From DSC:
This posting is for those students who are studying Education in college and/or for those adult learners who are making a right turn in their careers to become teachers.
Don’t underestimate the learning potential in a hashtag on Twitter! Consider a few:
Look at the individuals and the organizations who are posting in those hashtags — then follow those who are contributing solid resources, ideas, thoughts, and content.
A parent’s guide to prioritizing emotional well-being — from modernlearners.com by Richard Ten Eyck, with thanks to Missy Emler from Modern Learners for this resource
Excerpt:
I wonder what we are doing in our families, in our schools, in our society that is causing this dramatic rise among our youth. I wonder if my kids feel like they belong at their school? I wonder what school policies/practices my kids find stressful?
I wonder what we could do differently in our families, in our schools, in our society that could make a difference. I wonder why we still have grades, age grouped classes, separate subjects? I wonder what would happen if, like some schools, we tried to eliminate them?
Couldn’t we at least try? Should we just keep doing what we are doing even though we know it’s making kids anxious?
How can we help one another?
What really matters?
Welcome to the future! The future of work is… — from gettingsmart.com
Excerpt:
The future of work is here, and with it, new challenges — so what does this mean for teaching and learning? It means more contribution and young people learning how to make a difference. In our exploration of the #futureofwork, sponsored by eduInnovation and powered by Getting Smart, we dive into what’s happening, what’s coming and how schools might prepare.
EdSurge joins ISTE to accelerate innovation in education — from iste.org
Excerpt:
BURLINGAME, Calif. – Two of the leading names in education technology – EdSurge and ISTE – are preparing to join forces.
The acquisition, which has been approved by both the ISTE and EdSurge boards of directors, will see EdSurge’s operations become part of ISTE. The expanded organization will offer teachers, education leaders and edtech innovators more services, ranging from education events to in-depth research, industry news, job matching and more. EdSurge will continue to publish independent news and analysis under the “EdSurge” name. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of 2019.
We believe that by teaming up, we can exponentially advance the goal of keeping learning and students at the center of the conversation.
Betsy Corcoran, CEO, EdSurge
Also see:
In case you missed it, WMU-Cooley’s President and Board of Directors took a look at our tuition rates and made the decision to reduce them by 21 percent starting Fall 2020! https://t.co/FjC6hk4vnE pic.twitter.com/NkCMAzoomE
— WMU-Cooley Law School (@WMUcooleylaw) October 16, 2019
From DSC:
Regular readers of this blog will know that for years, I’ve made it one of my goals to try and raise awareness of the need for institutions of higher education to lower their tuitions! For example, Yohan Na and I designed the graphic below way back in 2009.
Through those years, I cringed when I kept hearing various Boards say, “We only increased our tuition by ___ % — the lowest percentage increase in our state.” The direction was completely wrong! It needed to go down, not up. If you work in higher ed, I encourage you to find a way for that to happen at your own institution.
So I’m very pleased to report that the WMU-Thomas M. Cooley Law School — where I work — was able to reduce tuition by 21%!!!
Don’t get me wrong, some tough decisions were made to pave the way for that to occur. But this will be the case no matter which institution of higher education that you look at. An institution will have to make some tough choices to reduce their tuition. But it HAS to occur. We can’t keep this upward trajectory going.
If we don’t change this trajectory, we will continue to put enormous gorillas (of debt) on our graduates’ backs! Such debt will take our graduates decades to pay off.
We need to be aware of these invisible gorillas of debt. That is, our students move on…and we don’t see them. But their gorillas remain.
Addendum on 10/18/19:
Victoria Vuletich, the assistant dean at the Grand Rapids, Michigan campus of Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, was interviewed by the State Bar of Michigan’s Legal Talk Network to discuss what the law school experience is like for the current generation of students.
Kansas City high schools add real-world learning — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark
Excerpt:
The good news is that more young people are graduating from high school than ever. The bad news? High school is often less relevant to them and their futures than ever.
The largest effort to make high school more valuable—to young people and their communities— is underway in the six-county two-state Kansas City metro area.
About 60 schools in 15 districts from Kansas and Missouri are spending this school year investigating ways they can make high school more valuable to young people by incorporating more real-world learning.
From DSC:
I know that by the end of his junior year, our son was so tired of having information crammed down his throat. He viewed so much of the content of his courses as irrelevant and unimportant. This year, he is immersed in what he wants to do — acting. And now he is soooooo much more motivated to learn and to grow now that he is able to pursue his passion.
The research is clear: If you want smart, healthy, well-rounded children it pays to invest in recess. pic.twitter.com/uvlkhXsXSU
— edutopia (@edutopia) September 14, 2019
‘The Dangers of Fluent Lectures’ — from insidehighered.com by Colleen Flaherty
A study says smooth-talking professors can lull students into thinking they’ve learned more than they actually have — potentially at the expense of active learning.
Excerpt:
The paper also provides important insight into why active learning hasn’t taken deeper root in academe, despite the many studies that have previously identified its effectiveness as compared to more passive approaches (namely the lecture). In a word: students. That is, while professors are often seen as the biggest impediments to innovative teaching, the study describes an “inherent student bias against active learning that can limit its effectiveness and may hinder the wide adoption of these methods.”
Compared with students in traditional lectures, students in active classes perceived that they learned less, while in reality they learned more. Students also rated the quality of instruction in passive lectures more highly, and expressed a preference to have “all of their physics classes taught this way,” despite their lower test scores.
…
In some ways, he said, “the study confirms what we have suspected anecdotally for a long time — that students feel more comfortable in a lecture environment and believe that they are learning more because of the expectations they have for a college learning environment.” But, in fact, he said, they’re “actually learning more in the environments where they are actively engaged in building knowledge about key concepts.”
From DSC:
The part about the students feeling more comfortable in a lecture environment and believing that they are learning more reminded me of this research/paper (which the graphics below reference and link to as well), where they mention the practices of highlighting and re-reading some text. Students feel like they are really learning the content more thoroughly when they are doing these things (and this is what I did in college as well). But the evidence shows that the utility of these methods is low. Instead, practice testing — which involves retrieval practice, as well as distributed practice and interleaved practice produce stronger results.
So what students feel and what’s actually occurring can be different…as Colleen’s article from insidehighered.com points out.
That said — and as the article asserted as well — is that some lecturing is fine to do:
At the same time, Eyler stressed that existing literature shows that some limited lecturing is “definitely OK,” as “students need to know content in order to engage in higher order thinking.”
Addendum on 9/14/19:
Just because students perceive you to be a better teacher doesn't mean they are necessarily learning more.
"Meta-analysis of faculty's teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings & student learning are not related" https://t.co/GKblnrddqu
#higherEd— Dr. Alec Couros (@courosa) September 14, 2019
Podcast: Susan Patrick on Transforming Education Systems for Equitable High-Quality Learning — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark & Susan Patrick
Excerpts:
5 Global Trends
From DSC:
Below are the comments that I relayed back to Tom and Susan on Twitter:
“We need to keep asking– how do we design a system fit for the world we live in?” I thought that this was a great point from Susan. I would just add that not only do we need to look around at the current landscapes, but also what’s coming down the pike (i.e. the world that we will be living in). With the new pace of exponential change, our graduates will need to be able to pivot/adapt frequently and quickly.
Also, watching my wife’s experiences over the last few years, only one of the three school systems offered solid training and development. The other two school systems needed to pay much more attention to their onboarding and training programs. They needed to be far more supportive — working to establish a more team-oriented teaching and learning environment. While the corporate world can learn from the K-12 world often times, this is where the K-12 world could learn a lot to learn from the corporate world.
From DSC:
In reviewing some of the learning spaces I ran across out at inventionlandinstitute.com/innovation-labs…
…I wondered…why can’t more learning spaces look like this!?!
Meet Anthony Johnson: Teacher of the Year. Rebel ‘Mayor.’ High School Dropout. — from edsurge.com by Kristin Leong
Excerpt:
Anthony’s classroom is as much an invitation to his students to take ownership of their learning as it is a rebellion against the education system that failed him when he was a student. In his book, “High School Dropout to Teacher of the Year,” Anthony’s complicated relationship to education comes through as the fuel behind his work. In explaining his motivations behind reinventing classroom learning, he says that his focus as a teacher is to provide students with learning experiences that are “radically different” from the ones he remembers.
From the description of his book:
What makes Anthony Johnson a gem is not the fact that he is an African American male, but that he cultivates and fosters a learning environment unlike any other seen in this country.
Choice -> Ownership -> Empowerment -> Deeper Learning — from AJ Juliani
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Students continue to fall into the same trap year after year with traditional schooling. They rarely have a chance to choose their learning path in school, and routinely treat school like a “job” instead of the most valuable learning experience they will ever have…
By the time students get to high school, over 83% are stressed out, [and] 67% say they are bored half the time, and many learn to “play the game of school” worrying about what will happen to them if they do not get a particular grade and get into a specific college.
What we end up with are students who are never given a chance to explore their own interests in school, who end up confused about what they want to do with their future because they continue to march down a path that has been chosen for them for 12 years. Many of these students end up getting jobs in fields they think are “safe” or “practical” but don’t have a personal connection or interest to the work they are doing.
Choice in what content our students consume, what activities they take on in and out of school, what assessments they take, and choice in their purpose for learning.
Choice drives student ownership of their learning, which kicks engagement into high-gear, and ultimately leads to learning that is intrinsic and powerful and deep.
From DSC:
Our son has become a game-player. He knows just what he needs to get that A. No more, nor less. He doesn’t care about learning. And he is tired of getting information crammed down his throat. Information he doesn’t care about…at all. Since 10th grade, he has become disengaged.
Next year (for his senior year of H.S.), he is heading to studying what he wants to study — acting. Although it will be very difficult, I think he will blossom. He will become fully engaged…because he’s doing what he chooses to do.
Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental — from apa.org
Many people believe learning styles predict academic and career success, study finds
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON — Many people, including educators, believe learning styles are set at birth and predict both academic and career success even though there is no scientific evidence to support this common myth, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
…
Previous surveys in the United States and other industrialized countries across the world have shown that 80% to 95% of people believe in learning styles. It’s difficult to say how that myth became so widespread, Nancekivell said.
Also see:
From DSC:
While I’ve heard and read through the years that there isn’t support for learning styles — and I’ve come to adopt that perspective as well due to what I’ve read, such as the items listed above — I do think that each of us has our learning preferences (as the debunker club mentioned as well). That is, how we prefer to learn about a new subject:
Along these lines…in my mind, offering learning in multiple media and in multiple ways maximizes the enjoyment of learning by a group of people. And now that we’re all into lifelong learning, the enjoyment of learning has notched waaay up in importance in my book. The more we enjoy learning, the more we enjoy life (and vice versa).
In fact, I’m getting closer to the point of putting enjoyment of learning over grades in terms of importance. Grades are a way to compare people/school systems/colleges/universities/etcetera…they are the currency of our current systems…and they are used to “incentivize” students. But such systems and methods often produce game players, not learners.
Cathedral Thinking – Designing for the Next Century — from tarunagoel.blogspot.com by Taruna Goel
Excerpts:
With the cathedral thinking mindset, there are many questions that I am pondering about…
Bad bargain: Why we still ask kids to factor polynomials and how we fix it — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark
Excerpt:
OK, we cut a bad deal 20 years ago and it’s time to fix it.
Kids are still factoring polynomials and that’s just dumb. Requiring every student to pass a course on regurgitated symbol manipulation (Algebra 2) is torturous for many students and why some dropout. It’s an inequitable barrier to college and careers.
“The tragedy of high school math,” said venture investor and education advocate Ted Dintersmith (who has a Ph.D. in math modeling), “is that less than 20% of adults ever use algebra. No adult in America still does integrals and derivatives by hand – the calculus that blocks so many from career paths. It remains in the curriculum because it’s easy to test, not important to learn.”
Math educator Dan Meyer told the We’re Doing It All Wrong Podcast that algebra 2 is “arcane gibberish…not useful knowledge”…
…
Now, rather than the plug and crank of symbol manipulation, we should be teaching computational thinking. As mathematician Conrad Wolfram said, we should be teaching math as if computers existed.
Rather than a separate symbol language, Wolfram argues, math should be taught as computational thinking and integrated across the curriculum. That starts with problem finding–spotting big tough problems worth working on. Next comes understanding the problems and valuables associated–that’s algebraic reasoning. But rather than focusing on computation (including factoring those nasty polynomials), students should be building data sets and using computers to do what they’re good at–calculations.
…
To fix the problem, states that require Algebra 2 should swap it out for a course in coding and computational thinking. Colleges and college entrance exams should drop Algebra 2 requirements. They should start by asking young people about their contributions to solving big problems.
From DSC:
This posting reminded me that, just the other day, I took the picture below…it’s outside a local mall. The annotated picture below gives you some of my thoughts on this ridiculous setup.
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