Total Teaching: every lesson is group work It’s no secret that I think children learn best in groups. I’ve argued back and forth with sundry opponents who claim that group work is variously inefficient, pointless or too hard to do and have (to mind my mind at least) matched them stroke for stroke with no quarter given on either side. It seems that one of the main objections to group work is that it has in some way a constructivist, anti-knowledge agenda, and who knows? Maybe in some teachers’ minds it does. Oh, you have? Whatever. I was particularly taken with the ideas for creating affiliation with classes. A new generation of Total Teachers? Maybe, I thought in a delirium of end of term tiredness, teaching should somehow embody the philosophy of the Dutch football team circa 1972. Maybe this observation seems banal. Lecturing effectively requires as much skill and hard work as any other approach to teaching, it’s just that the effort often seems invisible – sometimes even to the teacher themselves. 1. Rules are your friend.
Intern Blog | How You Can Be A Thiel Fellow, Too: Interview with Danielle Strachman of the Thiel Fellowship Most of us have heard about the Thiel Fellowship: an innovative program created by brilliant investor Peter Thiel, set on empowering top students to push technological innovation. However, what most of us remember about the Fellowship is that it involves exceptionally brilliant students dropping out of universities like Harvard and MIT in order to pursue more entrepreneurial ideas. We could simply gape at the incredible qualifications of these “drop-outs,”who are programming, creating, and blazing through college courses at the ripe old age of age of…say, 15. Yet, what becomes clear is that their ideas unleashed by funding and support of the Foundation grants are even more amazing than prior accomplishments. Are you salivating yet? Amidst the arguments over “whether dropping out is at all beneficial” or the “intrinsic value of education,” there is undeniable value that can be extracted from understanding the tenets of the Fellowship regardless of age or college situation. Why do so?
23 October 2012 | North of England Transformation Network Heresies in public policy Tuesday 23 October, 10am-12.30pm, in Newcastle Upon Tyne at Life (2 mins walk from the Central Station) A joint session with Newcastle University Business School and Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service Are you moving away from using numerical targets and crude outputs to manage your performance? Measuring the results of your work and understanding its impact on the people you serve is surely a no brainer. Or, is the focus on outcomes bad? In this session, Toby Lowe, visiting Fellow at Newcastle University Business School, will argue that the use of outcomes as a concept to measure the effectiveness of social policy interventions is inherently flawed and creates unwelcome paradoxes. So, if not outcomes, what should we measure instead? Toby Lowe Toby Lowe is Chief Executive of Helix Arts, a Participatory Arts organisation which works with the most disadvantaged and marginalised people in society. Sign Up Sign up here.
Let's All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can't Raise Any More Money Here’s some stunning, Earth-shattering news: You know all those hundreds of incredibly stupid startups that have been raising seed money in Silicon Valley despite the fact that the people running those startups have no experience doing anything, ever, and have no idea at all how to generate revenue (let alone profit) with their lousy ideas, because, in fact, there is no way to make money with their lousy ideas, because in fact their ideas are lousy? Well, nobody wants to give those dopes any more money. So now they're going to go out of business. I know. Shocking. And the dopey angel investors who wrote the checks for those startups are going to lose their money. Believe it or not this is actually a big story in Silicon Valley right now. But who didn’t see this coming? How could this have ended in anything but a train wreck? We're Shocked -- Shocked! And remember when there supposedly was no bubble? I’m sorry but the whole thing is hilarious. A Confederacy of Dunces What Happens Now? Yeah.
Review of Educational Research A Meta-Analysis Authors Abstract Although previous meta-analyses have indicated a connection between inquiry-based teaching and improved student learning, the type of instruction characterized as inquiry based has varied greatly, and few have focused on the extent to which activities are led by the teacher or student. This meta-analysis introduces a framework for inquiry-based teaching that distinguishes between cognitive features of the activity and degree of guidance given to students. Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa. The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. But that's not what OLPC did. "We left the boxes in the village. Via MIT
Level 3 Extended Projects - Education The Level 3 Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) is intended for post-16 students and is equivalent to 0.5 GCE Advanced Level. These resource materials were initially developed to support the Edexcel EPQ but are also relevant to EPQs offered by other Awarding Bodies. For a PowerPoint presentation on the Edexcel EPQ please use the following link: Level 3 EPQ ppt (MS PowerPoint , 2,357kb). The resources comprise a Student Guide and a Teacher Resource Disc (TRD).The Student Guide supports and guides students as they prepare for and carry out all types of EPQ work. The TRD contains materials for teachers and for students that refer to specific types of project outcome (Investigation/Fieldwork, Dissertation, Performance, Artefact) and to project work in a wide range of topic areas (Technology, Business, Artistic expression, Environment, Professional Values, Culture). For details of the publications please use the following link to Pearson Schools and FE Colleges. (Read this first!) , 217kb)
The History of Science Society | Newsletter Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2010 Printer friendly version of Newsletter Perspectives on Science by Michael Bycroft Consider how secondary schools might teach history of science in an ideal world. Assessment would be kept to a minimum, and independent research encouraged. Taught content would cover historical research methods and a few key case studies. Is such a course possible in today's secondary schools? After three years as a pilot program, PoS made its formal debut in UK secondary schools in September 2008. Elizabeth Swinbank is a Fellow in Science Education in York’s Department of Educational Studies. The project team agreed at the beginning—and has insisted ever since—that those explorations should be "recognised as valuable in their own right, not merely a way of getting the teacher off the subject at the end of a more conventional science lesson." Fortunately for the project, led by Dr. The extended essay is one of PoS’s key innovations. What role have academics played in all this?
Art Adventurer Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. It has a large and committed education department that offers an extensive range of programs directed towards engaging families, teens, adult learners and schools programs and to reaching young people in a variety of ways, from high school internships for students to learn about the museum as a workplace to after school art programs held at the museum, adult public programs, family days; the list goes on. Evenings for Educators These professional development events occur four times a school year in the museum and welcome teachers from a wide range of backgrounds and subject areas into the museum. The majority of those who attend LACMA’s Evenings for Educators are non-art specialists who are expected to integrate art into other subject areas and many of who lack experience and confidence in engaging with art. Art Programs with the Community: LACMA On-Site A family focus
Project Based Learning: I did it my way I’ve finally managed to cobble together my first post since starting back in September. What with starting a new job, teaching A level for the first time in over a decade and languishing in post-publication blues after the release of my (hopefully) first book, I’ve not had much headspace for writing and I’ve missed it. Hopefully, this post marks a welcome return to the blogosphere. There’s so much going on that it’s been hard to pick what to write about but I’ve settled on detailing how I’ve gone about solving the age old problem of what to do about everyone’s favourite year group: Year 9. We took the bold decision to completely overhaul the antiquated SATs hangover of a Year 9 programme of study with something fleet of foot and fit for purpose. My solution to this quandary was Project Based Learning (PBL). The Buck Institute for Education (spiritual home of PBL) advocates that “students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge.
Dissertation-style A-level project goes beyond teaching to test | Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional The desire to quantify and assess our children has dominated educational thinking over the past 20 years. IQ and base line tests rank students in a hierarchy of intelligence, while public examinations of all forms provide a raft of grades as proof of individual worth. As a consensus about the way we learn, it has been pervasive and influential. Yet this glut of testing has bred complacency in our schools and long fallen short as a barometer of excellence. How do we resolve these problems, while still encouraging students to meet basic standards and aim high? The project was introduced through Perspectives on Science, an AS level in history, philosophy and ethics of science. From 2008, the Extended Project has been formally offered as an A-level standard qualification. To get the most out of any qualification, students require platforms that fire up their enthusiasm and give them the confidence to develop ideas. Patrick Derham is headmaster at Rugby School.
What Makes Project Based Learning Effective? #Edchat #EngChat I've been meaning to write about my adventures in Project Based Learning for a while. It's a topic many teachers are interested in, but are unsure of how to implement it or know if it is working. After much thought, I have broken down Project Based Learning into the 5 parts that make it effective in the classroom. Long before my Epic Romeo and Juliet Project, the first major project I created was during my student teaching 10 years ago. I thought it would be a great idea to do a mock trial in my class after reading Huck Finn. As I look back at the project (and ahead as I prepare to bring it back), I notice all of the things that made this project work that lead to deep understanding. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Next week, my students will be creating their own Transcendentalist Society. If you have any thoughts on bringing PBL to your classroom, please do not hesitate to contact me. - @TheNerdyTeacher