Thursday, November 8, 2007
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 [...]
Thursday, October 11, 2007
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 [...]
Friday, September 21, 2007
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 [...]
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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 [...]
Monday, September 17, 2007
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 [...]
Sunday, September 9, 2007
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 [...]
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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 [...]
…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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
