The students shall lead the way. The drawing is similar to the responses I get from high school, elementary students, and some college students who take a course I teach in strategic and creational thinking when I ask the question: “Who are your heroes and why are they your heroes?” Have done this with hundreds...
The Republican Party of Texas states in its official 2012 political platform: We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs...
McREL has collected data from more than 27,000 classroom observations that offer a dismaying glimpse into the level of instruction that appears to be occurring in the nation’s classrooms. In well over half of these observations, student learning reflected the two lowest levels of Bloom’s taxonomy: remembering (25 percent) and understanding (32 percent). Meanwhile, students...
just because students are asked to do a complex performance does not mean that any real transfer is demanded. If the task is completely scripted by a teacher – say, memorizing a poem, performing a Chopin Prelude that one has practiced many times, with coaching, or writing a formulaic 5-paragraph essay – then there is...
I adopted Leonardo da Vinci’s 7 Principles as a guide and was especially attracted to Sfumato, usually translated as “Up in Smoke,” meaning to embrace ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty. Great things are produced and discovered when you open the door to possibilities and leave some things undefined. When I did that, there was difficulty adjusting...
In a comment on Dan Willingham’s recent post, I said we have plenty of alternatives that have been offered, over and over again, to counteract our current over-reliance on – and unfounded belief in – the ‘magic’ of bubble sheet test scores. Such alternatives include portfolios, embedded assessments, essays, performance assessments, public exhibitions, greater use...
I am rereading Teaching As a Subversive Activity, which is a phenomenal book if you haven’t read it. About halfway through the book, Postman and Weingartner discuss ‘closed’ versus ‘open’ systems of knowledge: A closed system is one in which the knowables are fixed. Examples of this kind of system would include any in which...
When I work with educators, I get asked on a regular basis, “What about the universities? What are they doing to prepare educators who can facilitate technology-infused learning environments that emphasize deeper cognitive complexity and greater student agency?” Unfortunately, I don’t have much to offer them. I’m not up on all of the thousands of preparation...
In How Children Fail, John Holt makes the following distinction: producers – students who are only interested in getting right answers, and who make more or less uncritical use of rules and formulae to get them thinkers – students who try to think about the meaning, the reality, of whatever it is they are working...
Dan Berrett said: Rates of scientific literacy among American adults hover below 30 percent. More than a third of them aren’t convinced that the planet is warming, and only half think human activity is causing climate change, despite consensus among scientists that it is. Even long-settled subjects are still clouded by doubt: 30 percent of...