Learning Methods

Innovative ideas - projects, processes, curricula, and more - that are transforming how we teach and learn.

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May 18, 2012 | 10:34 AM | By

What Schools Can Learn from Summer Camps

As warm weather approaches and parents sign up their kids for summer enrichment programs, many may wonder how long the effects of these programs last. Do their benefits persist into the school year, or do they disappear come September?

A study led by Stanford University psychologist Paul O’Keefe, released online this month by the journal Motivation and Emotion, offers some heartening news: Students’ improvements in attitude and motivation stick around well after summer turns to fall.

Over the course of nine months, O’Keefe and his coauthors assessed a group of eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-graders three times: once before the end of the school year, once during their summer enrichment program, and a final time six months after the end of the program.

Reward intellectual risk-taking, and avoid punishing students for failed experiments.

The researchers were looking at the teenagers’ “goal orientations”—were they interested in learning for learning’s sake, or in showing off their smarts? The first type of attitude, called a “mastery orientation,” has been linked to high levels of motivation and engagement, while the second, known as a “performance orientation,” has been tied to greater anxiety and less resilience in the face of failure.

During the summer enrichment program, the students became more apt to favor a mastery approach, endorsing statements such as “It’s important to me that I learn a lot of new concepts in science,” and discounting statements like, “One of my goals is to show others that I’m good at science,” which indicate a performance orientation.

The surprise was that the teenagers’ embrace of mastery remained strong even after they returned to school—which, with its tests and rankings, often places more emphasis on performance than on learning for its own sake.

As cheering as this finding may be, it in turn raises another question: How can we carry the mastery orientation cultivated in summer enrichment programs into the rest of the year? For the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, learning styles, mastery
May 17, 2012 | 2:57 PM | By

Flip This: Bloom’s Taxonomy Should Start with Creating

Chris Davis, Powerful Learning Practice LLC

By Shelley Wright

I think the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is wrong.

I know this statement sounds heretical in the realms of education, but I think this is something we should rethink, especially since it is so widely taught to pre-service teachers. I agree that the taxonomy accurately classifies various types of cognitive thinking skills. It certainly identifies the different levels of complexity. But its organizing framework is dead wrong. Here’s why.

Conceived in 1956 by a group of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom, the taxonomy classifies skills from least to most complex. The presentation of the Taxonomy (in boththe original and revised versions) as a pyramid suggests that one cannot effectively begin to address higher levels of thinking until those below them have been thoroughly addressed. Consequently (at least in the view of many teachers who learned the taxonomy as part of their college training) Blooms becomes a “step pyramid” that one must arduously try to climb with your learners. Only the most academically adept are likely to reach the pinnacle. That’s the way I was taught it.

Many teachers in many classrooms spend the majority of their time in the basement of the taxonomy, never really addressing or developing the higher order thinking skills that kids need to develop. We end up with rote and boring classrooms. Rote and boring curriculum. Much of today’s standardized testing rigorously tests the basement, further anchoring the focus of learning at the bottom steps, which is not beneficial for our students.

Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they’ve learned. And in a Google-world, it’s just not true.

Here’s what I propose: we flip Bloom’s taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it.

Creating at the Forefront

In media studies we often look at the creation of print and digital advertisements. Traditionally, students learn many of the foundational principles for creating a layout through a lecture or text Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Bloom's Taxonomy, Flipped classroom
May 17, 2012 | 12:00 PM | By

Learning that Happens Online and Off, In and Out of School

Erin Scott

Urban School students work in groups.

By Kyle Palmer

Field trips have always been a staple – some might say the best part of — school. But those trips are typically special occasions and happen only a few times a year, if budgets and schedules allow for them.

At the Urban School, an independent high school in San Francisco, off-site learning is going to be a core part of a few of the classes next year.  For students who take statistics and elections  the classes will incorporate a chunk of time spent at companies and organizations that are relevant to the class topic.

For example, in the statistics class, Urban School staff is looking to partner with companies and organizations that have data they’d be willing to open up to classes to analyze. For the elections class, students would ideally work in local field offices.

“With technology, we start with ‘yes’ and then put boundaries on it, instead of starting with ‘no’ and having censorship,”

Time spent in the field would be part of a broader, comprehensive curriculum that includes time spent in class, project work with other schools – perhaps even in other cities and countries that will eventually become part of a larger network, guest lectures and speakers, group work, and online work done at home.

Taken all together, it’s a combination of “flipped,” “blended,” “experiential,” “authentic,” and some of the other buzz words we hear in education circles. This experiment for Urban is what some educators envision would exemplify the future school day: learning that happens outside of fixed boundaries, in fluid environments, applying real-world applications to concepts and theories.

“Imagine a kid in a math class working on a project,” said David Bill, the Director of Educational Technology. “Several times a week, they don’t have to be in class, but they can go out and work with a company to get data sets for a unit. It’s a more real-world experience.”

IN THE DNA

This kind of experimentation is not unusual for a school like Urban, which has long had a forward- Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, blended learning, Flipped classroom, inquiry learning, Urban
May 16, 2012 | 10:23 AM | By

Teachers Transform Commercial Video Game for Class Use

MinecraftEDU

By Katrina Schwartz

Educators have been tapping into the wildly popular online game Minecraft for its potential as a learning tool for a while now — to teach physics, math, and computer science. But until recently, the game was mostly the territory of computer science teachers, and even they were forced to use the commercial version of the online game.

So a few months ago, two teachers, Santeri Koivisto and Joel Levin, decided to make the software more accessible and relevant to teachers. They joined forces to found MinecraftEdu and started offering discounted educator licenses to Minecraft. MinecraftEdu now offers a plug-in, which enables teachers to tailor the software to individual curriculum. And a fresh new wiki is dedicated to sharing ideas with topic suggestions such as “How To Use Redstone, (a fictional mineral) To Teach Electricity.” Teachers can also work with others to co-develop lesson plans within the game software.

Teachers like to use Minecraft because it’s a “sandbox” game — it provides players nearly limitless freedom to build within it. As a player’s skill develops, the game’s complexity increases ad infinitum. In multi-player levels, players collaborate on building complex structures, use programming features to build contraptions, games, or compose music. Meanwhile, beginning players use their problem solving skills to scavenge for materials. They learn to mine stone for building, and coal for making fire.

“Many educational games start with the question, ‘What should we teach with the game?’ and they forget the most important part, that it should be a great game too.”

Koivisto and Levin decided to pursue a classroom application after observing students solve complicated problems with their collaboration in the game. When Koivisto tested Minecraft at a Finnish school, one-third of the 20 teachers in the study later chose to incorporate the game into their teaching.

Koivisto and Levin, who uses the game with his second-grade students, are part of the growing movement of teachers who see video games as more than entertainment and educational games Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Games, Minecraft, video games
May 14, 2012 | 1:41 PM | By

Guide to Free, Quality Higher Education

By Katrina Schwartz

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

  • COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Tech Tools, Coursera, Harvard, Minerva, MIT, MITx, Open Source, Stanford, Udacity
May 11, 2012 | 9:22 AM | By

What’s the Best Way to Encourage Kids?

Around kitchen tables, in school hallways, from the sidelines of playing fields, the exhortations ring out: “You can do it!” “The sky’s the limit!” “Go for the gold!”

Raising the aspirations of children—especially those who are economically disadvantaged—has been a popular prescription for many years, and it’s not hard to see why. What could be wrong with encouraging kids to set their sights high?

But “what has been missing,” write a group of British researchers in a report released last month, “is any evidence that the recommended initiatives actually lead to the outcomes assumed by the policy.” The report, produced for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, reviewed programs designed to bolster students’ goals for the future.

“The widespread emphasis on raising aspirations,” the team concludes, “does not seem to be a good foundation for policy or practice.” What we need, they add, is “a shift in emphasis from ‘raising aspirations’ to ‘keeping aspirations on track.’”

What we need is “a shift in emphasis from ‘raising aspirations’ to ‘keeping aspirations on track.’”

The problem, in other words, is not one of low expectations—in fact, the report found that low-income families already have high hopes for their kids. Rather, the issue is finding a way around the practical barriers that stand in the way of anyone chasing a dream. And our frequent cries of “You can do it!” may actually be part of the problem. In a series of intriguing experiments recently published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers demonstrated that posing this sentiment as a question, rather than a declaration, led to more goal-directed behavior in the subjects they studied.

In one of the experiments, Ibrahim Senay, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and two co-authors asked a group of subjects to prepare for an anagram-solving task Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods