'science' Category
Fault Lines
Artichoke’s post about metaphor and education, and creativity, has me thinking about the lines and tensions in teaching. She notes the contradiction for art teachers working in schools with “The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words.” Her post was provocative, [...]
Sustainability and Science Education
It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mainly due to hassles managing a classroom full of 12-year-olds full of holiday cheer bent on early celebration. It’s exhausting to maintain a focus right now. We have another week to go, right up to Dec. 21. And despite pressure to join the merriment, I push [...]
Considering the Source in Reading Programs
Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:
…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are [...]Setting the Dial on Rationality
Davis and Sumara’s book about complexity theory in education, mentions the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity research, but I’d never heard of it. They also referred to a book by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, which as it turns out, tells the story [...]
Treeline Habitat
We took a trip up to the top of the dome yesterday to study plants at treeline. But when you’re constructing meaning at a conceptual level, you need to establish a context. My group of town kids with little outdoors experience didn’t know what “treeline” was. So we started at the bottom and made a [...]
Going the Distance
One of my students was having trouble with some math exercises (as in, 480 cm. = __m) and I asked him to show me about how long a centimeter is, and how long a meter is, but that was hard for him because he didn’t have an intuitive sense of the relationship between meters and [...]
Differences and Inferences
We started germinating seeds in the classroom a few days ago. Since the growing season outdoors is closing down, we’ll grow some on the window ledge. The science objective is to have students observe differences between monocotyledons and dicotyledons, and so they’re germinating beans and corn in wet paper towels. But I have another, more [...]
Learning Isn’t Scripted
Teaching can be scripted, but learning can’t.
The science work I’ve been doing the past 2 weeks with my students shows how a lesson can gradually unfold in nonlinear fashion. In this case, we reached our objective after I saw how students responded to what I asked them to do, and made some adjustments. Even [...]Teaching to Inquire
Yesterday I talked to my students about the value of doing science - asking questions, predicting, observing, describing, measuring, classifying, generalizing, inferring, communicating - and I told them that I never did science in school. Science, for me, was reading the textbook and answering questions at the end of the chapter. We practiced none of [...]
Redrawing the Shape of Learning
…the universe has come to be seen as “relentlessly nonlinear.”-Davis and Sumara
Will Richardson’s recent posts about the future of schools and teachers leaves me an opening for a new “big idea” that I’ve been working on lately. I finished reading Complexity and Education, by Davis and Sumara, which has me thinking about complex [...]
