Tag Archive | "Learning"
Ed Reformers: Champions of the Wrong Theory of Learning
In alphabetical order: Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City. Eli Broad, financier and philanthropist. Jeb Bush, ex-Florida governor and possible 2012 presidential contender. Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education. Bill Gates, business magnate and philanthropist. Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City schools. In education issues, mainstream media sometimes call these gentlemen, “The New [...]
Continue reading...Spill Happens: Education Reform & the Gulf of Mexico
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
There are a number of things we could arguably learn from the on-going Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico: These things are NOT fail safe. We should get off oil. MMS’s regulators are too lax. BP took too many chances. Corporations are to blame. Lobbyists are to blame. Politicians are to blame. We are [...]
Continue reading...The Acronym’s Missing a Letter: W(riting)
Friday, May 28, 2010
I’m proposing something radical. I’m recommending we consider something that may not fit into a nifty acronym. For some time, educators and those interested in influencing schools’ curricular foci, have suggested significant instructional redirection, often with an acronym that supposedly creates education’s needed compass. The most famous of these, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), has [...]
Continue reading...Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the Learning Revolution
Monday, May 24, 2010
The next installment of Sir Ken Robinson’s take on schooling, learning, teaching, and the revolution (not evolution) of education. He softens his deconstruction of our education system with humor, though he looses non of his poignancy. Among the insights: We are building our education system around a fast food model, where everything is standardized, yet [...]
Continue reading...Creating the Optimal Learning Environment
Monday, May 24, 2010
This article was originally posted by George Couros on May 21, 2010 at his site, “The Principal of Change“. As I have talked about effective practices for teachers and administrators, I really wanted to shift the focus on what the best environment is for student learning. If we are to have students become leaders and [...]
Continue reading...Winning: the ultimate distraction
Monday, May 24, 2010
I was reffing basketball again this morning and I had a game where a player placed another in a headlock and took him to the floor as hard as he could. So I promptly gave him a disqualifying foul and he was removed from the game. The disqualifying foul was a no brainer – the [...]
Continue reading...Collaboration Agent
Friday, May 14, 2010
This post is cross-posted from www.joebower.org Collaboration is a very important skill to have. If you are a teacher or parent, you know how cumbersome group projects can be. Sometimes the project itself is the least of our concerns. But is it possible to collaborate too much? I took some class time to show my [...]
Continue reading...What Makes a Master Teacher?
Monday, May 10, 2010
This post was originally written by myself, George Couros, on my blog, “The Principal of Change”, on April 24, 2010. I am honored to have been asked to cross-post this to the Ecology of Education blog. Hope you enjoy it! The term “master teacher” seems to get thrown around a lot, but is something that [...]
Continue reading...People’s Republic of Standardization
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Yong Zhao's recently released book Catching Up or Leading the Way is a must read for educators and policy makers who want to see where our current high stakes testing regimes will take us. Zhao does a masterful job of showing how China has long had an obsession with standardized testing.
Continue reading...In Teaching, Impact Matters
Friday, April 23, 2010
1986. That was a big year for me. I was 12, in sixth grade, liked Garfield, Opus the Penguin, was “going” with a boy named Kevin, liked Zingers and Corn-nuts, loved my class and my friends, and had suffered a pointed moment of tween angst when my mom made me wear a training bra to [...]
Continue reading...Diving—Good for Students’ Heads!
Thursday, April 1, 2010
“No diving! Water depth is too shallow.” If you’ve ever swum in a hotel swimming pool, you’ve likely seen this sign. The fear, of course, is that the hotel will be sued if swimmers injure themselves diving head-first into the pool. It is probably a good policy for hotels, but not for constructing lasting learning. According [...]
Continue reading...Intrinsic Motivation and Autonomy
Monday, March 22, 2010
Teachers and parents complain regularly that their students or children show a lack of initiative. They aren't self-starters and seem to need more and more kicks-in-the-ass to get motivated. What we may not realize, is that we may to blame.
Continue reading...Destructive Grading Schemes
Monday, March 15, 2010
Teachers have what seems like an infinite number of assessment schemes at their disposal, and unfortunately most of these schemes revolve more around managing grades than encouraging learning. Today, I wish to debunk a certain kind of scheme. Have you ever heard of a teacher who subscribes to this kind of assessment practice? Good morning [...]
Continue reading...What Ifs of Education
Friday, March 12, 2010
1) What if we eliminated public schools as we know them? What if parents were provided with smaller, more personalized community schooling options in lieu of our current “mass production” schooling campuses. Think of it as a revival of the one-room school house, except maybe a two story multi-bedroom house instead. Instead of building new schools, [...]
Continue reading...Critical Transformations: 15 Tools
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Major seismic shifts can transform educators, and by proxy, instruction. However, more often than not, it’s just the opposite. Here are 15 implementable small steps that lead to transformation.
Continue reading...Engaging Your Stakeholders with Podcasting
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Educators feast on hope. We hope to make a difference. We hope students will become life-long learners. We hope it won’t take too long to grade that stack of assignments we’ve been neglecting all week. We hope the students bring us our favorite candy the day after Halloween. Mostly, though, we hope to find curricular [...]
Continue reading...Learning in the Age of Globalization
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Yong Zhao, like Daniel Pink, makes a compelling case for re-imagining our school system in the age of globalization. With our current overemphasis on knowledge transmission, we run the risk of sacrificing innovation, all in the pursuit of scores. Zhao provided a glance at some international education reforms that move toward what our policy seems [...]
Continue reading...Learning Cycle. For Kids Only?
Thursday, February 11, 2010
As part of a professional development workshop on Inquiry in the Classroom (which is a part of our school’s yearlong investigation), my fellow teachers and I were (re)-introduced to the Learning Cycle model. The basic model, initially developed in 1984 by David Kolb, looks something like this: This is nothing new. Many teachers already know [...]
Continue reading...Maybe We Should Just Go Back Outside and Teach
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
In the 500 years since Columbus’s Big Misunderstanding in the “West Indies”, our education system has come a long way. After manhandling the country away from the natives (who’s “schools” probably consisted of ridiculously worthless lessons like feeding your family, shelters that last, and building fires without zippos, anyway) we’ve managed to construct an institution that has [...]
Continue reading...Recent Videos 
-
Oil Spill Estimate
Pick your level of gush: NOAA’s super-conservative-we-just-publish-what-BP-tells-us or the Dr. Doom expert analysis. Either way, it’s not looking good. It’s looking goo.
- Open Letter to the Teacher Who Said "I Hate Technology."
- The Folly of Rubrics and Grades
- A Teacher's Field Guide to Parents
- Reviewing Cathy Vatterott's "Rethinking Homework"
- Shift Happens. (Even in Schools?)
- Marion Brady: Thank YOU. I hope I didn't leave the impression th...
- Marion Brady: I've done consulting work twice for the Gates Foun...
- Sharon Elin: One important parent type that could be added, in ...
- Jessica Horton: Marion, I love this piece, but I don't know if I a...
- Adam Burk: Thanks for this post, making the necessary highlig...
© 2010 Ecology of Education. Powered by Wordpress.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
View Comments