Lecture Me. Really. Photo BEFORE the semester began earlier this fall, I went to check out the classroom where I would be teaching an introductory American history course. Like most classrooms at my university, this one featured lots of helpful gadgets: a computer console linked to an audiovisual system, a projector screen that deploys at the touch of a button and USB ports galore. But one thing was missing. Perhaps my request was unusual. In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Today’s vogue for active learning is nothing new. Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms with a grain of salt. Holding their attention is not easy.
SmartBlog on Education - 3 ways to make career exploration cool again - SmartBrief SmartBlogs SmartBlogs In many schools and districts, career education has gotten a “bad rap.” Sometimes, vocational- and career-exploration activities are only offered to students who aren’t attending college. Due to this, career exploration can carry a negative stigma that seems silly and even detrimental. But the common core’s focus on career and college readiness may change all that. As educators, we must use this momentum to make career exploration cool again. Not sure how to begin? 1. 2. 3. As we all know, the careers available to our students may look very different from the careers in existence today. Kristen Swanson (@kristenswanson) is a learner, leader and teacher.
Reinventing the School — Better Humans Teachers Like most problems, it’s best to start at the very root. Students are educated by teachers, and a good teacher is nothing short of invaluable. Now, say that you’re a teacher with 10 years of experience based in San Francisco, one of the most expensive places to live in the world. How much do you think your salary is? $100,000? The real problem lies in the attraction. Technology Let’s imagine that a tablet sits on every child's desk, and text books have been banished. One of the key relationships in any students educational life is the one between the teacher and parent. Just as technology companies track and analyze their customers, teachers should be assessing their students in real-time. What else would benefit from the vast amount of data generated by students? Classes More often than not we are not prepared for life after education. The classes taught today are begging for an overhaul. Fees There is room for a middle ground.
Are College Lectures Unfair? Photo DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent? The notion may seem absurd on its face. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. The partiality of the lecture format has been made visible by studies that compare it with a different style of instruction, called active learning. Continue reading the main story Research comparing the two methods has consistently found that students over all perform better in active-learning courses than in traditional lecture courses. There are several possible reasons. Active-learning courses deliberately structure in-class and out-of-class assignments to ensure that students repeatedly engage with the material.
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. Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. But that's not what OLPC did. Via MIT
Replacing Teachers with Emotion Image credit: iStockphoto Teachers mean well. By teachers, I mean you. You mean well. After all, you're here, aren't you -- looking for resources to become a better teacher or administrator? That part's simple: it's emotion that makes them tick. Emotion in Children The need to belong, the desire to be understood, the instinct to understand -- these are all universal human emotions that do not fade with time, vary across generations, or stop just because you've got algebra to teach. But in western education -- being the purveyors of both ambition and science that we are -- we've tried a more analytical route, attempting to decode how learning happens (and the human genome as well, not ironically). While every multiple choice question has a distractor -- an answer to tempt the responder to choose the answer that's nearly right -- it might be that assessment itself is the distractor, because few experiences are as cognitively arresting as a rigorous academic exam. It supersedes learning.
Log In We weren’t too surprised that most people didn’t know the exact jobless rate; most people aren’t economists. What was truly intriguing was that so many people answered in the completely wrong direction. We set out wanting to learn about people’s perceptions of the value of college, now nearly seven years after the recession, when a big supply of college graduates and low demand for work had made the case for college seem weaker. Late last year, we asked Google Consumer Surveys to ask Americans about college costs, wages after college, and unemployment rates of college graduates and nongraduates. The really interesting result was how people answered the jobless rate questions. We asked: “What would you guess is the current unemployment rate for four-year college graduates between the ages of 25 and 34?” Initially, people were way off. We were so surprised that we thought we had done something wrong. Can this really be true? We posed the same question to our friends and parents.
What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance? Executive summary Education policymakers and analysts express great concern about the performance of U.S. students on international tests. Education reformers frequently invoke the relatively poor performance of U.S. students to justify school policy changes. In December 2012, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) released national average results from the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Two years earlier, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released results from another international test, the 2009 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). However, conclusions like these, which are often drawn from international test comparisons, are oversimplified, frequently exaggerated, and misleading. Performance levels and trends in Germany are an exception to the trends just described. Part I.
Are Lazy Students the Real Problem in Public Education? | Students on GOOD Over the past few years teachers have borne the brunt of the blame for the challenges facing the nation's public schools. But in a scathing op-ed in Salt Lake City's Deseret News, Teresa Talbot, a veteran of Utah's public schools who's about to enter her 25th year in the classroom, claims "the main problem with our education system today is not what is taught, where it is taught, by whom it is taught or how it is taught." Instead, says Talbot, the issue is students who refuse to put in the work required to earn a good grade. As evidence, Talbot cites several examples of teachers having to scale back assignments or needing to give students time in class to complete work they didn't finish at home. Talbot's own math students balked at doing multiple step problems. "I'm not doing that; it's too much work," her students complained. Talbot's op-ed isn't the first time a teacher's frustrations about unmotivated students have sparked debate. Photo via (cc) Flickr user Slongood