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.
30 Ideas for Teaching Writing Summary: Few sources available today offer writing teachers such succinct, practice-based help—which is one reason why 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing was the winner of the Association of Education Publishers 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award for Instructional Materials. The National Writing Project's 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies contributed by experienced Writing Project teachers. Since NWP does not promote a single approach to teaching writing, readers will benefit from a variety of eclectic, classroom-tested techniques. These ideas originated as full-length articles in NWP publications (a link to the full article accompanies each idea below). Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing 1. Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful." ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. Back to top 2. 3. 4.
How the Transactional Approach to Instruction Helps Build Independent Learners Move alongside students, give feedback, offer them your support during difficult moments, and gradually let go—that’s what ASCD author Rhoda Koenig wants to help you learn to do. In her ASCD book, Learning for Keeps: Teaching the Strategies Essential for Creating Independent Learners, she offers everything from sample lessons to exercises that will support your efforts. Below is a passage that will get you thinking about transactional instruction. Using a math lesson as an example, Koenig shows how differently a discussion with students can play out when a transmission approach is replaced with a transactional approach. How might this look in your classroom? Stop by our website for additional information about the book and author or to access sample chapters and the free study guide.
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.
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.
7 Tenets of Creative Thinking In school, we learn about geniuses and their ideas, but how did they get those ideas? What are the mental processes, attitudes, work habits, behaviors, and beliefs that enable creative geniuses to view the same things as the rest of us, yet see something different? The following are seven principles that I've learned during my lifetime of work in the field of creative thinking -- things that I wish I'd been taught as a student. 1. Artists are not special, but each of us is a special kind of artist who enters the world as a creative and spontaneous thinker. 2. You must show passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of developing new and different ideas. 3. When producing ideas, you replenish neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to challenges. 4. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves patterns of activity, rather than simply processing them like a computer. 5. Aristotle believed that things were either "A" or "not A."
Video: “The Future Will Not be Multiple Choice” Teaching Strategies Educator Jaime McGrath and designer Drew Davies explain how to create a “classroom of imagination” by turning lessons into design problems and giving students space to be creative in this Tedx video. In a New York Times op-ed The MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Competition’s co-director Cathy Davidson said she thinks it’s possible that 65 percent of students today will end up doing jobs that haven’t been created yet. McGrath and Davies argue that school needs to keep up with the times by promoting creativity, entrepreneurship, design thinking and hands on skills. McGrath’s experience teaching design problems has convinced him that the approach includes all learning styles, brings the best of project-based learning, encourages cooperation and integrates subject matter horizontally. Related Explore: design thinking, project-based-learning, TED talk
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
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.