Consider that holy grail of learning outcomes, critical thinking… Teaching it is not a cheap or efficient process. It does not come from… emphasizing short, quantifiable, standardized assignments at the expense of meandering, creative and difficult investigation. Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It’s about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.”
Some years ago, Dan Meyer pioneered and promoted a structure of math lessons based on three “acts” that fit together in a way that gave lessons a momentum and rhythm in the way that three act structure in film gives films (or TV shows or whatever) a structure and a rhythm… [In media literacy] we have three acts as well.”
In education, decision makers are often motivated by the desire to improve student outcomes and increase educational equity. Yet both “student outcomes” and “equity” are vague terms… Without more precise understandings of which outcomes we care about and which distributions of those outcomes are fair, decision makers lack orientation. Their decisions may end up relying on data about outcomes that happen to be available rather than about outcomes that align with their goals.”
“All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid, so it really meshes well,” González added.”
A word problem, like an essay, is an argument. You start with the given information. You summarize it with symbols and expressions. You make a plan and follow some logical steps until you arrive at a conclusion. Along the way you’ll likely make mistakes. You might find you spent a disappointing amount of time on a bad approach, but that’s okay because the process is the whole point, as evidenced by the existence of partial credit.”
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Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson