Author Archives: MindShift

College or No? Stuck Between Present Realities and Future Promises

January 25, 2013 | 10:14 AM | By
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Flickr: Javi Velazquez

By Holly Korbey

Higher education options are changing for all students — not only for gutsy school reformers and tech enthusiasts dropping out with hopes to become the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. As MOOCs proliferate and college costs keep rising, more young reformers and “edupreneurs” are looking for a way around a four-year degree, some opting for a gap year to work on personal passions they hope will take off, and some looking for meaningful work experience in the world’s classroom.

They’re not alone. In fact, they might even be the majority. According to a panel of higher education experts, only 27% of today’s college students have a “traditional” four-year college experience away from home. The rest work toward a degree in pieces while living their lives – holding down jobs, having families, and taking care of other responsibilities.

“I really don’t like the way school works. I believe that, as it stands now, I could learn more outside college than in.”

But while economists and entrepreneurs debate who’s right for college, and we question the value of a college degree, young school reformers who are trying to figure out what’s on everybody’s mind: Can dropping out or putting off college advance their budding careers in reforming the system, or will the lack of a college degree put them at a disadvantage?

Nineteen-year-old Zak Malamed, a freshman at University of Maryland College Park majoring in government and politics, is looking for ways out of the four-year degree track to spend more time on his growing school-reform organization, Student Voice. He’s been considering a break, like the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Higher Education

How Math is Getting Its Groove Back

January 24, 2013 | 9:46 AM | By

PBS NewsHour

By Rebecca Jacobson

Carrie Lewis and Kelly Steele’s fifth grade students slide and spin across the classroom floor, doing the hustle, the robot, and the running man. While it may look at first glance like goofing off, these students are actually dancing for a higher cause…math.

Lewis, a STEM specialist for Virginia’s Lynchburg city schools, and Steele, who teaches gifted education in Bedford county, Virginia, are both math enthusiasts eager to instill in their students a love of the subject. And dancing, they hoped, might be just the thing to help tackle a common fifth-grade learning deficit — number patterns.

“Dances are patterns,” Lewis said. “We had identified that our students had trouble with patterns and this was a way to get them involved in it.”

Both teachers are part of Sweet Briar College’s STEM teacher education program, where they worked together to design “dance by numbers,” a lesson plan that relies on dance to teach pattern recognition. In the video above, Lewis explains how the lesson works.

IDENTIFYING A PATTERN

The first step was to turn a dance routine into a number pattern. Students logged onto the Pillsbury Dough Boy website and watched, studied and deconstructed the cartoon mascot’s six dance moves. They assigned each step a number, and charted the patterns in his dance. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, math

More Teachers Refuse to Give Standardized Tests

January 21, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By

Flickr: albertogp123

By

An entire school of teachers in Seattle is refusing to give students a standardized test that’s required by the district. The teachers say the test is useless and wastes valuable instructional time.

Meanwhile, individual teacher protests of standardized tests are popping up nationwide, and the Seattle case may make bigger waves.

Students in Seattle Public Schools take a test called the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, up to three times a year, from kindergarten through at least ninth grade. The school district requires the test to measure how well students are doing in reading and math — in addition to annual standardized tests required by the state.

“No one likes what’s going on, but no one has really found a mechanism to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong,’”

The MAP test is used as part of the teacher-evaluation process, and it’s supposed to help teachers gauge students’ progress.

“We’ve lost a whole lot of class time. I don’t know what the test was about, and I just see no use for it at all,” says Kit McCormick, who teaches English at Garfield High School.

McCormick says teachers are never allowed to see the test, so she has no idea how to interpret her students’ scores.

“So I’m not going to do it. But I’d be happy to have my students evaluated in a way that would be meaningful for both them and me,” she says.

Instead of this kind of high-stakes testing, teachers at Garfield propose that student learning be judged by portfolios of their work.

The school’s academic dean, Kris McBride, was supposed to administer the test this week. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, assessment, standardized tests

Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students

January 18, 2013 | 9:15 AM | By

Erin Scott

By Jennie Rose

In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation.

Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas.

“We have a lot of learned behavior of compliance, and hunger for external rewards and no real engagement.”

Whether a teacher is presenting to her board or pitching a crowd of 12-year-olds on why Shakespeare was a genius, it’s all the art of persuasion. Though his new book has only been out a couple of weeks, Pink said he’s already received many messages from teachers who agree that, “Yes, I sell. I sell students on poetry, on calculus, on biology.”

In fact, the business world has a lot to learn from educators: what motivates people, how to inspire people to perform well. But educators can also take a lesson from the commercial world: namely, teaching the complicated skill of finding problems. In a recent study, Pink said school superintendents rated problem-solving as the top capability they wanted to instill. Corporate executives, however, rated problem-solving as seventh on their list of attributes in employees, but rated problem identification as the single most important skill. That is, the ability to suss out issues and challenges that aren’t necessarily obvious. And this is where students could benefit from educators — learning the process of identifying a problem.

“The premium has moved from problem solving to problem finding as a skill,” Pink said. “Right now, especially in the commercial world, if I know exactly what my problem is, I can find the solution to my own problem. I don’t need someone to help me. Where I need help is when I don’t Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods

Making Math Meaningful with Online Games and Videos

January 15, 2013 | 2:37 PM | By

Re-Roofing Your Uncle's House

By Almetria Vaba

Math can be made meaningful when connected to students’ experiences. With video clips and interactive games from public media students practice math concepts while exploring real world concepts. Learn how to decorate an intricate cake, play the role of the pharmacist, roof a house and more using PBS LearningMedia resources to measure with math.

Using Recipes for Fractions Lesson Plan and Video
While doubling a cupcake recipe, students practice three ways of doubling fractions using representations, addition, and multiplication. Students also convert between improper fractions and mixed numbers. Grades 4-8.

Re-Roofing Your Uncle’s House Interactive Game
In this interactive activity adapted from the Wisconsin Online Resource Center, students use mathematics and measuring skills to solve a construction problem by playing a game using tools (including a tape measure, notepad, and calculator) to determine how many shingles are needed to reroof a house. Students also learn the importance of proper planning and how miscalculating the amount of materials necessary can add to the cost and time spent on a project. Grades 3-9.

Cake Designer Video
Math made delicious! In this video, a cake designer describes how she uses math with her recipes and designs. Students can relate the importance of mathematics to the field of cake designing. Grades 3–9.

Area of Circles with Dive Dog Interactive Game
In this animated activity students learn the formula for the area of a circle and then apply it to multiple scenarios involving Spot the Dog. Activities include solving problems involving the area of a circle and for the areas of parallelograms, triangles, and circles. Students also calculate the area Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, math, PBS LearningMedia

Five Secrets to Succeeding Without a College Degree

January 15, 2013 | 10:33 AM | By

Getty

By Nikhil Goyal

British rapper-poet Suli Amoako recently launched a video, “Why I Hate School, But Love Education,” that has been making rounds all over the Internet. He calls for young people to “understand your motives and reassess your aims” and provides outliers in history that have done very well for themselves and society without formal schooling.

The final line of the video is: “There’s more than one way to be an educated man.” Amoako’s on the mark.

In the book The Millionaire Mind, Dr. Thomas J. Stanley conducted an extensive survey of more than 1,000 millionaires in the United States. He approximated that the average collegiate GPA for a self-made millionaire is 2.76. New York Times columnist David Brooks jokes, “You know all those morons who sat in the back of the classrooms goofing off? In a few years you’re going to have a new name for them: Boss.” What’s more, people with the highest life satisfaction are more likely to drop out of school, according to research from psychologist Edward Diener.

Before you accuse me of calling for millions of students to drop out of school, let me make a few things clear: First, if you have viable alternative, dropping out may be the best option for you. But as always, one-size-does-not-fit-all. Second, we have many lessons to learn from successful people who have done poorly, dropped out, never went, or just hated school. A common thread strings them together — a serious commitment to lifelong learning and a desire to screw with the status quo. Here, five secrets of the great “uneducated.”

1.  NEVER STOP PLAYING.

If not for Steve Jobs’ adopted father, Paul, who instilled a love of learning and tinkering within him, we may not have Apple today. He taught Jobs “how to build things, how to take things apart, [and] put things back together.” He exposed him to electronics and mechanics, planting the seeds of design and inquiry within the young innovator that would be later exemplified in Apple products like the iPhone and Macbook.

While Jobs abhorred going to school and almost got his curiosity “beaten” out of him, he never stopped playing be it during his tenure at Apple or his stint at Pixar. Extraordinary innovators never stop playing. “Work hard, play hard,” as the Wiz Khalifa tune goes. For his entire life, Jobs, unlike most human beings, was able to “retain a sizable portion of…[his] childhood spirit despite the pressures and demands of adulthood” — a characteristic called psychological neoteny. Jobs neve Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Higher Education