Article Archive
The Berkman Center recently asked me to provide an update on my work over recent months. Here it is: Greetings! Sorry for my tardiness. I've spent the the last two weeks in Singapore, serving as an Outstanding Educator in Residence with the Academy of Singapore Teachers. It has been an amazing exchange, and incredibly […]
After many days working with the Ministry of Education and Academy of Singapore Teachers, I have *finally* had the chance to get into some schools! I had two terrific visits to two very different classrooms, and I left both visits energized and excited about the future of education technology in Singapore. My first visit was […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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” […]
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. […]
I'm very pleased to announce that the first report from my research project, the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, is published in this month's issue of Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association. The article can be found through this direct link or at this landing page and is titled, "The […]
The Pew Internet and American Life Project is one of the great research treasures of America, constantly producing provocative surveys describing our evolving relationship with technology. In partnership with Elon University's, they've released a report on Imagining the Internet, under this headline: Teens-to-20s to benefit and suffer due to 'always-on' lives. From their amazing ability to juggle many tasks […]
Mike Muir and I are having a productive, respectful back and forth specifically about his research concerning iPads in Kindergarten classrooms and more broadly about how practitioners should deal with educational research that uses statistical methods. I'm going to start with this reminder (which Mike has echoed in his own way): I think it's completely […]