Author: abendelow
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Google founder Brin sees students seeing more of the world
with google-y eyes–seeing farther and better than their dad’s or grandad’s eyes could. More vision means more perspective, right? I’m so glad that, in this LA Times article, he suggests what I’ve been asking for the last few years: enlisting our high school kids in knowledge-worker bootcamp–getting them working in teams in the wiki mines.…
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Values come first–in Education Land and elsewhere
What is the place of “values” in education? First of all, it’s a funky question. since “values” can mean anything to anyone, “Does [‘value’] mean the quality of valuity or the thing having value?” asked John Dewey in 1923 (“Values, Liking, and Thought” in The Journal of Philosophy). Knowing the kind of value we’re evaluating…
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"All learning is the result of inquiry"
said Virginia F. and John M. Ritter in 1979, and it still holds true today. Give students meaningful questions to answer, and they will naturally engage in the search for information (inquiry). A teacher can guide and resource the student’s learning, but the essential relationship is between the student and the subject of her inquiry.…
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So, at the end of my curriculum class, how do I define "curriculum"?
“Woman Teaching Geometry” The word is vast. So I define it in the biggest way I can: “Curriculum is everything taught, intended or not.” That’s why it is the perrenial eduational topic. Curriculum maven Elliot Eisner (2002) puts it this way: “…the curriculum of a school, or a course, or a classroom can be conceived…
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
Charles Dickens set Tale of Two Cities in the days of the French Revolution, when human energy was at a very high level and expressed itself in opposite and extreme ways. On one hand, it was the “best of times.” Oppressive lords and clerics were being overthrown, slaves were being emancipated, women were beginning to…
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One thing CUC's EDU 6500 has helped me with
is in helping re-framing my understanding of the educational enterprise. The change that my exposure to the progressive and mastery-learning theories has had can be illustrated in the change in metaphors that I have undergone. In an early assignment, Dr. Tagaris had us each imagine our metaphor for education. Mine was illustrative of a results-…
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"Mastery Learning" is alright with me
“Mastery Learning” is a new notion to me, but one I see informing the practice of my young colleagues in the department I work in, who have implemented certain changes that are moving our practice (operational curriculum) in this direction. It has apparently been around a while (testament to my professional ignorance borne out of…
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Elliott Eisner on the value of arts education
Why do we under-value art in schools, under-funding it, cutting it out in lean times, not testing for it, etc.? It must be that we don’t as a society recognize its effect on students’ cognitive development.http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-2754433793634835877&hl=en&fs=true In this extremely irritating video (because of the avaricious host and the slow, affect-less delivery of the guest), the…
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What's the difference between goals, mission, strategies, objectives, and values?
Well, values come first. I mean, they are all essential to a well-designed curriculum, where a curriculum is what Elliot J. Eisner calls it, “a means” to “addressing the aims [a community] values.” But chronologically and logically, of the five, “values” come first. Those designing curricula have certain worldviews, based on particular sets of values.…
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My learning styles and theirs
I want to encourage my readers to take the learning style inventories Dr. Angela Tagaris assigned to her class this week (here is one from the North Carolina State University, and here is one from a commercial outfit. Doing so will reveal how you learn and allow you to adjust the biases that are thereby…
The Wikiness 