Sarah Hanawald's List: FacultyCouncil

• national study says that students who spend at least a month on just one topic in a high school science course get better grades in a freshman college course in that subject than students whose high school courses were more balanced.
• AP’s exact approach is not clear yet, but College Board officials said they too will embrace depth. They have been getting much praise for this from the National Science Foundation,
• students who did not use a textbook in high school physics—an indication that their teachers disdained hitting every topic — achieved higher college grades than those who used a textbook.

  • It also means they had confident teachers who knew the subject matter backwards and forwards. . .
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• A 2005 study of 46 countries found that those whose schools had the best science test scores covered far fewer topics than U.S. schools
• 73 percent of chemistry students and 66 percent of physics students) said their high school science courses spent at least a month on just one topic.

  • so the population is those who succeeded and felt ready to go on to study science at the college level.
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• resistance from teachers who like breadth because it offers the chance of connecting in some way to every student.

  • Which is very important and should not be dismissed. If you pick a topic to explore in depth that leaves a kid cold, will they be alienated from that subject or even education in general?
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• It's kind of like law school. They don't actually teach you much about the law -- at least, not much about the law that you're going to need to know when you get out and practice. But they teach you how to think like a lawyer -- how to find what you need and how to analyze it, so that once you do get out there, you can pick up the specifics of your particular area pretty quickly.

  • Good points, for a lawyer.
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• Obama's inauguration is providing students with the option to experience, share and report on a collection of days that are destined to be recorded for a museum or archive.
• they were required them write their thoughts and to create a one-minute YouTube video.
• "If you are not connected with social media, chances are you wont win the election,

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• Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it.
• Almost all the people for whom the casual assumption that the European novel is the height of human achievement are essentially assuming that any change in the status of that particular sort of “great books-ish” analysis of human culture—any challenge to that version of the status quo—is itself evidence of decline.
• information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime,
• And by the 1800s, it’s a general problem of the middle class
• The reason we think that there’s not an information overload problem in a Barnes and Noble or a library is that we’re actually used to the cataloging system. On the Web, we’re just not used to the filters yet, and so it seems like “Oh, there’s so much more information.” But, in fact, from the 1500s on, that’s been the normal case.
• twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well.
• I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students.
• one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.
• It’s that young people don’t have to unlearn all the stuff that old people do have to unlearn if we want to understand this world. And unlearning is just about the least fun activity in the world.

  • But eventually everyone has to unlearn.
• I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on. It’s in part because I grew up in a generation that benefited enormously from not doing that. Right? The baby boomers, when we were young, we had zero, zero patience for the idea that people who are in their fifties in the ’70s and ’80s should somehow be shielded from cultural changes because somehow the stuff that we were doing was upsetting them. So, now it’s our turn and we ought to just suck it up.

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• the majority of “21st Century Skills” are nothing new, and that we should have been teaching them all along.
• he learning that can be done (and is being done already) using online social tools and networks
• They need teachers who can help them navigate these complex spaces and relationships online that require, at the very least, a different application of traditional skills and literacies.

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• think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece
• How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?
• 21st-century thinking was far more important than the mounds of content we were expected to force-feed our victims (I mean students)
• In this democracy, we never make changes all at once.
• Greenwolfe said it took him years of effort to learn this
• Great educators tell me that teaching and learning are more about relationships than content,

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• Librarians need to embed themselves within the core curriculum, through the backwards design process.
• 2 (or more) equal partners who create a project or unit of study based on content standards in one or more content areas, a unit that will be team-designed, team-taught, and team-evaluated.
• it’s necessary to develop a common understanding of what collaboration really means
• There is a vast difference between cooperation, coordination and collaboration,
• prolonged and interdependent relationship

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• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,  Clay Shirky writes, “Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.”
• Why limit students to one teacher when a large number of them exist outside the institution?
• Why not give students real-world opportunities to learn how to manage and benefit from networked sources?  Institutions that are opening up are betting that the benefits obtained by sharing their resources will outweigh the expenses incurred in their creation.
• keeps the institution from becoming irrelevant,

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• When teachers get together and apply their combined knowledge and experience   to the challenges of teaching and learning, amazing things can happen.

• he was only driving a taxi until he could find something that paid better. He explained that he had lost two careers
• I suggested there were lots of opportunities to learn a new career with online courses. He said he could never take a course online. He needed a teacher.
• I believe the digital native exists but that it does not represent an advantage. 
• The more high tech our society becomes, the longer it takes to move out of your parent’s house.
• we are the first generation of educators who have to prepare all of our children to lose their careers.
• What skills can we teach our educators that will outlast changes in technology?

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• new report on the future of the internet.
• mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.