Peter Liljedahl, a professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University, has spent twenty years observing classrooms in pursuit of effective teaching (mostly in K12 classrooms). He has concluded that…
Category: Learning
The Pen Was mightier than the Keyboard
In 2013, researchers designed an experiment to determine if taking notes by hand made things “stick” more than taking notes on a computer. Mueller and Oppenheimer had participants watch an…
The Peak-End Rule
In 1993 an interesting study run by Daniel Kahneman and other researchers investigated discomfort. Participants submerged one hand in water at 14°C (57.2°F) for sixty seconds and rated the discomfort….
The New Education
Cathy Davidson, Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), recently released an updated version of her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize…
Toilets, Helicopters, and Punnett Squares
Do you know how a ballpoint pen works? If you’re immediate answer was “yes”, you are in a majority that includes people who think they know how a ballpoint works (though in…
The Myth of Learning Styles
When I was in college (in the nineteen hundreds), one of my education classes explored Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I was enamored with the idea. As a doe-eyed…
Constructivism vs. Constructionism
In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain shares the results of a study he conducted of sixty five teachers across twenty-four institutions. He’s organized his findings across…
Minimizing Distractions, Minimizing “Multitasking”
We know multitasking isn’t possible. We know distractions compete for attention, and failure to attend to learning completely derails any hope of future retrieval. In fact, as Michelle Miller states in…
Myths of Multitasking
More news in the department of “People are Notoriously Wrong about Themselves”, this time under the subheading of distraction and multitasking. Distractions are not the same as multitasking, but they do…
What Questions do you Have?
I had the luxurious experience of being at a conference in person last week. You know, with people. You know, with people not on a screen. It was exhilarating. One of the presenters had everybody…
Open Pedagogy – Increased student motivation and learning (and less work for you!)
We are in a perfect storm. The confluence of Open Education Week, a pivot to a new LMS, and FLCC’s commitment to free and low-cost materials (backed by financial incentives for…
Heutagogy, Generative Learning, and Drive
In 2009, Daniel Pink wrote Drive – a book that interrogated what we know about motivation and challenged the world with a reframing of what makes us tick. In 1949,…
Spaced Out
In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus introduced the world to the forgetting curve. In an impressive-but-limited study, he attempted to memorize nonsensical words and then recall them at different intervals (immediately, a few…
Show Your Work
In the domain of computer nerds, there is a prophetic maxim that states: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar Dubbed “Linus’s Law”,…
Messy and Wicked Students
Every computer science student has had to program HelloWorld, TowersOfHanoi, and Nim. They are canonical problems that most students are likely to encounter and study in the classroom. Similarly, most math students will…
Beyond the Due Date
In Blended Learning with Google: Your Guide to Dynamic Teaching and Learning by Kasey Bell, tackles different ways to leverage engaging technology. While the book is targeted for K-12 teachers, there are many…
Power of Prediction
We predict things all the time (usually based on prior knowledge, context, and experience). Have you ever attempted to complete someone’s sentence? But did you know predicting in a novel context can be a potent learning…
Teach by Example(s)?
Consider this story: A general wishes to capture a fortress located in the center of a country. There are many roads radiating outward from the fortress. All have been mined…
Worth the Wait
Feedback. If you’re like me, you probably believe two things. One, that feedback is essential to student learning. And two, the more immediate the feedback, the better. I’ve always suspected…
Assessing Assessments
If you’ve been reading the thoughts from CTL this semester, you’ve probably noticed a trend. The blog posts tend to focus on things we can control in our classroom. How…
Neuromyths – Part II
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the…
Neuromyths – Part I
In 2018, Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa published Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About The Brain, a book that interrogates roughly sixty myths about learning and teaching. She frames each myth by explaining the myth, discussing the…
Three Types of Knowledge
We all know about Bloom’s taxonomy – the eponymous hierarchy for classifying learning objectives and a guide for designing scaffolded learning experiences. I use Bloom’s as a guideposts as I craft lessons; “Is…
Why we Sleep
Dr. Matthew Walker published a book in 2017 called Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. In the book he warns of the serious long term dangers…
Taking an online course to be a better teacher
You can be a better teacher by taking an online course. During the pandemic, we have all had to experience some type of online teaching and/or learning. Why not find…
Rubrics
What if I told you there was a tool that, when used well, can clearly articulate to students what is important in an assignment, give timely feedback to students, reduce…
Developing a Classroom Technology Policy
James Lang, author of Small Teaching and Small Teaching Online has published a new book, Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It. While reading this…
Chance Favors the Prepared Mind
Massed practice is how I learned math growing up; that is, focusing on specific problems. On Monday, my teacher gave me 20 addition problems. The next night she gave me 20 subtraction…
Quiz Early, Quiz Often
In the book Make it Stick, the authors discuss a number of research-based strategies to help instructors create meaningful learning experiences for their students. One of the strategies – retrieval practice…
Creative Commons for Educators
There have been times when (and I’m embarrassed to admit this because I’m married to a librarian) that I’ve stolen a picture from a website for something I wanted to use…