• TIP: Theories

I ran across this in a David Wylie Slideshare.  Funny how I had seen this before but paid no attention to it.

• Aptitude by Treatment Principles:

  • 1. Aptitudes and instructional treatments interact in complex patterns and are influenced by task and situation variables.

    2. Highly structured instructional environments tend to be most successful with students of lower ability; conversely, low structure environments may result in better learning for high ability students.

    3. Anxious or conforming students tend to learn better in highly structured instructional environments; non-anxious or independent students tend to prefer low structure.

  OK, so I am going to have confront my bias against strategic students considering that I am actually doing the opposite of what this research suggests I should do with my at-risk students. Rigid structure is what they need, sigh. Teaching is not about my needs. It is about their learning.
  

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Beware of School "Reformers"

  Alfie Kohn nails it and then we get Arne Duncan
  

  • "Political progressives are in short supply on the president-elect’s list of cabinet nominees.  When he turns his attention to the Department of Education, what are the chances he will choose someone who is educationally progressive?
  • Both Duncan and Klein pride themselves on new programs that pay students for higher grades or scores.  Both champion the practice of forcing low-scoring students to repeat a grade —a strategy that research overwhelmingly finds counterproductive.  Coincidentally, Darling-Hammond wrote about just such campaigns against “social promotion” in New York and Chicago, pointing out that politicians keep trotting out the same failed get-tough strategies “with no sense of irony or institutional memory.”  In that same 2001 essay, she also showed how earlier experiments with high-stakes testing have mostly served to increase the dropout rate.
  • Notice that these features are already pervasive, which means “reform” actually signals more of the same—or, perhaps, intensification of the status quo with variations like one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards or longer school days (or years).  Almost never questioned, meanwhile, are the core elements of traditional schooling, such as lectures, worksheets, quizzes, grades, homework, punitive discipline, and competition.  That would require real reform, which of course is off the table.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

First, let’s consider when giving it up for nothing can work in your favor:You have no clients or portfolio. If you left your staff position without any customer testimonials or work samples, you may have to do a freebie or three for a worthy small business to prove to paying clients that you’ve done this before. Pick short-term projects (several days, tops) so you’re not stuck working pro bono until the next decade.Your dream client has shallow pockets. Writers, artists and performers are all too familiar with this phenomenon. Example: The indie magazine that barely pays its freelancers but, thanks to the power of PIE, has landed many of them agents, book deals and art shows. For business consultants, speaking at a highly publicized conference might yield similar results, in the form of new clients and paid speaking gigs. Be sure to build such unpaid work into your annual promotional plan (which can be all of two paragraphs) so you don’t give away too much time each year.You’re donating time to a worthy cause. When donating your services to your favorite nonprofit or charity, my motto is, “Give big.” Think high-profile auctions, galas and fund-raising marathons; the more PIE potential, the better. Although you’re doing the job gratis, send the client a short, informal contract clearly stating what you will and won’t do, and when.

When to Work for Nothing - Shifting Careers Blog - NYTimes.com

Tags: consulting

I wrote this as a comment in Will Richardson’s Weblogged as a response to a post about change in education.

Humans as a race have always found a way to adapt.  That is a very fair statement and one backed up by evolutionary history and biology.  Our many-layered brain is a physical text of this adaptation. Given this premise the question remains: how will we adapt?  More specifically, how will teachers adapt to this changing environment.  We can continue to game and tweak the status quo.  We can strike out toward some new ‘thing’ that we cannot call ’school’ but can claim is learning.  Or we can do both:  lay tracks for the new right next to the old. Or we can try a million other new new things. Nicholas Taleb says that the only certainty in these scenarios is that we cannot predict which one of these new parallel tracks will be the right one.  In other words, what we as teachers need to do is to remain learners, to be bloodhounds for this new scent, and to be ready to try on and cast off many of the trails we discover before we find one that works for our learners.  And then keep doing that.

It means (to switch metaphors) that we need to value the adaptive over the institutional model. An adaptive teaching model in our current predicament most probably requires a wildly adaptable institutional model.  We need a  way that says the only charter a school needs is to help its students learn and to be accountable in some reasonable way for that learning. What we need is a way to make schools-of-one just as viable as schools-of-many.  What we need is a world full of learning brokers or coaches or entrepreneurs or what-have-ye who can coggle together a virtual architecture of formal and informal systems to help us learn.

I can think of two examples that exemplify this:  Ravelry and Stronglifts.  These are both ‘convivial’ tools in the best Illich-ian sense.  The former is a knitting site that is so much more.  It is a school where you can learn to knit.  It is a place to teach others.  It is a place to ask questions and provide answers.  It is formal (the site has a structure and rules) but it is also informal (the site has as many forum on as many topics as can be imagined).  My wife is a better knitter because of it.  Plus, she is now much better versed in the tools of our socially networked metaverse.

The latter, stronglifts, is a personal training website specializing in showing its participants how to get stronger.  I have been reading this site from its inception where it has gone from zero to 15,000 subscribers in a year.  Its owner/blogger/manager is a Belgian named Mehdi.  Recently, he started doing personal training.  One might well ask how someone can teach weight lifting over the web.  He combines some old school and some new.  He has a forum on his website run on good ol’ phpbb.  He has a paying forum within that site for his students.  In this weight lifting academy he has individual training logs for each student.  I keep diet and training logs every day or nearly so and he comments daily.  The most interesting part is that I make videos of myself as I lift and then upload them to YouTube.  I mark them private and send a share invite to him.  He watches the vids and makes suggestions.  This dance of feedback and change works for me (although he is a fierce taskmaster whom I have nicknamed Torquemada).

Root hog or die.  That’s what one of my music acquaintences, Mojo Nixon says.  I know that this is hard.  I spent $150 on gas last week for my various vehicles.  I am going to have to learn how to reduce this burden or find other work, but I am already moving towards that change on several fronts.  What I am saying is that school can no longer afford to look like it does any more than I can tolerate 30% increases in transportation each year.     Garmston’s suggestions in your post, Will, are all well and good, but I don’t think most folks will tolerate the consequences that flow from it.  It’s like the suggestions in the new book, Brain Rules.  We know what we ought, yet we do not.  I do believe that as our affordances change so too will the ways out.  Just like a real hog, schools will find a way, but I guarantee you that they will appear to us in ways that are unexpected, new, surprising, and perhaps both better and worse than what we now have.  Complexity is a bitch.  Get over it.