I’m an idea guy. That is, I have a lot of ideas. As a teacher I would constantly improvise, come up with new projects, lesson ideas, tweaks to traditional assessments, and have an organic approach to learning in my classroom.
But they were still my ideas.
I was failing to value, foster, and spark ideas from my students. In fact, I would sometimes hurt their creativity and flow by moving on too quickly.
I doubt anyone would argue with the goals of making math class more joyful and playful, but those goals are more easily adapted to a poster or conference slidedeck than to the actual experience of math students and teachers. So what does a math class look like that responds whenever a student acts mathematically,…
Despite clear advantages to advancing digital literacy, schools often experience considerable roadblocks to implementing digital literacy initiatives. Interestingly, accessibility often isn’t the biggest factor blocking this process—more often than not, it comes down to a teacher’s own comfort with social media. Teachers with little to no training on how to integrate digital literacy exercises into…
I was recently at a conference about the social and emotional needs of children today. While much of what I heard reinforced what we were already seeing as a campus, it was fascinating – the idea many children today are unaware of how to communicate effectively, show and understand empathy, understand their feelings regarding shame,…
Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists. What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the…
It sounds like a paradox. How can you teach computer programming without a screen? Computer programming is a term synonymous with coding, after all. Text, letters, syntax, arranged in meaningful sequences that give machines instructions. We code with our keyboards and we see code on our screens. But there is a clear distinction between coding…
The growth of this kind of stubborn ignorance in the midst of the Information Age cannot be explained away as merely the result of rank ignorance. Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance,…
