When schools try to innovate, they often take a traditional top-down approach: devise a strategy, roll it out to teachers and support a high-fidelity implementation. The end result is often one that lacks teacher support or genuine enthusiasm — initiatives putter along and change is sporadic or modest.In education and beyond, innovation is usually the result of iteration rather than central planning. In schools that succeed in implementing real instructional improvements, teachers figure out how to improve teaching and learning by journeying through multiple passes of a cycle of experiment, reflection and adjustment.
Number one on their list is, what I feel, an important and overlooked aspect of education. Research and development is all too often replaced with, “the research says we should be doing this, so let’s implement this across the building or district, without doing any R&D”.
I hear this concern often from the parents of many of my patients. They routinely remark that their sons do just enough to keep the adults off their backs, while their daughters relentlessly grind, determined to leave no room for error. The girls don’t stop until they’ve polished each assignment to a high shine and…
A FEW WEEKS AGO, CJR WROTE about a disturbance in the force caused by what was perceived as sudden and inexplicable changes in the Associated Press Stylebook’s hyphenation guidelines. Even though the guidelines were not sudden, and even though AP explained them thoroughly, people were upset. Source: AP hyphen outrage continues with guidance update –…
Over the years, there has been considerable discussion of Google’s “filter bubble” problem. Put simply, it’s the manipulation of your search results based on your personal data. In practice this means links are moved up or down or added to your Google search results, necessitating the filtering of other search results altogether. These editorialized results…
What if I told you that, contrary to the alarming headlines and eye-catching infographics you may have seen ricocheting around social media, new technologies aren’t shaking up the labor market very much by historical standards? You might think I was as loopy as a climate-change denier and suggest that I open my eyes to all…
Chromebooks have become popular educational devices that are used in thousands of schools across the US and worldwide. They offer an attractive price and can be used very effectively to target many 21st century skills such as connecting, critical thinking, and collaboration. However, one very important skill that we don’t generally associate as much with…
Two big updates to Google sheets, the ability to visualize data with machine learning and syncing data in Google Sheets to Google Docs or Google Slides. Machine language charting allows you to ask Google Sheets questions about your data, and let Google Slides figure out the best way to present the information to you. This is…
