“Organizing schools in discipline-based classes that go for 45 minutes where quizzes and test assess understanding every so often works well when you’re focused on knowledge. But skills and competencies are fundamentally different. They require different contexts, different structures. Cultivating creativity, collaborative problem-solving, self-directed learning, empathy, can largely only happen effectively in rich, complex contexts — not squeezed into the 45-minute math lesson. That is why in many schools working to make this transition, you see a fundamental restructuring of the learning environment—to leverage richer, deeper, more meaningful and contextualized learning through project-based learning (PBL), competency developmental progressions, and integrated formative assessment (Levine & Patrick, 2019). Such a deep restructuring does not come easily, and for many learning environments can only happen in certain ways or hardly at all due to current constraints and demands.”
“We have focused our recent research on one interesting aspect of the transition for new teachers: the influential role of the induction mentor teacher in an educator’s first year. Through a case study approach, we looked at the in-depth experiences of seven recent graduates from our teacher preparation program, collecting interview and focus group data throughout their first school year.”
“What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many of the more holistic and exploratory practices that enabled UX to deliver that kind of foundational value.”
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