Ignition for Education

  • 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…

  • 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…