'science' Category
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 [...]
Ground Rush Kicking In
An exploit during my first year of college (1971) that seems worthy of recall right now was jumping from an airplane for gym credit. In those days, in Eugene, Oregon, there was an alternative menu of courses for students interested in nontraditional ways to meet the general requirements for graduation. I decided, What the heck, [...]
Principle-based Practice
We get a newsletter every few months from our state Professional Teaching and Practices Commission (PTPC). Over the years I’ve mostly thrown them away with barely a glance, but the last two have been interesting because they’ve included lengthy excerpts from a book called The Ethical Teacher. The Spring 2007 newsletter arrived today, and I [...]
Hauling our wealth to the surface
A quick trip through my local used bookstore almost always turns up a gem or two. From Total Eclipse, in Teaching A Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard:
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities [...]Constructivism in Practice
Brad, over at HUNBlog posted My Two Cents on Constructivism, and he asked,
I don’t know the extent to which constructivism can work for math education as an isolated strategy. Can it be useful in math education to some extent. Probably. Is it useful in language arts? Probably, but just how and to what degree I [...]Indigenous Knowledge
Posted on Artichoke’s Knowledge Building wiki page:
Next to the wisdom of youth, the knowledge of people who’ve managed to survive with minimal technology for millenia has been all but fogotten. This survival feat was accomplished by assuming a relationship of respect for all things. We’ve had many discussions up here in the North about the [...]Outcast Planet
You never know when you’ll be called upon to speak authoritatively on something you know little about. Fortunately, since I began blogging two years ago, I have experience.
I heard a news story on the radio this morning about the demotion of Pluto from its status as a full planet. It is now classified a [...]A Bum Steer from the IRA
From Borderland’s Ministry of Barnyard Literacy Rants:
Timothy Shanahan, the current International Reading Association president, claims he never said that kids shouldn’t read in school. But he damns himself in his own defense by making a narrow argument against devoting class time to SSR (sustained silent reading).
Shanahan appraised the IRA mission,
According to its [...]
