The reporting throughout the shelter-in-place has seen darker and darker shadows fall on the subject of eLearning, whether K-12 or in Higher Education.
Learning and the Super Bowl
What can the NFL’s most boring Super Bowl show us about better teaching and learning?
Can Curriculum Kill Curiosity?
Teaching today is far more about classroom management than it is about actually teaching leading to learning. But when you add in Common Core requirements, newly defined elements of “rigor”, high stakes testing, the political and process-based rules setup by people who have often never been in a classroom, as well as the operational issues needed to organize a grouping of people, teaching and learning is often quite strangled – becoming almost impossible.
Knowing More About Less
For those of you creating workshops of your own, we found some amazing benefits to practicing what we preach. This is a major differentiator for the Institute, actually leveraging brain science, learning research, and more as we learn and contextualize. We utilized the most effective practices from cognitive science, persuasion, and perception strategies in each session. From Interleaving to pattern finding to intentional creation of norepinephrine / dopamine / endorphin moments, we saw the power behind these learning frameworks. Participants had the opportunity to review and reflect often. Attendees also networked like crazy, establishing a community of practice that will follow them home. In other words, I am confident in saying that we all learned. I am also confident that learning will stick.
Tricksters, and Hustlers, and Cons, Oh My!
Meanwhile, educators have a captive audience of 20-2000 students, every week. You are experts with important and powerful messages of learning, critical thinking, problem solving, and more. These students need your message. These students would benefit from your wisdom and solutions. Yet, without the best practices surrounding connectedness, those same messages are seen as boring or undeserving of attention. With becoming a master teacher, your expertise does little to help these needy students. It is in everyone’s best interest to learn how learning works in every sense of the word!
Learning That Sucks…in the best way possible
If you allow a robotic vacuum to work, it will get your floors cleaner than you can yourself. Likewise, if you create a student-led model for learning, and you cultivate it, your students will learn better than through the traditional, teacher-centric model. And learning won’t “suck” either.