Explore by Time Period | Zinn Education Project. How Liberal Colleges Breed Conservative Firebrands - NYTimes.com. WASHINGTON — Stephen Miller has been called a lot of things since becoming President Trump’s senior policy adviser. Last month, when Mr. Miller made the rounds of Sunday talk shows to defend the president’s first travel ban, the “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called his performance “horrendous and an embarrassment.” On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert called Mr. Miller, who is 31, “young Gargamel,” after the evil wizard on “The Smurfs.” David Letterman described him as “creepy.” The vitriol isn’t new. Academics can change the world – if they stop talking only to their peers. Research and creative thinking can change the world. This means that academics have enormous power.
But, as academics Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr have warned, the overwhelming majority are not shaping today’s public debates. Instead, their work is largely sitting in academic journals that are read almost exclusively by their peers. Biswas and Kirchherr estimate that an average journal article is “read completely by no more than ten people”. They write: Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. This suggests that a lot of great thinking and many potentially world altering ideas are not getting into the public domain. The answer appears to be threefold: a narrow idea of what academics should or shouldn’t do; a lack of incentives from universities or governments; and a lack of training in the art of explaining complex concepts to a lay audience. The ‘intellectual mission’ Some academics insist that it’s not their job to write for the general public.
No incentives. News | Zinn Education Project. Arkansas Teachers: Request Your Copy of A People’s History and LessonsMarch 3, 2017 With the legislative proposal to ban “any books or other material authored by or concerning Howard Zinn,” the Zinn Education Project is offering free copies of A People’s History of the United States to teachers in Arkansas. Just fill out the form below. Read more » Arkansas Bill Attempts to Ban Books by Howard Zinn in SchoolsMarch 2, 2017 As reported in the Arkansas Times, pending legislation would prohibit any publicly supported schools in Arkansas “from including in its curriculum or course materials any books or other material authored by or concerning Howard Zinn.” Read more » Get a Free Copy of A Short History of ReconstructionFebruary 21, 2017 In January, we published a new lesson, “Reconstructing the South: A Role Play” by Bill Bigelow about a key turning point in U.S. history.
Read more » Five Myths About ReconstructionFebruary 21, 2017 By James W. Read more » Read more » Read more » Do No Harm: Flexible and Smart Grading Practices. My Edutopia post When Grading Harms Student Learning generated a lot of buzz. Grading is an emotional subject, with strong-held opinions and ideas. I was really excited to see discussion on all sides of the issue. The best feedback for me was that, while many readers agreed with parts of the premise, I hadn't been specific on support strategies.
Thank you for that feedback -- it was specific, actionable, and created the need and excitement for a follow-up post. While there are many tools out there that help address concerns around redoes, zeroes, not grading homework, and more, here are some of my favorites: Address Behavioral Issues Affecting Academic Achievement Points off for late work may not motivate students. Request to Retest This is a great way to put the student in the driver’s seat of what they'll redo and how they'll redo it. Redo Parts of an Assessment Some assessments that we give students have very clear categories.
Reflect on Assessments Were you prepared for this test? 6 Techniques for Building Reading Skills—in Any Subject. As avid lovers of literature, teachers often find themselves wanting to impart every bit of knowledge about a well-loved text to their students. And this is not just an ELA issue—other disciplines also often focus on the content of a text. However, teaching reading skills in English classes and across the disciplines is an almost guaranteed way to help students retain content. Unfortunately, the tendency to focus on the content is a real enemy to the ultimate goal of building reading skills.
Without a repertoire of reading strategies that can be applied to any text, students are being shortchanged in their education. In order to teach students to read effectively, teachers must be sure that they are not simply suppliers of information on a particular text but also instructors of techniques to build reading skills. Teach Close Reading Skills Guide students in annotation by directing them to do more than highlight or underline.
Appeal to the Senses Guide Students in Setting Reading Goals. The Best Tips for Spotting Fake News in the Age of Trump. In this op-ed, William Colglazier — an AP US History teacher from California who is teaching his students how to spot fake news — explains how we can do the same. Wait, what?! Did you hear? The days of saying the Pledge of Allegiance are gone! Check it out… Now the question is, would you click Post to Facebook? What about share or re-tweet it? I guess it depends — but not on what you might initially think. To be clear, the story is fake, but that didn’t stop over two million people from sharing, commenting, liking, or reacting with a 😀 or 😡 on Facebook in the last month. Now, maybe a fake news story about politics doesn’t wow you. A recent Stanford University study found that over 80% of middle-schoolers couldn’t determine the difference between an article and an advertisement online, according to NPR.
The next step to saving your friend’s reputation would be to inquire about the rumor monger’s reputation. The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids. Step into an American preschool classroom today and you are likely to be bombarded with what we educators call a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.
Because so few adults can remember the pertinent details of their own preschool or kindergarten years, it can be hard to appreciate just how much the early-education landscape has been transformed over the past two decades. The changes are not restricted to the confusing pastiche on classroom walls. Pedagogy and curricula have changed too, most recently in response to the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s kindergarten guidelines. One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade? New research sounds a particularly disquieting note. That’s right. Conversation is gold. Fake-academe-looking-much-like-the-real-thing. OMICS is also in the less well-known business of what might be called conference fraud, which is what led to the call from John.
Both schemes exploit a fundamental weakness of modern higher education: Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure. Even within the halls of respectable academia, the difference between legitimate and fake publications and conferences is far blurrier than scholars would like to admit. OMICS is on the far end of the “definitely fake” spectrum. Real academic conferences evaluate potential participants by subjecting proposed papers and presentations to a rigorous peer-review process. In October, a New Zealand college professor submitted a paper to the OMICS-sponsored “International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics,” which was held last month at the Hilton Atlanta Airport.
The paper was accepted within three hours. Having dispensed with academic standards, OMICS makes money on volume. Mr. Mr. Nurturing Genius. This article was originally published in the September 8, 2016, issue of Nature with the title “How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Super-Smart Children.” It is reprinted with permission from Nature, which, like Scientific American Mind, is part of Springer Nature. On a summer day in 1968, psychology professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his classmates in mathematics that his parents had arranged for him to take a computer science course at Johns Hopkins University, where Stanley taught. Even that wasn't enough. Having leapfrogged ahead of the adults in the class, the child kept himself busy by teaching the FORTRAN programming language to graduate students.
Unsure of what to do with Bates, his computer instructor introduced him to Stanley, a researcher well known for his work in psychometrics—the study of cognitive performance. A Study Begins The Predictive Power of Spatial Skills. The Ex-Con Scholars of Berkeley. The first day of his first semester at the University of California, Berkeley, Danny Murillo walked into the Cesar Chavez building and saw a white man with tattoos on his arms.
Something about the man felt familiar. He could tell from the tattoos that the man was, like him, from Los Angeles, and he was around his own age, mid-thirties, but it was something else that he recognized. He went up to the man and said, “Damn, I feel old around all these youngsters.” The man said, “Yeah, me, too.” The Pelican Bay SHU—Security Housing Unit—is where California sends some of its most recalcitrant inmates. It was not such a long shot as it sounded, because the qualities that had got the two of them into the SHU were not so different from the ones that had got them into Berkeley. Murillo grew up in Norwalk, in southeast L.A. Not long afterward, he started selling crack. The man told him to start with Voltaire’s “Candide.”
He decided that he wanted to get out of prison and stay out. All Stories by Andrew Simmons. Teaching 1984 in 2016 Every year, one high-school educator converts his classroom into a totalitarian state to teach George Orwell’s book. This year, the lesson feels different. The Tragedy of Vice Principals The jokes in the HBO comedy may not be all that funny, but the show reveals something raw and authentic about public-school dynamics. Literature’s Emotional Lessons Grappling with the way books make students feel—not just analytical skills—should be part of the high-school English curriculum.
Mishandling The Prize A new book, by Dale Russakoff, examines the pitfalls of Mark Zuckerberg’s generous philanthropic gift to Newark Public Schools. The Problem With Ds Why the letter grade should be banned from schools What Undocumented Students Bring to the Classroom Public discourse shouldn't focus on what immigrants "take" from America but rather on how they enhance the learning experiences for all the country's children. Noam Chomsky on the Perils of Market-Driven Education. Free higher education could be instituted without major difficulties, but neoliberalism is standing in the way.
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) Stories like this one depend on support from readers like you. If you like what you read at Truthout, please make a donation! Throughout most of the modern period, beginning with the era known as the Enlightenment, education was widely regarded as the most important asset for the building of a decent society. However, this value seems to have fallen out of favor in the contemporary period, perhaps as a reflection of the dominance of the neoliberal ideology, creating in the process a context where education has been increasingly reduced to the attainment of professional, specialized skills that cater to the needs of the business world. What is the actual role of education and its link to democracy, to decent human relations and to a decent society?
C. Noam Chomsky: I don't think there is a simple answer. The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. Approaching the school’s playground that morning, I watched as an army of 5- and 6-year-old boys patrolled a zigzagging stream behind Niirala Preschool in the city of Kuopio, unfazed by the warm August drizzle. When I clumsily unhinged the steel gate to the school’s playground, the young children didn’t even lift their eyes from the ground; they just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud. At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside—having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer—even though they had already been outside for an hour.
As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they’d been doing on the playground. “Making dams,” sang a chorus of three boys. “Nothing else?” “Nothing else,” they confirmed. “Play is a very efficient way of learning for children,” she told me. Timothy D. The Course Outline of Record: A Curriculum Reference Guide | ASCCC. Curriculum is at the core of any educational endeavor, and the course outline of record plays a central role both internal and external to the California Community College System.
This update to the original Academic Senate paper Components of a Model Course Outline of Record also incorporates material from the previously published Academic Senate papers Stylistic Considerations in Writing Course Outlines of Record and Good Practices for Course Approvals. In spite of the fact that internal and external standards for courses regularly evolve, this paper offers the curriculum developer a clear framework for the writing of a course outline of record. The paper begins with a broad overview of the development process and then moves to an element by element explanation of the course outline of record itself.
For each element, stylistic and practical considerations are provided along with the appropriate citations where such inclusion helps to clarify the regulatory intent to ensure quality. 31672150. COR Curriculm Reference Guide. Curriculum Samples | Oak Meadow. How Trauma is Changing Children’s Brains. For several years, John Snelgrove began his workweek with a lengthy fax from the local police, listing the home addresses where officers had answered domestic violence calls over the weekend. Snelgrove, head of guidance services for Brockton (Mass.) Public Schools, would check those addresses against the district’s student database. When a match came up, he’d alert the counselor at that child’s school, who, in turn, would take a red envelope and deliver it to the child’s teacher. Inside was a slip of paper with a student’s name and a quick prescription for “TLC.” A Sunday night, disrupted by violence, panic, and 911 calls, surely will make it difficult for a child to settle down to learn on Monday morning.
But, even more than that, researchers have found that exposure to unrelenting stress and repeated traumas can change a child’s brain, making it easier to “fight or flee” from perceived dangers and harder to focus and learn. The Traumatized Brain Back in the 1990s, Dr. The Myth of Having Summers Off. 8 Travel Grants and Fellowships for Educators. The Education System Is Rigged Against Low-Income Students, Even In Kindergarten.
TED Talks for Social Studies Teachers. What Can I Do with This Major? At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait. How Higher Education in the US Was Destroyed in 5 Basic Steps. The Ultimate Collection of Free Physics Videos. 5-Minute Film Festival: 10 Great Video Resources for Teaching Math. When Grading Harms Student Learning. The Profound Ways that Schooling Harms Society: Incredibly, All of This Is Invisible to Our Culture. Teacher Burnout Is More Likely Among Introverts. 30 Habits Of Highly Effective Teachers. UCLA Luskin professor Ananya Roy: a scholar with a mandate for social justice.
What the US could learn from Singapore about making teachers better. No more physics and maths, Finland to stop teaching individual subjects. No more physics and maths, Finland to stop teaching individual subjects. Learning at CSCS | Clark Street Community School. What Quality Education Should Teach You. Kindergarten Has Become the New First Grade. Your holiday reading list: 58 books recommended by TED speakers. What Can Schools Do to Address Poverty? 53 Ways to Check for Understanding.
Henry F. De Sio, Jr., Addresses International Symposium on "Why Empathy Is As Important as Reading and Math" How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus. The delicate little flowers on today's college campuses. When Grading Harms Student Learning.