Academic Integrity and Citing

Snowball + circle-square-triangle for idea/response exchange

Novel in an hour

My video presentation on using novel-in-an-hour...

Bohemian Gravity - Video Presentation of Scientific Theory

McGill grad student Timothy Blaise created an amazing video on string theory among other things. Really interesting way to share concepts. Of course, this can be used in a science class (lyrics here), but also what a great project for high school students can work on as well. Listen to the explanation at the end of the video!

Banking theory of education (or, alternatives to the information dump)

Paulo Freire (1985)  critiques conventional “banking models” of education. Within the banking model, the teacher holds the knowledge (usually the traditional canon of his/her subject area) and has a goal of “depositing” that knowledge into the student through transmission-style teaching in the form of lectures, competition, and standardized testing. As an example, any activity of reading and writing will have to start from what the student already knows and not of what he/she ignores. In this view, students are passive recipients of knowledge rather than active constructors of understanding.

Good teaching avoids “banking models” of education that view students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge poured by the teacher. This approach “transforms students into receiving objects” through control over inquiry (Freire, 1970, p. 77). The argument goes that when students are disempowered, they respond by resisting. That resistance takes many forms—interrupting class with jokes, disagreements with teachers for the sake of disagreement, ignoring the classroom, and so on (Milner & Tenore, 2010). On the flip side, constructivist approaches to learning that center on the student and his or her interests and culture and that are rigorous constitute good teaching. In this way, the engagement approach puts teaching at the center of classroom management.

This brief video doesn't address the interesting and important philosophical underpinnings of the information dump, but it offers a highly practical understanding of different ways of setting up learning that are not limited to elearning.
 

Works cited:
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. (D. Macedo, Trans.). South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Milner, H.R. & Tenore, F.B. (2010). Classroom management in diverse classrooms. Urban Education, 45(5). 560–603.

Fonts and student learning!?

Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan at Princeton did a study to figure out whether changing the font of written material could improve the long-term learning and retention of information presented to students - they did this with both university and high school students.

Students reviewing material in hard-to-read fonts did better on regular classroom assessment tests than did their randomly selected counterparts reading the same material in easier fonts.

The hard-to-read fonts were Haettenschweiler, Monotype Corsiva or Comic Sans Italicized. The control was whatever the teacher had been using previously -- usually Times New Roman or Arial.

You can read more about the study at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S28/82/93O80/index.xml?section=topstories or the published findings in the journal, Cognition.

Literature Search in the U of T library tutorial

Here's a walk through of my approach to quick literature searches...

Popular Education Myths: "Wag of the Finger" Installment 1

Sometimes, we as teachers look to a few sources that support a particular direction in our classrooms. But, in the social sciences, people interpret data in many ways. Sometimes, claims are based in limited data or in what Van Manen calls "habitual" practice (that is, we've always done things this way, so we continue to "reproduce" practices instead of interrogate them).

In this post, I'll briefly tackle 2 very, very popular myths in education. Keep in mind that these are not extensive lit reviews, but the sources cited are relying on meta-analysis of research. And keep in mind that research is being published daily that advances our understandings, so what you see here could be contradicted in the future. As a teacher, you need to judge the strength of claims these writers make, and compare them to other evidence and arguments availalbe to you!

THE MYTH OF LEARNING STYLES

How many times have you heard statements like, "I'm a visual learner?" How many of your education professors and instructors ask you to differentiate by learning style?

While the concept of learning styles is incredibly popular, the truth is that 40 years of research show no evidence of this concept as an effective learning strategy (Dembo & Howard, 2007; Olson, 2006; Reiner & Willingham; Scott, 2010)! While practitioners and teachers will argue vehemently that such claims are valid, researchers assert that they have "no place in eduction theory and practice that claim to be scientifically based" (Scott, 2010) and some have gone to far as to say that when teachers perpetuate the use of learning styles, it compromises our reputations as professionals.

This video summarizes a lot of the research, and makes the argument that while we should vary teaching strategies for what is best for content knowledge, the practice of classifying students by individual learning styles is simply empirically incorrect.

THE MYTH OF BRAIN-BASED LEARNING AND GENDER BRAIN DIFFERENCE

These days, many teachers are interested in brain research - but this is a field in its early states since the technology (fMRI and other imaging) is fairly new! The data, so far, have not been all that reliable.

First, there are some who argue - and even make a career of - talking about gender differences in brain physiology. There are popular books - some used as textbooks in teacher prep courses - that make such claims. But the academic world reject this - in fact, there are more similarities than differences in brains across gender! Lise Eliot (2010) sums it up really well:

"In spite of what you may have read, women do not have a larger corpus callosum,1 process language in a more symmetrical fashion, or have higher circulating levels of serotonin compared with men. The latest high-resolution MRI studies reveal small differences in brain lateralization or “sidedness” (Liu, Stufflebeam, Sepulcre, Hedden, & Buckner, 2009) and functional connectivity (Biswal et al., 2010), on the order of threetenths of a standard deviation, meaning there is more overlap between average males’ and females’ brains than differences between the average brain of each gender."

In terms of the application of brain research in general, many questions and inconsistencies remail - including a lack of research. In this video, Daniel Willingham summarizes some of the cautions - and he concludes that teachers should ignore about 95% of brain-based learning conclusions (at least based on information available at the time of writing).

Sources cited and further reading

Dembo, M.H. & Howard, K. (2007). Advice about the use of learning styles: A major myth in education. Journal of  College Reading & Learning, 37(2), 101-109.
Eliot, L. (2010). The myth of pink and blue brains. Educational Leadership, November, 32-36.
Olson, J.K. (2006). The myth of catering to learning styles. Science & Children, 44(2), 56-57.
Reiner, C. & Willingham, D. (2010). The myth of learning styles. Change, September/October, 33-35.
Scott, C. (2010). The enduring appeal of learning styles. Australian Journal of Educational Research, 54(1), 5-17.

Ontario Educational Resource Bank

Stuck for a lesson idea? The Ontario Educational Resource Bank has free access to a weath of teacher-created materials, that include Word and PDF documents, PowerPoint slides, and Flash presentations.

Dr. Hatties findings on effect size in classrooms

Gender differences in reasoning styles: Feminist contributions to STEM, politics, law

When we plan lessons for gender inclusivity, one of the things to consider is how the styles of reasoning might privilege one gender over another. Time and time again, research points to different approaches to criteria, processing, and decision-making among genders. This is not to say that *all* women or men reason a certain way. Current thinking is that there are huge differences within genders. However, being conscious of gender remains an important consideration for teachers.

Below is a summary I put together of some of the research to date on feminist contributions to reasoning in STEM, politics and law. Consider how the "styles" of identifying, establishing and applying criteria in the process of thinking might relate to your own classroom. When you look at your lesson plan, try to identify subtle bias in these areas. Also, try to think about the structure and nature of discussions you have in class could be remodeled to address dialogical reasoning!

Sketching lectures, graphic book reviews & web 2.0

I came across the work of Sacha Chua, a former IBM employee who sketches meetings for a living through her company, Experivis. This approach to summarizing information is a great potential teaching tool for students who are inclined to doodle! She also has a blog with ideas for presenting, and a great concept of visual book reviews, which are a great idea for allowing students to demonstrate comprehension and synthesis in ways that can engage those who like to doodle or draw.

To see an example of her work - with content relevant to teachers - view these slides:

A Teacher's Guide To Web 2.0 at School from Sacha Chua

Using the library to research teaching ideas

If you're using the NU library....

Meme production as learning activities

Here's a quick introduction to Internet memes with ideas on how to use and create them in educational settings:

Using Track Changes and Comments

Track changes and comments are a great way to collaborate on documents. Here's a very quick tutorial on using these features in MS Word 2003.