'education' Category
Intelligence Training
People tend to think of intelligence as a static quality, something that some people have more of than others. Yet we know that our brains are developed through experience, by stimulating neuronal connections. Yet, all experience isn’t equally valuable. And some experiences may even inhibit intellectual growth. Our goal as teachers should be to stimulate [...]
Word of Mouth
Seems like I spend half my time in the classroom keeping the noise level down, and the rest of the time getting someone besides the regulars to speak up. This post is about the talking part of student presentations, and helping kids to develop an actual public speaking voice. I discovered last week, by accident, [...]
When Worlds Don’t Collide
Once upon a time I looked forward to seeing mainline literacy journals take an interest in blogging. So, it was good to see an article in this month’s Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy on using of blogs for literature study, Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class [...]
Accommodating Student Weirdness
Susan Ohanian:
The important things a student gets from school are elusive. The so-called value added system does not and cannot measure the things I value as a teacher. Instead of spending their time trying to measure corporate imperatives, teachers need to learn how to accommodate student weirdness.This is my job, plainly put.
Critical Moves
Because I teach writing, and because my students publish some of their writing to the Internet, I’ve been thinking about the differences between blogging effectively, and simply writing online. This is a question that Bud Hunt explored recently, and he sees hypertext links as the essential difference. But I’m sure that Bud would agree there’s [...]
Learning to Fall
For the record, I am not a good skier. I learned to ski with cross country skis on a frozen lake after I moved to Fairbanks, when I was 30 years old. I did a lot of stumbling and shuffling before I began to approximate the fluid motions of the more expert skiers I saw [...]
Meme: Passion Quilt
Social Justice
“All for the Common Good, each according to their abilities…”
Miss Proffe linked to me from her passion quilt meme post. I don’t always respond to these things, but I liked hers so much that I decided to join it.
The caption appears with the photo on flickr, but in Portuguese, and I discovered [...]Teaching Reading in the Contact Zone
I’m not sure whether this qualifies for Miguel’s passion quilt meme, but my son and daughter have turned our yard into a terrain park. I’m not sure about the meme business because this isn’t something that I am passionate for kids to learn about. It’s their passion. I’m just the observer/promoter. The project began [...]
On Reading Skills and Strategies
Skills is a word that gets a regular workout in discussions about education. I used it in my previous post about reading instruction, making a distinction between skills and strategies. I listed what I saw as examples of each in order to amplify this statement: “Good assessment techniques provide information about the skills and strategies [...]
Reading Teacher Mojo
Since I may be one of the “smattering of yoga/raga/tofu/mojo/mantra folks” Garrison Keillor mentioned in his wrongheaded critique of reading teachers, I’ll go along with Ken Goodman, who says, “NCLB is not about reforming schools. It’s about making public education look like a failed ideal.”
Rather than dwell on that discussion, though, we should talk [...]
