Introducing the Follow / Tinker / Make / Share Framework for learning-by-making — You’re a teacher. Or a parent. Or a school leader. Or just a person. Given the perilous state of the world, currently hosting a global pandemic as a warm-up act for … well, a catastrophic global warm-up, you’ve perhaps begun to recognize the burdens this next generation will have to…

Improving teaching and learning in the current upheaval — Kids are fed up with sitting in front of screens watching teachers lecture all day. Is that a surprise? And an even more important question: is watching a teacher lecture from a desk in a classroom really all that much better? Was it better when you were the student sitting…

If you want to build a diverse, just, and equitable society, you cannot do it with the current educational system. That may sound harsh, but there’s no use pretending otherwise. Consider for a moment not what happens on the surface of most schooling — not the math, history, chemistry, or…

With instructionist education throwing up its hands in the face of the pandemic and the ‘education industrial complex’ peddling the same old information-centric instructionalism that drives home-bound teens to sedition and insurgency, lots of us are asking “what should we build instead?” Unfortunately, despite the itch to make something new…

[traducido del inglés por Beatriz Leiderman] Un edificio construido sistemáticamente sobre el fundamento de ‘gestión científica’ de F.W. …

[la versión en español está en este enlace] Education is over. An edifice systematically built on the foundation of F.W. Taylor’s “scientific management,” the misguided application of standardization, and the emphasis on testing and human ‘data’ originally developed during the Second World War has come crashing down under the weight…

In my last article, I described two kinds of educational approach: the “Platonic,” that prizes “pure” abstract or conceptual information, and the “Aristotelian,” that focuses on embodiment and application of knowledge in learning-by-making and real-world contexts. In other words, it’s the difference between instruction and construction as teaching strategies. As…

In a previous edition of my career, when I was a professor of literature and literary theory, I used to tell my students that much of literary history could effectively be seen as an argument between Plato and Aristotle…. Plato believed in an absolute “reality” that exists outside of human…

It’s both ironic and fitting that the death should have happened in a valley named “Perseverance,” because the explorer had persevered far beyond what anyone had planned or imagined. Of course, that’s also one of the things that made the death so poignant — the reason the whole world shared…