All You Need to Know About the 'Learning Styles' Myth, in Two Minutes. On a sunny hike along a Madeiran levada a couple of years ago, I got chatting to a retired school teacher and I told him about the brain myths book I was writing. An affable chap, he listened with interest about the 10 percent myth and other classic misconceptions, but his mood changed when I mentioned learning styles. This is the mistaken idea that we learn better when the instruction we receive is tailored to our preferred way of learning.
The friendly teacher was passionate about the concept’s merit – his own preferred style, he said, was to learn “by doing” and no-one would ever convince him otherwise. How widely believed is the myth? Why is the idea so popular? Is there any evidence to support the learning styles concept? Are there any other problems with the myth? So, should we completely give up on tailoring our teaching styles? Go Back to Top. Bend But Don’t Break Your Teaching Standards. Image: Charles Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) I’m a Denver Broncos fan. That’s why I skipped watching this latest Super Bowl. For those of us in Colorado it was like watching a western movie in which both sides wore the black hats.
However, I did see an article on Huffington Post before the game that vastly improved my opinion of the often-controversial Richard Sherman, the Seattle Seahawks’ star cornerback. That article contained long quotes from a press conference where Sherman and one of his teammates made the case that NCAA athletes should get paid. What’s most useful about the following quote from Sherman is how it shows things from the student’s point of view: “I would love for a regular student to have a student-athlete's schedule during the season for just one quarter or one semester and show me how you’ll balance that,” Sherman said. If you don’t agree with Sherman, talk to some football players in your classes, and I’ll bet their comments will change your mind.
Common Core math experts say teachers need to stop using shortcuts and math 'tricks' Guest opinion: Community colleges must move students further and faster. 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education. Plickers: Clickers without the Clicking. If you taught for a while, you have probably at least seen a classroom set of clickers somewhere on your travels. These student response systems were all the rage for a while. They looked like TV remote controls and were designed as a way that students could respond to a quiz or oral question by pressing a button to indicate the answer that they chose.
Each clicker was unique to that student so that the teacher could see who answered what and when. Fast forward a few years and today you can experience the future of classroom clickers – a free tool called Plickers. So, how does it work? It’s a genius idea. Does it work 100% every time? So, if you haven’t tried Plickers yet, and have been looking for something new or interesting in they way of assessment tools for the classroom, then give it a go. Thanks to Seth Denney for the tip! Like this: Like Loading... Related Plickers 2.0: Classroom Clickers Reinvented In "web 2.0" 10 Alternatives to InfuseLearning for Assessments In "Digital Learning" Unicorns Are Not Real - The facts about Common Core State Standards.
What Is Being Learned From MOOCs? New Report Takes Stock. The hype around the free online courses called MOOCs has drawn millions of students, who are all essentially part of a teaching experiment of unprecedented scale. These days, researchers are increasingly checking in on that experiment. A new report, released on Thursday, seeks to answer the question “Where is research on massive open online courses headed?”
The report is the work of the MOOC Research Initiative, funded with more than $800,000 in grant support by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The group put out a call for research submissions and used much of the grant money to fund 28 of them, which were then analyzed for the report. When MOOCs emerged a few years ago, many in the academic world were sent into a frenzy. Pundits made sweeping statements about the courses, saying that they were the future of education or that colleges would become obsolete, said George Siemens, an author of the report who is also credited with helping to create what we now know as a MOOC.
Mr. Does The Grit Narrative Blame Students For School’s Shortcomings? #edchat #grit #ptchat. Ever since Angela Duckworth published research in 2007 showing a connection between a student’s ability to persevere on long-term challenges and his academic success, “grit” has become a buzzword in education. Some schools have even made being “gritty” a core goal of their educational mission. Working hard to achieve success is a narrative firmly rooted in American history, so it’s no surprise that helping kids stick to their learning appeals to many in education. But some question the research, claiming it has been accepted too easily without a proper examination of whether it’s a fair way to evaluate students. “Is grit [about] getting the kids to do what I want them to do?” Asked educator Becky Fisher at the EduCon conference hosted by Science Leadership Academy, a magnet public high school, in Philadelphia earlier this year.
“Kids are passionate about stuff,” said Fisher. Duckworth says her work has been taken out of context. That’s exactly what Albemarle County is trying to do. Should Teachers Be Held Responsible for a Student’s Character? #edchat. If you’ve followed education in the news or at the book store in the past couple of years, chances are you’ve heard of “grit.” It’s often defined as the ability to persevere when times get tough, or to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal.
Alongside growth mindset and self-control, grit is on a short list of not-strictly-academic skills, habits and qualities that researchers have deemed essential. And that research has quickly made its way into the hands of educational leaders eager to impose accountability measures that can go farther than standardized math and reading tests.
They want to capture how schools are doing in cultivating the full range of qualities necessary for students to succeed. But now Angela Duckworth, the scientist most closely associated with the concept of “grit,” is trying to put on the brakes. “I feel like the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science,” Duckworth said in an interview. Here’s the problem. The KIPP Paradox How to resolve the paradox? @themathdancer I think you should work this in somehow! "One More Day" Back off parents: It's not your job to teach Common Core math when helping with homework. While doing a math problem with my six-year-old recently during a classroom session for parents, I barked at her, “Just put the number in any circle.”
She looked at me as if I was speaking a different language. Turns out, I was. Her teacher, who overheard the conversation, corrected me. The sum, she explained, goes in the top circle. Three circles form a pyramid and the bottom stack are for addition or subtraction while the top is for the total. I wrongly assumed order was insignificant. For months, I had been baffled by “number bonds,” a way of expressing math in circles that my daughter had to complete for homework. Related: Could you answer these Common Core test questions? Parents across the country are trying to make sense of Common Core standards, a set of academic expectations that call for less focus on memorization and more focus on explaining how solutions were found and, in English, a deep probe of text. “The most important rule as a parent is to make sure it gets done. The Stanford professor who pioneered praising kids for effort says we’ve totally missed the point @qz. On a bitingly cold winter’s day in 2013, a woman whom I’ll call Laurie took me to the terrace of a tall building in a city about two hours west of London, England.
Years earlier, she’d tried to jump from the terrace and kill herself. It had been a harrowing time for Laurie. She’d started hearing voices in her head and often felt as if an outside force was controlling her. She attributed her suicide attempt to this outside force. “I wasn’t the one making that decision,” she told me. Fortunately, she never did jump. We tend to think of schizophrenia as a disorder of the mind. In Laurie’s case, she remembers feeling dissociated from her body when her symptoms were at their most intense.
“If I [would] extend my hand out, I’d think my hand was going to go off somewhere else, further away,” she said. Understanding the bodily self What Laurie was experiencing was a disruption of her bodily self as well as her psychological one. But these are not static representations. Foreign limbs.