Lies My Teacher Told Me

James Loewen has a fascinating book called Lies My Teacher Told Me which addresses the common misrepresentations and falsities that U.S. History books espouse. He has a full section on why teachers continue to promulgate these versions of history, including that they do not know any better, they avoid controversy and they simply believe it to be true. To me this is really representative of the circular way that beliefs work. We learn our beliefs from our environments and our social surroundings from the moment we are born and those environments are different for everyone. Inherently, teachers bring beliefs into their teaching and their classrooms, and that influences their students, whether they know it or not. This works not only with curriculum, but about perceptions of the learning process in general and explains why we have so many students who are unengaged in their own education. This particular book focuses on history teachers and curriculum but it's true for all subjects and the socialization process that all students go through.

Teacher Beliefs

This video is a great example of one teachers philosophy that uses popular culture references to illuminate their points. The most fundamental belief I hold about teaching comes from Friere, "people teach each other, mediated by the world." I believe this is independent of age or background and am always looking for new things to learn from my students. This belief allows me to remember that I don't have all the answers and gives me the ability to work with my students more effectively because I believe that they have just as much capability to share new things with me as I do with them.

Virtual Leadership

As I was doing the readings for this week, all I could think about was how truly technology has pervaded every bit of our lives. In our office, if one of our computers is down, we are completely lost; we don't know what to do with our time without them. Over the summer, I added a virtual leadership series to the leadership certificate program that I coordinate. It covers things like webinars and social media as well as using office technology. It is surprising to me from what I've seen in this track and what I've seen from working with students in general how little they actually know about technology. Is this a deviation from the digital native theory? I think many of them are better able to learn new technological skills than those from earlier generations, so perhaps not. What do you think?

21st Century Learners

Here is another video thinking about 21st century learners and adapting education to mesh with their style. It is fascinating to me to think about all the different ways that we use technology, especially because the most popular mechanisms are all those that foster social connections. As some articles from this weeks assignments discussed, technology is mediating activities that would have already been happening, only making them more immediate and pervasive in our day-to-day lives. 

Somewhere Over the Rainbow!

I love this illustration of the 7 principles, particularly because it combines the principles with technology which is increasingly important in today's learning environments!

PISA using Bloom to Measure?

For another class, I'm working on comparing the new common core curriculum with the framework used to get PISA rankings (don't know what PISA is? Don't worry, I didn't either! Here's a video overview). The PISA exam, particularly the reading section, seems like it fits into Bloom's taxonomy perfectly! The first level tasks are access and retrieve, followed by integrate and interpret at the second level, and reflect and evaluate at the highest level. They do not mention Bloom in their explanation of their framework, but I wonder if this was intentional? What do you think?

Back to Social Learning Theory

This morning, I was reviewing an article by Carla O'Conner as part of my comprehensive exam preparation. The article, "Dispositions Toward (Collective) Struggle and Education Resilience in the Inner City: A Case Analysis of Six African-American High School Students", presents the stories of six students who by all previous research would have been assumed to be failing in their education. But these students were not only succeeding, they were high-achieving and optimistic about their future. O'Conner found two things that were important to this unexpected success - experiencing struggle and having a model (a "sponsor") to illustrate how to best deal with the inequities of the system. And social learning theory is back! I like that we can apply these learning theories to things that are happening outside of the classroom, whether they affect what's going on in the classroom or not. Highly illustrative of learning as an all encompassing entity, not something that is contained to the school day.