Posts by Guest Author
Jobs’ passing: Who will bring our 1984 moment to learning?
Steve Jobs passing and the outflow of feelings says this is more than a mere corporate titan's death. In the flood of remembrances, we can see how different he was from many technology-industry peers. Although he never turned his relentless design sensibility on the building of full learning environments, there are lessons we can take away for what a “Jobs-like” focus in learning would be like.
Communication Barriers: Keeping the Walls Down in the Online Classroom
The Wall Street Journal recently discussed communication difficulties between foreign doctors and patients in Iowa. The article emphasized the communication barriers that can exist between doctors and patients who come from different cultures. It made me think about communication between online students. Distance learning peers rarely live in the same geographic area (and become quite excited when they discover someone who does live in the same region), but generally communicate quite well.
Critiquing Diane Ravitch’s Parent Trigger Critique
[Sigh]...Diane Ravitch launched another attack on the Parent Trigger. One of America's best known reformers is now an apologist for an overpriced and failing education bureaucracy.
School Will Change, With or Without Following Rules
Public education is, by its very nature, tangled with policy, dependent on rules and regulations set by federal, state, and district mandates. What most students do in school at any given moment has been prescribed by legislation passed years before they — or their parents — entered kindergarten.
Get out the blender, kids
I think I have just glimpsed the future, or at least what could be the future, of public education. I’m talking about the effective use of today’s technology to enhance learning, or what insiders are calling ‘blended education.’ Michael Horn, a co-author of Disrupting Class, provided a definition: Blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.
How To Effectively Teach Students Using Video
Video by nature is a fantastically accessible medium. The strong connection a video production can have with an audience makes it an incredibly powerful teaching tool. It has a unique ability to convey complicated topics in a way viewers can really engage with and understand thoroughly. So how do you teach using video?
The Seven Steps to Becoming a 21st Century School or District
Last summer, as I was winding down my eight years as president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, I went around the country and met with 30 superintendents, asking them, "What can I do to support your efforts to implement 21st century education in your district?" Together we came up with the idea of creating a professional learning community (PLC) of education leaders committed to 21st century education. A team of us liked the idea so much that earlier this year we launched EdLeader21, a community of education leaders committed to building critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity into their educational system.
Six premises, seven ideas for better teacher training
At the Twitter Town Hall with Education Secretary Arne Duncan (related: the full transcript of that dialogue is online) on August 24, he promised some new initiatives regarding schools of education. In the hope that the suggestion box is still open, I have a suggestion — not for the Secretary but for schools and colleges of education.
Confronting the 15,000-Hour Problem
But we must also contend with the 15,000-hour problem. Most Americans have attended schools for 13 years—and have watched teachers teach for more than 15,000 hours, usually in the company of 25 or 30 other students (40 or 50 in hard times). And while most Americans may want improved schools and better teaching, they do not want teaching and learning to look all that different from when they were in school themselves. The public’sfamiliarity with teaching reifies expectations. It may even breed contempt for the specialized skills that effective teachers and administrators need to develop—after all, an expert teacher can make the job look easy.
Debating Petrilli’s Post “One size fits most” for Ed Reform
By Bruno Behrend We education reformers are a fractious lot. We like to debate each other more than we like to take on the obstacles to transforming education. One exception to this rule is Mike Petrilli of The Fordham Foundation. He is well known for his tendency…