Teaching Civics in America's Classrooms Must Be a Trump-Era Priority. Mike McQuade When I was about 10, a classmate in my small-town school in Latvia liked to tell me in between classes that he hated Jews.
I was the only Jewish kid in school, and one day as I walked home I heard steps behind me. My eyes caught his, and we stood there for a moment. I still remember his face—hazel eyes, closely cropped blond hair—and his navy uniform jacket over a white shirt. "There is nothing we can do to change him," my father said in our garage the next day. My mother and I eventually left Latvia, and bullying was a big reason for me. In a 2015 survey, 1 in 5 Muslim students in California said they experienced discrimination by a school staff member. Extreme views can be socially contagious, especially among young people, who are more susceptible than adults to being influenced by their peers. From 2002 to 2009, classroom time devoted to civics decreased by 33 percent nationally. In 2011, all federal funding for civics and social studies was eliminated.
She paused. B.C. leads the push to eliminate letter grades from school report cards. When the school district in Maple Ridge, B.C., asked for volunteers to pilot a new report-card system that abandons traditional letter grades, officials expected a few schools to sign up. Instead, 17 of the district’s 21 schools stepped forward. “Suddenly it was like, ‘Holy cow, how are we going to manage the service and make sure everyone gets through it?’” Said David Vandergugten, director of instruction for School District No. 42, which includes 8,000 students in Maple Ridge and Pitts Meadows, east of Vancouver. The pilot launched in 2013, largely driven by teacher concerns that letter grades weren’t effective.
Students in Grades four through nine can choose to switch to a system that focuses on detailed feedback throughout the year, rather than simply whether a student earned a B- or an A. Since the program’s launch, the number of families who still ask for letter grades has fallen from almost half to just 14. However, there are limits to that space and opportunity. What’s Going on Inside the Brain of a Bilingual Child? | MindShift | KQED News. Part of our ongoing series exploring how the U.S. can educate the nearly 5 million students who are learning English. Brains, brains, brains. One thing we’ve learned at NPR Ed is that people are fascinated by brain research.
And yet it can be hard to point to places where our education system is really making use of the latest neuroscience findings. But there is one happy nexus where research is meeting practice: bilingual education. “In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a virtual explosion of research on bilingualism,” says Judith Kroll, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Again and again, researchers have found, “bilingualism is an experience that shapes our brain for a lifetime,” in the words of Gigi Luk, an associate professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. At the same time, one of the hottest trends in public schooling is what’s often called dual-language or two-way immersion programs. Attention Empathy Reading (English) Steele suspects the latter. Academia, Love Me Back – TIFFANY MARTÍNEZ.
My name is Tiffany Martínez. As a McNair Fellow and student scholar, I’ve presented at national conferences in San Francisco, San Diego, and Miami. I have crafted a critical reflection piece that was published in a peer-reviewed journal managed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Higher Education and Council for Opportunity in Education. I have consistently juggled at least two jobs and maintained the status of a full-time student and Dean’s list recipient since my first year at Suffolk University. I have used this past summer to supervise a teen girls empower program and craft a thirty page intensive research project funded by the federal government. As a first generation college student, first generation U.S. citizen, and aspiring professor I have confronted a number of obstacles in order to earn every accomplishment and award I have accumulated. In the face of struggle, I have persevered and continuously produced content that is of high caliber. Today is different. Like this:
THE PEOPLE VS THE SCHOOL SYSTEM. Why A School’s Master Schedule Is A Powerful Enabler of Change | MindShift | KQED News. How to Incorporate Immigration Studies into High School Curriculum. Why I regret letting my teen sign up for an AP course. The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence.
The myth of the straight-A student, and 6 ways to debunk it.