Ken Haynes, former public school teacher and current specialist in the emerging field of digital education, participated in a NISCE professional conversation held at Boston Green Academy. This group had a round-table discussion exploring the concept of ‘student-centered education,’ and Ken shared his varied experiences in creating effective learning environments in a variety of settings. He offered the following thoughts in response to questions drawn from that conversation.You were a teacher … [Read more...]
Inspiring Reading From Grade School Through Grad School
Research shows that Americans are reading less and that those who are reading are reading less well. This is according to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts which notes that, "Less than one-third of 13-year olds are daily readers, a 14 % decline from 20 years early," and that "Reading scores for 12th-graders fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines in the amount for lower-level readers." How is it that parents, educators, and individuals who are concerned … [Read more...]
Can A Child In India Teach You Something About Learning And Education?
When most of us think about education we assume the presence of at least one teacher and one student. More often, we imagine a teacher and a room full of students, the classic and ubiquitous model with which we are all familiar. Who of us imagines a room with no teacher?One answer to that would be Sugata Mitra, an education researcher from India who has done remarkable work in an unusual line of thinking. Mitra has made it his business to investigate a very difficult question: What can be done … [Read more...]
Self Teaching – Are you a genius yet?
A great deal of what we learn is self-taught. We learn through modeling, observation, trial and error, and pattern recognition, and we do all these things with or without the help of others.As evolving humans, this is what we do. As many philosophers of education point out, we are hungry for learning and will naturally develop many important skills and realms of knowledge with no more than the slightest nudge from those around us. In a very true sense, we are students of our world, … [Read more...]
