Yearly Archives: 2020

John Dewey on Practice

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Practice, exercise, are involved in the acquisition of power, but they do not take the form of meaningless drill, but of practicing the art. They occur as part of the operation of attaining a desired end…. All genuine education terminates in discipline, but it proceeds by engaging the mind in activities worthwhile for their own sake.”

John Dewey

How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

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A Teaching Support on Scripted Activity Structure

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

Here’s another teaching support as a table of scripted activities structures I grabbed a couple of years ago from R. Keith Sawyer’s (ed.) book The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Before you blow this off like I probably would after reading the adjective “scripted”, let me point out that this isn’t scripted curriculum like the crap that various educational “innovators” or “entrepreneurs” all too frequently shill in our schools, but rather structured methods of inquiry that are, in fact, scholarly in structure.

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Term of Art: Novel

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Novel (noun): A work of prose fiction, usually an extended narrative but often idiosyncratic in structure, that tells a story or uses incident and setting to dramatize human experience and individual character, whether through imagination, re-creation of real-life existence, intricate or rich plot, the author’s particular vision or persona, or all of these; the genre of this type of prose writing. Adjective: novelistic; adverb: novelistically; verb: novelize.

‘At this late date—partly due to the New Journalism itself—it’s hard to explain what an American dream the ideas or writing a novel in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever. It belonged in the glossary to A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, somewhere between Narcissism and Obsessional Neuroses.’”

Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences

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Tycho Brahe

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

This reading on Tycho Brahe and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet have turned out, to my surprise, to be surprisingly high-interest materials for a certain kind of student I have served over the years. If you can persuade students that Brahe, like Galileo and Johannes Kepler, was in rebellion against the established authorities (church, but also, where they were closely aligned, state as well) of his time, well, what adolescent isn’t interested in acts of rebellion?

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

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A Teaching Support on Designing Cognitive Apprenticeship Environments

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

I’ve posted a lot of learning supports on Mark’s Text Terminal, but here is a teaching support in the form of an outline of principles on designing cognitive apprenticeship environments.

For the record, this was lifted from Allen M. Collins article “Cognitive Apprenticeship,” which I read in R. Keith Sawyer’s (ed.) book The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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On Education and Data and Ethos

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Murray Cohn has, for twenty-three years, run Brandeis according to his own lights. He believes in cleanliness and order—and the halls of Brandeis are clean and orderly. He believes in homework, especially writing—and the students do it, even if they don’t do enough. He believes in publicly praising achievement—and the schools bulletin boards offer congratulations to attendance leaders and the like. What Cohn and other administrators like him impart to their schools is nothing quantifiable; it is an ethos.”

James Traub, as quote in The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education (1985)

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Auxiliary (n/adj)

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

Here are two context clues context clues worksheets on auxiliary as both a noun and an adjective. I’ll assume I don’t need to defend the teaching of this word in whatever part of speech it is used.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Term of Art: Semiotics

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Semiotics: An argument for the construction of meaning through structures of symbols that began with early-20th-century linguistics. In it the ‘signifier’ (a written or spoken word) and the ‘signified’ (the actual object of concept referred to) together form a ‘sign.’ It became useful for examining other cultural products as codes, including art. Magritte’s The Uses of Words I takes a semiotic approach to art-making. By painting the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe) under the image of a pipe, he questioned pictorial representation. It is not actually a pipe, merely its image. The broader impact of semiotics has been in postmodern art and criticism in studies of the power of cultural signs that are examined, reexamined, and deconstructed.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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The Weekly Text, January 10, 2020: A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Roots Bi and Bin

Posted on January 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Latin word roots bi and bin, which mean, of course, two and twice. In the hope that it will hint to students the meaning of these roots, I open this lesson plan with this context clues worksheet on the noun adjective dual. Finally, here is the word root worksheet that is the substance of this lesson.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Angles

Posted on January 8, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Angles: A Germanic people first heard of on the Baltic coasts of Jutland. On the evidence of their pottery found at a number of late Roman settlements in England, they were probably present as Foederati in the later c4 AD. In c5 they took part in the Anglo-Saxon migrations across the North Sea to settle the eastern parts of England after the breakdown of Roman rule. The archaeological evidence is treated under Anglo-Saxons since by this period the distinction between the two peoples had all but disappeared. Their names survives in East Anglia and England.”

Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.

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