Teaching, Learning, and Enactive Cognitive Science
Despite the perennial debate on whether teachers should just tell or not, both sides of the discussion tend to accept constructivism. Constructivism is a stance on learning which broadly says that students construct meaning in... Source
The knowledge-understanding problem is perennially debated. Many sense a difference and argue that we should ensure students learn knowledge and understand it. But others claim that understanding doesn t exist beyond what you know. The issue... Source
Education is caught in a debate over autonomy and cohesion. On one side, teachers are demanding professional autonomy: the right to discretion over their lessons. Others are demanding consistency through rigid structures and scripts. Neither... Source
When Engelmann developed his popular Direct Instruction1, his principle was that students were capable of learning anything. This seems like a good rule to follow; it removes blame from the student. If they didn t manage... Source
Claude Shannon s groundbreaking information theory focused on getting a message from A to B. It s now one the major underlying theories of the computers we use every day. Its principles also tell us something fascinating... Source
I’ve attended a couple of training sessions as a teacher in which the trainer would ask “check for listening” questions. They’d tell us things and then ask a question to someone chosen at random. “Seriously!?”... Source
Blood glucose homeostasis is a classic concept for teaching about feedback loops that drive stability. But, like all of biology, there are so many new structures and technical terms students may not see the wood... Source
Surface area to volume ratio is a fundamental concept that keeps appearing throughout biology. It s best to get it right the first time. Many times, however, students end up memorising ↑SA is good and ↓SA... Source
Recently, a claim has emerged: if leaders are frustrated with teaching outcomes, the fault isn t the teacher, but the specific techniques (like turn and talk) they ve been trained to use. And the proposed solution? Swap... Source
PowerPoint was a central tool in the community of teachers I was inducted into. Almost everyone I knew used it to develop their lessons (or at least obtain a pre-made one). It was at once... Source
Around 2012ish, a new movement rode into the UK (school) educational scene. It came with the banner of evidence-based , to counter the previous movement. I m not writing to contend whether the movement was right or... Source
Stafford Beer, a systems theorist, regularly claimed that a system s purpose is what it does. There was no point claiming, he thought, that its purpose was what it consistently failed to do. In this post,... Source