'teacher research' Category
Multiple Ways of Knowing
In my former life as a ne’er-do-well (during my 20’s when I had a variety of jobs) I worked on a couple of small fishing boats off the Oregon coast. We fished mostly within 50 miles of the beach, far enough out to lose sight of land, and I was grateful for the navigational equipment [...]
Diagnostic Intervention
Bill Kerr’s post triggered some thinking related to education and curriculum design. Asking what sort of computer interface is suitable for learning, Bill said
We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is “user friendly” and which gives us access to the function of the computer. The user friendly user [...]Thick Description
We had parent conferences last week. They’re a time for me to learn more about my students, just as much as they give me a chance to report on their progress. For the parents who don’t make it to the meeting, I give them a call some time during the following week. But the phone [...]
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 [...]
Emergence
After a week with my new group of sixth graders, I want to get a handle on the basics of what some theorists call emergence. Teachers call it classroom management, which deceptively implies foreseeable results. Like other complex systems, the classroom is self-organizing, marked by numerous connections and unplanned interactions. These things, it seems to [...]
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, [...]
Researching Back
At the AERA convention last week, Sarah Puglisi made the acquaintance of Paul Baker, who works in public relations at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Sarah suggested setting up a national teacher-researcher network, and Paul wrote about that on his blog. According to Paul, Sarah said that “Research organizations like the AERA could harness [...]
e-authoring our eduselves
I’m thinking about how the edublog genre might be like listening to a hatchling through the eggshell, if embryos could talk. It’s a public narration of the emergent self. The current Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (March, 2007), a themed issue about e-portfolios, got me going on this.
Troy Hicks and a cadre of teachers [...]
