I am all for STEM but I think we’d have a greater net number of STEMers if we focused our main efforts on getting more kids READY to learn their way into STEM.
How a president envisions the role of education in shaping the future of America is a telling indicator of his or her core beliefs, philosophies, economic theories, values, morals, and ethics.
What does it mean that most of our children are CHRONICALLY IMPROFICIENT in the skill areas most critically important for success in school?
The most cost-optimal, high ROI, way to improve our schools is to focus on upgrading the mental models through which educators understand and experience learning and understand their mission and purpose as educators.
The coming political argument about ‘Common Core Standards’ should force us to ask: “What is the mission of 21st century American education?” The mission of CCSS is to: Improve our economic future by teaching students the common core of knowledge and skills that WE KNOW THEY NEED TO LEARN. But how could we possibly think […]
The attribution of choice lies at the heart of virtually all forms of social inequality and what might also be called “self-inequality”. How we hold ourselves responsible for our choices forms much of the basis for how proud or ashamed of ourselves we are. How we hold others responsible for their choices forms much of […]
Pedagogically-strategically, leading learners into confusion means we can meet them in the confusion – we can arrange to be together in the confusion. For both their learning and ours, feedback, from their experience of confusion, is the best possible source of intelligence from which to tune/improve instructional design.
Higher Vocabulary ~ Higher Intelligence ~ Higher Income = Reading Matters It must be added that the differences in vocabulary here are not differences learned in oral conversation. After grade 4 vocabulary growth is largely driven through literacy not speech. Because most of the difference in adult vocabulary is a result of reading, using vocabulary as […]
Working Memory: IQ is not fixed. For better and worse, learning changes IQ. Because intelligence both shapes and is shaped by learning our conversation about the plasticity of IQ is another case in point for: “I” become the “me” I learn to be.
In response to a Harvard University release summarized by Brain Mysteries: Re: Wiring the brain, through experience Whether our brain’s ‘wiring’ starts minimal and extends through learning or starts maximal and is pruned by learning is less important to our common understanding than ‘getting’ that (to a profoundly significantly degree) our brain’s wiring is learned.
