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Category Archives: teacher research

Class Not Dismissed

Monday, May 26, 2008

It’s been a week since school let out for the summer, and I’ve been been thinking about what happened in the classroom this year. Decompression – it happens every May. Long bike rides are key: 30 miles yesterday, 20 today, 50 miles tomorrow, if it doesn’t look too much like rain. Two-lane country blacktop with [...]

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Multiple Ways of Knowing

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

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 [...]

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Diagnostic Intervention

Saturday, November 17, 2007

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 [...]

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Thick Description

Monday, November 5, 2007

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 [...]

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Learning Isn’t Scripted

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 [...]

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Teaching to Inquire

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 [...]

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Emergence

Friday, August 24, 2007

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 [...]

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Redrawing the Shape of Learning

Sunday, August 19, 2007

…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 systems [...]

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Ground Rush Kicking In

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

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, [...]

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Researching Back

Sunday, April 15, 2007

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 [...]

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