Brian C. Smith's Profile

It is so valuable to read not ABOUT Maria Montessori or Jean Piaget or Herb Kohl or Ted Sizer, etc., but to read what they actually wrote themselves.

I get dismissed as an old crank if I suggest that colleagues read texts longer than 140 characters, attend conferences or think more deeply about fads. There isn’t a single discovery of an edublogger that Seymour Papert didn’t write in his 1996 book, The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap, but who wants to read books by experts when our PLN applauds our laziness?

Seymour Papert and I used to talk at length about how the edtech community needs to know more about learning and how the progressive education community needs to understand how computers can amplify their ideas and offer learners unprecedented opportunities. Unfortunately, Dr. Papert was in a terrible accident and the summit we envisioned never came to pass. I do my small part by writing, speaking, recommending books and organizing events, but there is still much more work to be done.

Many school children have to overcome all sorts of personal, economic and societal challenges in their everyday lives. The last thing a child needs is to battle teachers or an inflexible one-size-fits-all curriculum. Kids need allies when they are in school, not an axis of evil. They are dependent on you to do the right thing on their behalf. School needs to be an oasis that nurtures the body, mind and soul.

Your position of authority is ordained based on an assumption of trust and an expectation that your efforts will benefit children. It is immoral and educationally ineffective to blindly enforce arbitrary regulations when we know that in many cases the opposite approach is required to benefit children.

Teachers' long-term commitment to enhancing their understanding of children is at the crux of the Reggio Emilia approach.

Their resistance to the American use of the term model to describe their program reflects the continuing evolution of their ideas and practices.

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it's just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.

Of course, it's easy to imagine that the use of open source software will slash the government's IT budget. After all, this software is freely downloadable. I have a feeling it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

Should teachers be friends with their students on Facebook? Can they use curse words on their personal pages? Should they post political views?

"You just do the same things on social networks as you would do in real life,"

Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view
themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and
then respond to the learning activities and situation.” 

Alongside an overemphasis on time is the widely held
belief that homework “reinforces” the skills that students have learned – or,
rather, have been taught -- in class.  But what exactly does this
mean?  It wouldn’t make sense to say “Keep practicing until you
understand” because practicing doesn’t create understanding – just as giving
kids a deadline doesn’t teach time-management skills.  What might make
sense is to say “Keep practicing until what you’re doing becomes automatic.” 
But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?