Posts Tagged ‘education’
Professor Donald Elder: Reflecting Back on Abraham Lincoln
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Professor Elder, we are about to celebrate the birth of Abraham Lincoln this month. In your mind, what was his impact on American history, in general? While there have been many Americans who have loomed large in our history, only George Washington had a greater impact on the nation than [...]
Chapter 6. Practice Draws on Social Roots
School Days, EducationNews.org Many teachers really don’t believe that students have to talk about ideas in order to assimilate them. They’re preoccupied with getting their class up to the minimum bar of standardized testing (the checkpoint most embarrassing if not attained). This level is achieved primarily by getting the first, [...]
The Strange Push for More College Students
By Phyllis Schlafly One of President Obama's fallacious notions for how to reduce unemployment, especially among young adults, is to get more students in college. He claims the United States is "falling behind" other nations in graduation rates, it's down to 12th place in the world, and he says we should regain "leadership" by inducing more [...]
Chapter 5. Practice by Explaining
School Days, EducationNews.org The shift from concrete to invisible, from outer to inner, is the perennial challenge of education. We’re tasked with enabling students’ minds to transform external data into their personal model of the world, their tool for “making it” for the rest of their lives. In adult society, expressing or acting [...]
Chapter 4. Effort In The Inner Venue
School Days, EducationNews.org Learning depends on spending time in effective effort. Since we’ve changed our field of practice from outer/visible to inner/invisible--from senses to thinking--what effort in the inner venue makes the difference? Let’s name a few that we draw on in subsequent chapters: 1. Focusing. This enables the mind to [...]
Chapter 3. Practice Requires Effort
School Days, EducationNews.org Our two classroom tools are teacher effort and student effort. To transform schools, the first has to direct the second differently. Whatever adults do about education, whatever buildings they build or laws they pass or money they allocate or teachers they train, all of that activity must result somehow in [...]
Chapter 2. Practice to Accumulate Knowledge
School Days, EducationNews.org Practice is comprised of clear input and repeated output. What’s the point of it? Where are we going with it? The typical input-output cycle used in schools today contains a systemic flaw. Understand that the very concept of practice means getting better at something, and to get better, you at least retain [...]
Chapter 1. First, Practice
School Days, EducationNews.org Most of the ills that plague US education can be traced to a single humongous mistake. Standard instructional technique violates a simple principle of learning that’s drawn upon correctly in every other sector of society. Schools that apply it even haphazardly produce better results and those that ignore it, [...]
Muslims Threaten Children With Violence and Rape
American Gumbo with Diane Alden Political correctness and deification of multiculturalism and demonization of Western culture could result in a new Dark Age. If the West is so unsure of the worth of its cultural heritage and does not want to defend it ...then we are doomed. The same happened to Rome. They ran out of steam; it just wasn't worth [...]
An Interview with Janet Giler: Teaching The Rules
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Janet, you have a book on teaching students some social skills and rules. How did this book come about? The book is a result of almost 20 years of work with children and adults with ADHD and Learning Disabilities when I realized how important it was to teach social skills to children because [...]
An Interview with Dr. Tiffany Cooper Gueye : Building Educated Leaders for LIFE!
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Dr. Cooper, I understand that you are going to be conducting an “after school program “in Detroit. How did this come about? Yes, we are thrilled to deepen our collaboration with the Detroit Public Schools in such a tremendous way. This past summer, we partnered with the district through an RFP [...]
An Interview with David C. Harvey: ProLiteracy
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1. David, can you tell us your exact position and how you got involved with adult literacy? I was recruited to be the president and CEO of ProLiteracy from the health and disability field, in which I had many years experience, particularly in the public policy arena in Washington, D.C. What sold me on [...]
Is College Worth Its High Price?
By Phyllis Schlafly Today we are going to ask if the students who stick it out for four (or five or six) years are getting a real or useful education. The exorbitant tuition prices cover salaries for well-paid leftwing professors to teach hundreds of so-called "niche" courses instead of courses teaching general knowledge and skills.A survey of [...]
Politicians ‘Dummied Down’ Education Standards So They Could Get Reelected
Liberty Alerts, Nicholas Ballasy, CNSNews.com When speaking before Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan charged politicians with “dummy-ing down” state education standards under the No Child Left Behind Act to increase their chances of being re-elected. “Historically in our country, I think [...]
From the Concord Review to Stanford
School Days, Michael F. Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Maya, a while back you published a paper in The Concord Review. How did that experience impact your growth and development? The experience of writing the paper, which was about artistic policy in revolutionary Russia, taught me how to think like a scholar. After doing all of my research, [...]
A Lesson on Urban Identity
School Days, Matthew Amaral, EducationNews.org I knew some of them as former students of mine, but for the most part they didn’t know me. I introduced myself briefly, told them about my college path, and then immediately went into Prewriting. This is what I told them to do: “Write down the names of the five most successful people you [...]
2010: The Year According to FIRE Staffers
Liberty Alerts, TheFIRE.org by Robert Shibley 2010 brought with it a vast array of developments for free speech on campus, some good, others bad. At the end of each year, FIRE staffers tackle the outstanding issues from that year in a series of blog entries. For those new to FIRE, or just too busy to read the huge amount of content [...]
An Interview with Ron Stefanski: The Local Library
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1. With the Internet, Yahoo and Google, people are finding much more information than ever on Google. Are libraries becoming a quaint thing of the past? Or have their functions changed in 2010? Libraries, in fact, are more relevant than ever before, and demand for their services confirms that. In [...]
Timothy Dwight; American Minute
American Minute with Bill Federer Grandson of Princeton president Jonathan Edwards, he could read at age 4 and entered Yale at 13. He was a chaplain in the Continental Army until his father died, when, as the eldest of 13, he worked the family farm to pay off debts. He was in Massachusetts' first State Legislature. This was Timothy Dwight, [...]
An Interview with Ruth Heilbronn: Becoming a Teacher
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Ruth, you and John Yandell have just edited a book on Professional Learning and Critical Practice in Teacher Education. What brought this about? We are part of a team of tutors in primary and secondary sectors, training around 1000 teachers each year through Post Graduate Certificate in Education [...]
An Interview with Diana Sheets: On the Passing of Denis Dutton
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Diana, Denis Dutton recently died. What were your initial thoughts and recollections? Denis Dutton, a native Californian, was an aesthetic philosopher who taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand after having held several academic positions in America. A polymath, a [...]
Is American math education lagging?
Sonam Shahani, EducationNews.org I argued, citing data that show the importance of engaging students in learning through hands-on approaches balanced with explicit instruction. These methods are taught in my university classes and witnessed in my student teaching placement classrooms. Teachers use activities, manipulatives, and real-world [...]
An Interview with Karen Kovach-Webb: Fund for Teachers
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Karen, what exactly is this FUND FOR TEACHERS and where does this money come from? Fund for Teachers has an important contribution to make toward an expanded notion of what constitutes teacher’s professional development. Quality, depth and authentic work with purposeful processes, skills and [...]
2010: A Pivotal Year for Campus Liberty
Liberty Alerts, TheFIRE.org Two-thirds of America's leading colleges and universities—those places most badly in need of open debate and discussion—have speech codes that restrict speech, according to an extensive new study by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). But the tide is turning: over the past 11 years, FIRE [...]
Will National Standards Make Kids Smarter?
By Phyllis Schlafly Lured by lots of federal money, at least 36 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to give up control of public education standards by their own state and instead substitute national standards written by the federal bureaucracy. Supporters of national standards claim that every country that beats American kids on [...]
An Interview with Jason Ross: The Bill of Rights
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Dec 15 is known as "Bill of Rights Day ". When did this celebration come about? Bill of Rights Day became a federal observance in 1941 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 1941 marked the It was the 150th anniversary of the ratification of those first 10 amendments to the U.S. [...]
An Interview with Maud van Thiel and Noks Nauta
Michael Shaughnessy, EducationNews.org 1) Maud and Noks, I understand that you have recently founded a Gifted and Talented Adult Foundation. When did this come about? After several years of thinking and talking about this and after a preparatory period of one and a half year we realized the official foundation in May 2010. We are very proud [...]
Oracy, Alzheimer’s, and Literacy as Candidates for Congressional Consensus
School Days, Robert Oliphant, EducationNews.org Our most agreement-friendly target is that of improving our nation’s listening and speaking skills — measurably so. Sometimes lumped together as “oracy,” these two skills are explicitly identified as major areas of concern, along with reading and writing, in the Common Core report, a [...]
Public School Teachers: The True Egalitarians
School Days, Ron Isaac, EducationNews.org We treat all children as potential prodigies. We take no child for granted and we accept none as lost. All our kids are fit to teach and meant to learn. No child is "damaged goods" to us. No matter their fortune of birth or breaks in life, they are ours as gifts, never to begrudge but always to [...]
Do Teachers Value Feelings Over Knowledge?
By Phyllis Schlafly Has the new ideology called Multiculturalism taken over our education system? One survey reports that nearly half of American history teachers believe it is less important that their students understand the history, ideas, rights and responsibilities that bring our people together as Americans than that kids celebrate the [...]
