Schools

School as Fiction

Writing a New Story of Schooling

I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re…

On Learning and Common Sense

As I continue my trek through some of the “classics” regarding learning and schools, I’m finding it interesting the belief systems that many authors take pains to articulate when it comes to answering my current favorite question “What do you mean by learning?” And while there…

Who Dominates Learning?

Got an e-mail this morning that was titled “Google’s Dominance in U.S. K-12 Schools Revealed In EdWeek Market Brief Special Report.” According to the summary, Google is now a “bona fide education company” because it meets schools’ demand for “simple, easy-to-integrate products.”

The Condition of “Open”

“The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.”…

Curiosity Is the Cat

I’m becoming more curious about curiosity. I’m beginning to think it’s the only “C” that truly matters, and that it’s been…

On “Learnability”

I find words fascinating, especially new ones. When I was teaching high school English, one of my favorite classes was an elective titled “Language Development” where we looked at etymologies, made connections between words and cultural shifts, and created all sorts of new words on our own among…

Change Sucks

“This hasn’t been easy, you know.”

That’s the principal of a middle school where the way kids learn in classrooms is fundamentally changing. More questions. More projects that actually tackle stuff that’s happening in the real world and that are driven by kids’ interests. More…

Learning the Change

The world as it is today, the one in which we have access to all sorts of knowledge, people, and technologies, that world is not the one that most current educators thought they were stepping into when they went into teaching. The image of schooling that most had was built on scarcity of those…