“Distance learning gives me more control of my studies. I can focus more time on subjects that require greater effort and study. I don’t have to sit through a teacher fielding questions that have already been answered. I can still collaborate with other students, but much more effectively… I’ve also found that I prefer some of the recorded lessons that my teachers post to Google Classroom over the lessons they taught in person.”
“This guide is meant to give you hope and fear. To beat COVID-19 in a way that also protects our mental & financial health, we need optimism to create plans, and pessimism to create backup plans. As Gladys Bronwyn Stern once said, “The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.””
“The fields of neuroscience and psychology, when paired, offer new insights on the principles of effective instruction.”
“When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller.”
“I think all teachers teaching online during the Coronavirus online learning period should pay particularly close attention to the Transactional Distance Theory’s core constructs of dialogue and structure.”
“A teacher can be soft-spoken, not someone we’d describe as extroverted or funny, but still create an excellent learning environment. What really matters is the ability to demonstrate compassion and emotional constancy, the cultural competency needed to develop trust and understanding with students, and the courage to, as Brené Brown writes, take risks and be vulnerable.
“Right now, a machine is breathing for my father, buying time in a ward I can neither visit nor see. The doctors talk a lot about time: How fast or slow he breathes — COVID comes for your breath — and how quick or sluggish his blood pressure, the beat of his heart. There is almost nothing I can do but call his carers, wait, and hope. In that morass of powerlessness, I’ve found myself reciting the snippets of poems I’ve picked up along the way. If nothing else, their meter overtakes the racing of mine.”
“A recent study… looking at longer-term outcomes described “Sesame Street” as “the first mooc.” But that description sells the show short; massive open online courses, like other kinds of “remote teaching,” are mainly an educational catastrophe… The story was different with “Sesame Street.” For kids who were under six in 1969, watching “Sesame Street” had a measurable effect on what is known as “grade for age” status: they entered school at grade level, and, in elementary school, they stayed on grade level.”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson