There is a difference between a student who is “on task” and a student who is “engaged” in learning. The student that is on task is not necessarily doing the activity because he or she wants to, and the student who is engaged isn’t necessarily doing something that a teacher would deem as being on [...]

This post will kick around ideas based on one of two questions that I posed yesterday (Simulations In The Classroom- Two Questions). Before we dissect the first question, everyone should check out the links that Bill Chapman left me yesterday and today. He was kind enough to share the following simulations from his website: Classroomtools.com. [...]

The last week of January I gave a talk at a conference where I urged a group of teachers to consider ways to introduce simulations into their classroom as a means of engaging students. These simulations do not have to be computer programs because any time that you take kids, ask them to solve a [...]

Do you implement group work, cooperative learning, or whatever else you want to call it in your classroom where you act as a “guide” rather than the all-knowing guru of information? My hope is that you say yes to that question. My other hope is that you realize that teachers who sit at their desk, [...]

When kids are working on an assignment and you can tell they are stuck, I hope you engage in conversation about how you can help. I hope you try and guide them by having them think through the problem. Where are you stuck? At what point did it start to become unclear? Let’s back up [...]

I believe that it is our job, as educators, to provide students with an environment where they are allowed to be creative and take risks without fearing the penalties of failure. I do, however, question our ability to assess whether something is creative or not and whether our assessment should count for anything when it [...]

I can remember my teacher education classes from undergraduate with fair accuracy when it comes to questioning and pedagogy. Many professors emphasize questioning techniques that provide scaffolding and helping students up the ladder of Bloom’s taxonomy. In doing so, future teachers are taught how to ask good questions to students and it is accepted as [...]

As the end of the marking period gets closer and closer, teachers begin to hear a plethora of similar questions: Is there anything I can do to bring up my grade? Can I do some make-up work? Do you have any extra credit I can complete? What can “Johnny” do to pass your class? As [...]

There is a general misconception in education that suggests giving students more work means “harder” or “more rigorous” work. The two are not synonymous in the least. There is an astute difference between having students think critically about topics and strongly consider multiple solutions as opposed to having them perform the same functions longer on [...]

I recently finished the book Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee, which discusses Emergent Social Software Platforms (ESSP) from a variety of angles. I understand the author’s multiple points and believe that they are relevant to education on a number of levels. Most importantly, students need to learn how to use ESSP’s so that when they join [...]