Ignition for Education

  • How to Become [not “be”] Good at Teaching

    In previous posts, I’ve considered aspects of good teaching, including the importance of interactive pedagogies, teaching as the organization of guided practice, classroom management, and curriculum planning. I’ve also recommended an important article on what research tells us about effective teaching. Those posts give thoughts on how to BE a good teacher, but how does…

  • Classroom Management when You’re Not a Natural

    What’s the scariest part of teaching? Lesson planning? Direct instruction? Guided practice? Grading? Parent communication? Evaluations? Standardized tests? For a lot of us, it’s classroom management. Students bring their own immaturity, and then they feed off each other’s, squaring or cubing the immaturity level. Often, they see teachers not as people who are trying to…

  • The Curse of Lazy Numbers

    In a previous post, I commented on “the quantitative tyranny in education”—the evaluation of learning, and of teachers and schools, through standardized tests. I argued that these tests can only measure a limited range of skills at best, and that they might measure only the students’ test taking skill and mentality. Yet great store is…

  • Does the Creation Paradigm suggest a good/evil duality?

    Are goodness and evil sound moral categories? The Creation Paradigm posits creation as definitive of goodness, of “the good.” But what about evil. Can it be pinpointed as, according to the Creation Paradigm, goodness can be? Does it exist per se? Is the Creation Paradigm dualistic? I’ve gone some way to answering these questions already.…

  • “Research-based” ( or “evidence-based”) teaching–What actually is it?

    A lot of teachers ask this question, because the body of educational research is impenetrable unless you have an advanced degree in one of the social sciences. And because people in our profession tend to throw around terms like “research-based” and “evidence-based,” and it can be difficult to know whether they are using the terms…

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Cult of Creativity, by Samuel W. Franklin (2023, Oxford University Press)

    Educators cherish the goal of helping students to be creative, but what that means can be hard to pin down. So many activities can be classed as creative, and, sometimes, acts that look creative are in fact exercises in rote repetition. In The Cult of Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin, a cultural historian, shows that the…

  • Wasting Education Dollars on the Culture War

    Of all the ways in which taxpayers money could be used to improve schools, a school district defending lawsuits because they insist on banning books is about the worst. Yet that is what Florida school districts are doing, as a Trump-appointed federal judge has just pointed out to one of them: https://www.theledger.com/story/news/local/state/2024/12/17/florida-school-district-urged-to-settle-costly-book-ban-lawsuit/77029016007/

  • The Logistics of Teaching

    The phrase “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics” has been attributed to various military leaders. I suspect it’s apocryphal, and that, if a serious soldier did ever say it, they meant that serious soldiers don’t discuss strategy without discussing logistics at the same time, because the strategy won’t succeed unless the logistics are made to…

  • Group Work: A Check on the Research

    In a previous post, I commented on the tendency of educators to say that an approach is “research based.” I wrote, “I’ve come to suspect that [the research] may sometimes be of low quality or exist only in rumor.” I committed to not believing such claims until I had conducted my own systematic check on…

  • Education, Egalitarianism, and Elitism: Why Kamala Harris is the Better Candidate for Education

    Education is not the issue on which the current US presidential election is being fought. The Issues page of Donald Trump’s campaign website does not include a section on education. The Issues page on Kamala Harris’s has a short section that mostly focusses on funding and debt relief for higher education. This isn’t surprising. After…