I was reading my Twitter feed a few days ago, and one person was sharing some innovations at their school. This drew the comment from another tweeter that ”we could never do that in our school.” This made me think about how change occurs in education, and what sorts of qualities are required in order...Read More

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

I’m getting fed up with the term ”data-driven instruction” that I keep hearing and reading about in the educational media.  To help articulate exactly why the word conjures up such a disagreeable sensation in my gut, I’ve listed seven reasons why the word should be stricken from every educator’s vocabulary. ”Data-driven instruction” is a term...Read More

Activity centers have long been seen as an effective way to have children or teens engage with learning material in a hands-on and experiential way.  However, for many teachers, the construction of such activity centers in the classroom may seem time consuming, require non-existent funds, and/or be just another burden to one’s teaching load.  Here...Read More

When I was in school, a long long time ago (sounds like the start of a fairy tale!), we had these Science Research Associates (SRA) reading programs that came in a box.  The box contained scores of laminated pages (like the files in a filing cabinet), each of which had a story on it with...Read More