Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework (Dana Goldstein)
Dana Goldstein is a Brooklyn-based journalist, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Fellow at the Nation Institute. This article appeared March 19, 2014 in Atlantic Online One of the central tenets of raising kids in America is that parents should be actively involved in their children’s education: meeting with teachers, volunteering at school, helping with homework, and
Moving Forward without a Backward Glance: MOOCs and Technological Innovations
In a recent commentary on the rock star Sting’s dipping back into his childhood to revitalize his song writing, David Brooks said: “how important it is to ground future vision in historical consciousness.” I agree with Brooks when it comes to the half-life of technological innovations. The experience of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) over the past few years is an unexpected example of what
Troubled Youth, Troubled Learning (Dave Reid)
Dave Reid is a high school mathematics teacher in his third year of teaching. He received his MA in Education and credential in secondary mathematics and physics from Stanford University in 2011. Dave spent a quarter of a century in high-tech primarily in the wireless and Global Positioning System (GPS) industries. He earned a BS degree in electrical engineering from George Mason University, a
Cartoons about Families and Schools
For this monthly feature of cartoons, I pulled together a bunch that got me smiling, chuckling, and occasionally laughing out loud. About half of them are about parent-child relationships in the home; the other half are about teachers and students from ex-middle school teacher Diana Bledsoe whose work I have featured before. I met Diana through my blog. I read hers and saw that she did cartoons ab
Politics, Research, and School Reform: Letting Teens Sleep in
Teaching high school students, first period of the school day, say, 7:30 or 8 AM is tough. Why? Students from both affluent and working class families shuffle into the room, sometimes carrying wake-up food and drink, and sit down at their desks giving the teacher the 1000-yard stare or closing their glazed eyes. They are sleepy. Recent research (see here, here and here) has established that adoles
Arranging Classroom Furniture: An Unobtrusive Glimpse into How Teachers Teach
How teachers arrange the furniture in classrooms gives a peek into how teachers teach. Look at these photos taken last year of elementary and secondary classrooms that have different furniture arrangements. Note the different arrangements of desks. In the first photo, rows of movable desks face the front of the classroom where the teacher’s desk is located. The second photo has a horseshoe patt
On Using And Not Using ClassDojo*: Ideological Differences?
In a recent guest post, two British Columbia (Canada) primary grade teachers took opposite sides in discussing their use and non-use of the free behavioral management tool called ClassDojo. As described by the reporter in the above article, ClassDojo is software that “allows teachers to give students points to reinforce positive behaviors, assign negative points for undesirable behaviors and allow
Slogans in Businesses and Schools
Located in Menlo Park (CA) near the tidal marshes at the southern edge of San Francisco Bay, Facebook has 11 open-space buildings holding 6,000 employees. Open space architecture means no one has an office with doors. You want privacy, wear earphones. None of the open-space arrangements surprised me. What did, however, surprise me in the description of Facebook’s workplace was that there were pos
Avoid The Hype: Online Learning’s Transformational Potential (Michael Horn)
From time to time, posts that I write prompt responses. Especially when writing about K-12 access and use of new high-tech devices, software, and their supposed revolutionary impact. Here is such a response to one I wrote about online learning and its hype. I would like readers to look at my original post and then Michael Horn’s response. “Michael Horn is a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen
A Tribute to Elliot Eisner, 1933-2014
Too few policymakers have ever taught in public schools. Even fewer can articulate what it is about teaching young children, youth, and adults that binds teachers and students together and makes the experience of learning memorable, satisfying, and long-lasting. A former high school teacher and life-long academic, Elliot Eisner was one of the few individuals I knew who could precisely put into wor