Category Archive For "Teaching"
To Reduce Plagiarism, Increase Joy, and Create Conditions for Learning that Sticks: Ask Students to Transform Content
Schools suited for the 21st century do not ask students to regurgitate content, but, instead, to transform it. What exactly does this mean? It means that students combine what they learn with their perspective, or their personality, or their aesthetics, or their creativity, or all of these, to produce something that has not existed before. …
in Teaching
Using Purpose to Encourage Student Engagement
One advantage of online learning from an instructional coaching perspective is it’s easier to get a sense of a student’s experience. From home offices, we can visit the documents, videos, and pages designed to lead students through lessons, tasks, and projects and put ourselves in the digital shoes of a 6th, or 9th, or 11th …
in Teaching
Teaching Students with Disabilities as Transformative Learning
When the virus first broke, some schools initially deposited the whole idea of online instruction in the too-hard pile, hesitating to offer classes for any students rather than attempting to fulfill their legal and ethical obligations to serve all students, especially those with disabilities. Clearly, if educators fail to attempt in good faith and to …
Treating Classes Like Gatherings, Part Three: Ending Well
(If you haven’t read part one, on establishing purpose, or part two, on facilitating well, I’d recommend starting there.) Parker does a particularly fine job of demystifying the part of a gathering that most seems like a combination of art, magic, and luck: the ending. The Sense of an Ending Before offering suggestions on how …
Links to Deeper Learning
Over the course of several days, fifty teachers established what makes deeper learning for students possible. Three themes emerged: connections, purpose, and intellectual depth. What existing practices and tactics, related to these themes, can we tap into to create a shared infrastructure on which to design and facilitate deeper learning experiences for students? A partial …
Writing the Hero’s Journey
The outlines are in! After studying the phases of the hero’s journey and analyzing exemplars, tenth graders brainstormed the details of their own stories. In groups of four, each student shares their work to receive initial feedback. The teacher, crouching, listens to one group and then another, taking notes on the discussion and, on occasion, …
The Design Trap in Large-Scale Projects
Be wary, PBL teachers who embrace the opportunity to tackle global problems such as climate change, poverty, deforestation, and etc. It’s true: most students immediately grasp the authenticity and importance of these problems. Furthermore, mountains of freely available, high quality resources are just an internet search away. And on top of resource availability and the …
Freshman Composition as a Window into College Prep
Freshman composition evolved from Harvard’s English 8—a course in which students read “great literature” and applied New Critical methods to analyze it. The course focused on close reading, Literature appreciation, and argument—though the last in only a very narrow sense, since it was argument restricted to the terms set forth in the piece of literature. The …
Learning Curves
How Differential Calculus and Reading Employ the Same Skill We build too many walls and not enough bridges. -Sir Isaac Newton It’s fairly widely known, and confirmed in an old NFL Films piece, that former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swan studied ballet in the off-season. I’m sure some of his teammates who spent their free months …
Treating Classes Like Gatherings, Part Three: Ending Well(If you haven’t read part one, on establishing purpose, or part two, on facilitating well, I’d [keep reading...]
Treating Classes Like Gatherings, Part Two: Teaching With Generous Authority(If you haven’t read part one, about establishing purpose, consider starting there.) After [keep reading...]
Why Teachers Should Consider Their Classes “Gatherings”Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering, a book that, as the subtitle suggests, takes up the subject of [keep reading...]