Alfie Kohn interview

I'm listening for the second time to an interview with Alfie  Kohn.

"Kids don't learn to make decisions by following directions. Kids learn to make decisions by     [wait for it...]   making decisions."

Yup. even bad ones (kids, decisions, either).


more to come as I continue re-listening.
Alfie Kohn interview


You can download the interview as a podcast and listen to it at your convenience in iTunes.

blog entry about research

I think the whole entry is worthwhile, but this quote is what I want to keep in my face:

School research at the school and classroom level has as many variables as it has students; and our outliers are not research distractions to be dismissed, they are children who must be helped.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/place_at_the_table

poetry, email and responses

something to contemplate doing......

I model– no– I conduct, real-time– our search, over the digital projector: Googling the author’s name, searching the poet’s biographies, looking up websites. We find an email address, pull up my school account, write the email together, and send it, having conversations....

Read the whole blog entry for the full picture.

theline.edublogs.org

complex

research        heart & gut

We need them both.

about "To Teach"

I've been wandering the web a lot today.

On
http://laughingsquid.com/to-teach-the-journey-in-comics/
I saw a piece about a comic book version of Bill Ayers's book To Teach, the journey. I wondered if that was THE Bill Ayers, the person spoken of as a domestic terrorist. Yes, it was and is.

I had no idea of his views on education; I knew he was a professor but hadn't remembered he was a prof of ed.


I was curious about what he had to say about teaching. I was hooked almost immediately. I ordered the book.
I made a screen shot of one of the pictures from the YouTube video on laughing squid.

I had to have the complete book. This picture is going up on the wall in 7-203. This picture communicates why I am suspicious of education matters that are only research based, things that see only numbers but no human faces.

quote-- complexities of learning and teaching

from Making Connections, p. 11  Renatta Caine, Geoffrey Caine, 1991

"Unfortunately many teachers who are aware of the complexities of learning and teaching have been intimidated into ignoring what they know. They have had to fight both a factory model that places a premium on low-quality output and a research model that implies that their observations of what actually happens are invalid. It takes a strong personality and enormous conviction to ignore such pressures."