Kaleidoscope Learning

Critics like to point to the difference between how teachers in public schools and chief executive officers in the private sector are treated as prima facie evidence of the hopelessness of reform. Their argument is that when CEOs don’t perform, they are fired. In contrast, when teachers don’t perform, there are no consequences. I’d like to examine this assertion more closely.

Students’ ability to learn depends not just on the quality of their textbooks and teachers, but also on the comfort and safety they feel at school and the strength of their relationships with adults and peers there.

Thanks to the success of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed, the conversation in education circles has turned to so-called “non-cognitive” skills, such as perseverance, self-monitoring, and flexibility. As much as or more than the cognitive, the argument goes, these are the qualities that account for success in school and life, and we need to promote them through some form of “character education.”

Wouldn’t this be a neat art project for kids? A tremendous number of similar items put together in a collection, a completed puzzle.

Lots of great photos in this collection…

Rob Roy, a friend of the photographer, has been collecting these scissors for 20 years. Sourced from all over the world, “they tell the tale of trades in which they have been plied,” Jim Golden says. The meticulous arrangement was an ambitious undertaking; Golden found himself spending hours preparing the shot only to scrap the arrangement and start over. His final shot is breathtaking, if paradoxical; a completed puzzle of distinct yet similar objects. Golden says he has been shooting apparel and footwear in this style commercially for years (jimgoldenstudio.com), and wanted to try the technique on his friend’s collection.“I like to photograph surveys of objects or people, then take a step back and look at the images as a group,” he says. “It’s my way of exploring a subject.”

Great website to accompany the PBS series. Tons of resources.

A revolutionary eight-part television series that reveals the dramatic rise of the animal kingdom through the breakthroughs of scientific discovery.

Can the creative impulse behind the “maker” movement also be tapped for student learning? A new project funded by the National Science Foundation and co-directed by Kimberly Sheridan aims to find out:

“Kimberly Sheridan, an assistant professor at George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development, and her colleague Erica Halverson from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently received a grant from NSF for a project called ‘Learning in the Making: Studying and Designing Makerspaces.’

They are working with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and its one-year-old ‘MAKESHOP’—a space that brings together digital media and the DIY culture—to study environments that foster creative doing and learning.

By studying how maker communities emerge, function, and create opportunities to learn, the project aims to produce research that informs other environments—classroom or otherwise—and lead to new ways of supporting student learning.”

These are great qualities to focus on when teaching. Great blogpost about how to use them.

• challenging
• encouraging
• honest

Posted by Vicki Davis

Educational transfer is the point of education, right? If students can’t use what we’ve taught them in new, real-life situations, then we end up with students who are good at school and bad at life.

Recent research from National Academies Press reminds us that one of the best ways to promote transfer is to balance students’ cognitive load while they consume or create multimedia.