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…

  • 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…

  • The Quantitative Tyranny in Education

    How can we find out how well our students are learning? Or how well a teacher or a school is teaching? I’m sure most teachers will tell you to look at the results: the students’ writing, discussions, lab reports, equation resolving, translation, and so on. Go to the concert. Watch the play. Attend the games.…

  • How Learning Begins, and Why Children Do the Maddening Things They Do

    In Plato’s dialogue Meno, Socrates proves, to the satisfaction of Meno, that learning would be impossible without innate knowledge. We would not recognize truth when we encounter it unless the knowledge of it was already in us. In other words, what we think of as learning is actually recollection of what we already, in some…

  • How to Become a More Effective Teacher in May

    May is not the month in which teachers evaluate their craft. It’s when we finish the curriculum, not rewrite it. It’s the time by which we hope to have tried out new teaching techniques, not a time when we think of more. It’s when we’re tired and longing for the summer break. It’s not when…

  • Yes, Some Students Should Fail. And No, We Should Not Give Up on Them.

    In my last post, I encouraged readers to read an article in The Economist which argued that the rise in high school graduation rates is merely that–a rise in the number of student who graduate. It does not represent an increase in educational achievement. In fact, it represents the opposite–the dumbing down of standards to…