Thanks to Hadley Ferguson (@hadleyjf) for sending me this article from the Huffington Post by J.B. Pritzker titled, “Only Kids Can Fix This Economy”. Pritzker is specifically talking about investing in the President’s proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund and the important waterfall effect that it can have, but let’s take this title and go in [...]

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 [...]

I’m interested in starting a series I would like to call “Tough Questions” that focuses on prickly issues that most people shun or don’t want to deal with. If you have an idea for a question, please let me know. I’m just trying this out, but it seems like it could be good fun for [...]

I’m reading “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, and I am amazed by the complexity of the issues he is discussing yet the clarity he maintains in doing so. In fact, I would argue that utilizing Diamond’s framework to dissect world civilizations is more advanced than any curriculum framework I’ve ever seen AND more engaging to think [...]

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. [...]

Yesterday I was standing in Colonial Williamsburg when one of the artisans came over to me and said, “no Spring Training for Ramapo Baseball this year?” I looked at him startled, and he motioned down to my jacket. I had forgotten that I was wearing my Adidas travel jacket from my baseball playing days at [...]

I love how people will buy into one idea, but they are not willing to realize that they then need to attribute that idea to all facets of life; not just what is convenient to them. Let’s take, for instance, Daniel Pink‘s recent theories on Motivation 3.0 and Seth Godin‘s “Cogs vs. Artists” thoughts. Now [...]

Educational institutions are experiencing an unprecedented period in the history of mankind. Students are getting more information (right and wrong) when they are outside of the building than when they are inside the walls. Social networking has taken off, which means that teachers not only have to fight the battle of student engagement in school [...]

Throughout history, people have always been able to live comfortably in knowing that the “default” of their lives was always set to private. They controlled what the general public knew about them and could be relieved that the only people who would comment on their work were those that they let in or privileged to [...]

In a previous post, I spent some time discussing “Misconceptions of Cooperative Learning” where I talked about the need for assignments to actually show some type of cooperation. In other words, rather than just throwing a name on something, I would advocate that we actually instill the practice and teach our kids to work together. [...]