There’s all this talk of ‘’best practices’’ in education but nobody talks about worst practices.  Here’s something that I think qualifies as a ‘’worst practice’’ – it involves educators’ propensity to teach mostly explicit knowledge as opposed to tacit knowledge.  Scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi bases his understanding of ‘’tacit knowing’’ on the principle ‘’that...Read More

A lot of recent research supports the systematic teaching of phonemic awareness in beginning reading programs.  The problem is that phonics lessons can get awfully dull, with teachers pointing to the letter and having kids say the sound, or students poring over phonics worksheets that ask them to match the right letter to the word,...Read More

Homework is considered to be part of the natural order of things in school.  But in the past twenty years or so there’s been an increasing amount of criticism about its function and use (see for example, Alfie Kohn’s The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing).  I too believe...Read More

Once upon a time a king asked several blind educators in his village to examine a new beast that had come into his possession and to tell him all about it.  The first educator went up to touch the Literacy Lion, and then ran back to the king shouting ”This beast is made up of...Read More

Think of an assessment in school and very likely you’ll think of a teacher handing out some papers with questions on them, and students providing the answers.  In fact, this scenario represents by far the bulk of assessments that teachers give to students.  But, this type of assessment barely scratches the surface of what is...Read More