Meet Dr. Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia, who loves to puncture our misconceptions about cognitive psychology. He’s a very smart guy, and has made some ripples in edworld lately by creating little videos debunking some cherished theories...
As a doctoral student in a small Education Policy cohort, I attended lots of Friday potluck dinners—cheap wine, the requisite tabouli and Korean mondoo, and hot discussion about which educational research grants are getting funded these days. The usual entertaining...
My friend the newspaper editor forwarded me an article she read in Slate’s “Dismal Science” section, Hot for the Wrong Teachers, with a little note: “Is this true?” I was excited: had Slate (Slate! Cool!) decided to write one of...
Interesting discussion on the Teacher Leaders Network, kicked off by a TLN member who just held her 90-year old mother’s hand through a minor medical crisis—and had time, in the waiting room, to wonder about the array of medical specialists...
I’m tired of writing about technology, but technology keeps inserting its hard, shiny tentacles into my thoughts. I just went to see Iron Man, and even while watching cars being crushed and Rob Downey Jr. experiencing unrequited lust with Gwyneth...
Around the Teacher Leaders Network, I have a reputation as an unrepentant Luddite—probably because I have wondered out loud if Twittering just might be overrun by twits, and have expressed my opinion that lots of the technology crusted on learning...
Education Sector has an interesting new policy report making the rounds. Here’s Education Week’s take: Think it's hard for schools to get bad teachers out of the classroom? Turns out teachers agree. More than half of teachers believe it's too...
Ever heard of the Documentation Generation? Great article in Newsweek about our growing technology-driven urge to create and display images: Here’s Looking at You, Kids (Jennie Yabroff). Yabroff covers lots of fascinating thought-territory in the piece, from the evolution of...
I’m not a math teacher, but I played one in a middle school, not too long ago. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was surprised to find myself teaching 7th grade math, in the fall of 2003. The...
Corey Bower asks a lot of questions about bad teachers in his unpretentiously titled blog, Thoughts on Education Policy. Mr. Bower, a doctoral student in Ed Policy at Vanderbilt, has been pumping out an assortment of blogs on a wide...
