A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #424 (September 17, 2023)

    • Inside Higher Ed
    • 09/14/23

    ““They’re voting with their enrollment, to start with—it’s an impressive sign of interest with the first semester alone,” UT system chancellor James B. Milliken said. “Everything I hear from students, from employers and others is they welcome this as an additional resource to prepare them for the marketplace.””

    • Hechinger Report
    • 09/11/23

    “Another surprising result is that students, on average, benefited from solving the same problems, without assigning easier ones to weaker students and harder ones to stronger students… when 30 students are each working on 20 different, customized problems, it’s a lot harder to figure out which of those 600 problems should be reviewed in class. There are other advantages to having a class work on a common set of problems. It allows kids to work together, something that motivates many extroverted tweens and teens to do their homework. It can also trigger worthwhile class discussions, in which students explain how they solved the same problem differently.”

ADOLESCENCE

ARTS

ASSESSMENT

    • Chronicle of Higher Education
    • 09/12/23

    “Combating grade inflation, however difficult in practice, is actually the easier of the two existing problems ChatGPT has exacerbated. More difficult is coming to agreement on what exactly we are evaluating in student papers. It seems to me that every discipline will have to engage in their own process of discerning what they want from student writing, and what — in a world where most low-level cognitive tasks may soon be automated — they want to teach students.”

ATHENA

CHARACTER

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

LEADERSHIP

LEARNING SCIENCE

    • New Yorker
    • 08/31/23

    “Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During rem sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama… Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd… Blumberg decided to put the dream-debris theory to the test.”

PEDAGOGY

    • Larry Cuban
    • 09/16/23

    “Stories told about “successful” teachers and the counting of what these teachers actually do in classrooms are very compelling, even persuasive at times. But such evidence remains stories and lists. They neglect systematically collected data from comparison groups of teachers and students to sufficiently pass muster as evidence of which teacher actions cause students to learn.”

    • John Holt
    • 09/15/23

STEM

SUSTAINABILITY

Z-OTHER

A.I. Update

TECH/AI: GENERAL

Issues

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

Subscribe

* indicates required