“As in a prior study of Wisconsin 6th graders, the 7th graders who participated in the writing exercise had fewer failing grades and better overall GPAs at the end of the school year than their peers who had not participated. The researchers found no changes in attendance or discipline, but did find that students who had participated in the writing test valued “doing well in school” more at the end of the year than their peers.”
“I tend to brace against the idea of lecturing. It conjures up images of a crowded hall and a professor droning on and on while we sit in the audience feverishly taking notes. But lectures aren’t inherently bad. After all, I love a good podcast or TED Talk. I regularly deliver keynotes for conferences, school districts, and universities. Great direct instruction is often an act of storytelling. It’s exciting and fun.”
“Formal and informal learning are two opposing learning styles. One is pragmatic and organized. The other, casual and unstructured. We’ve written about the merits and methods of both in the past, but today, we’re doing an ultimate comparison.”
“The advantages are clear enough. But it’s also clear that this is the end of a culture in which learning was a collective social experience implying a certain positive hierarchy that invited both teacher and student to grow into the new relationship that every class occasions, the special dynamic that forms with each new group of students.”
Copyright
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