My 11.125 students read education articles each week and discuss current events for about 15 minutes. It’s a lot of time to commit to the endeavor, but I think it’s a great way, in a survey class, to let students explore their interests and to learn more about the various issues and challenges in education. […]
Author: Justin Reich
Income Achievement Gap Eclipses Racial Achievement Gap
I was thrilled last week to see that Sean Reardon’s work on income inequality and education was featured for two days on the New York Times home page (especially since the work was published in a book edited by my advisor, Richard Murnane.) What Reardon and his colleagues demonstrate is that the “income achievement gap” […]
Are iPads making a significant difference? Findings from Auburn Maine.
Audrey Watters has an interesting article on early results from an assessment of iPads deployed in kindergardens in Auburn, ME. It’s a perfect place for me to get to one of the core purposes of this blog– to look at educational research results and critique them from the perspective of a fellow researcher. The goal […]
Dan Meyer Live Tweets Sal Khan
This needed to be saved for posterity. (Dan, let me know if you want me to take it down). Hilarious and germane. If you want to read more of Dan’s work, please do check out blog.mrmeyer.com. It’s certainly the best reading out there on math education. [<a href=”http://storify.com/bjfr/dan-meyer-on-sal-khan-at-stanford” target=”_blank”>View the story “Dan Meyer on Sal Khan […]
Which Facts do We Need? Part II
A quick addendum to my recent post on the role of facts in learning. The point of that post was that students do need to memorize certain facts in the content areas if we want them to be able to do more cognitively difficult work. Another NYTimes article today about habits reinforces this point. In […]
Which Facts Do We Need?
Today was my first “real” class with my MIT students in 11.125, Understanding and Evaluating Education. They are a bright, thoughtful, engaged group, and I am really looking forward to getting to know them better and learning from them. I awoke and flipped open my iPad to check the news, and was delighted to see […]
Adventures in Singapore: Top Learnings from a Learning Journey
My Big Takeaways from Singapore This is the final post in a series of reflections about my two weeks spent as an Outstanding Educator in Residence at the Academy of Singapore Teachers. What I’m thankful for in American Education… I told two stories in Singapore that people found shocking. First, in several workshops I shared […]
Name Names Arne: Who are the Unfair Critics of No Excuses Schools
Arne Duncan spoke at Harvard’s Ed School on Monday, and he gave a speech that I thought had some very good points (and I’m not a huge Arne Duncan fan). His speech–Fighting the Wrong Educational Battles–argued that some of our either-or thinking about education is counter productive. He highlighted two areas: First, he rejected those […]
Ask a Researcher: Using the forest to make sense of the trees
In this segment of Ask a Researcher, I have a short dialogue with a fellow education researcher, Vance Martin, a post-doc at U. of Illinois. Vance has a chapter forthcoming in an edited volume about using wikis in a social studies methods class (and his dissertation on the optic is freely available: Using Wikis to […]
Adventures in Singapore: My Parting Thoughts in Slide Form
I gave two final presentations today: one to the staff at the Academy of Singapore Teachers and one to a group of School Principals. The first provides a little summary of my experience in Singapore with bullet points of my learnings and my suggestions. The second accompanies the message that I shared to school leaders […]