Category Archives: Essays/Readings

This category often, but not always, designates a piece of my own writing on a topic on a variety of topics. So, if you are interested in listening to me bloviate, click on this category! The Essays/Readings category may also include extended quotes from books, particularly on pedagogy, literacy, terms of art, and philosophy.

One Thought About Teaching Students to Make Connections

Posted on September 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Drawing connections to students’ personal lives, embedding the introduction of new concepts and skills within meaningful tasks, and emphasizing the instrumental value of mastering a skill or or doing well in a subject area enhances value. For example, teachers can bring in speakers and experts from the local community to more authentically draw connections with life outside of school. A second way to enhance value is by incorporating topics that students find interesting (e.g. space travel, dinosaurs). Finally, value may be enhanced by having students work on questions and use practices similar to those used by members of the discipline (e.g. scientists and mathematicians).”

Phyllis C. Blumenfeld, Toni M. Kempler, and Joseph S. Krajcik, “Motivation and Cognitive Engagement in Learning Environments,” in The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, ed. Robert Keith Sawyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 477.

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Strategies for Creating Cognitive Apprenticeships

Posted on July 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

During the month of July, I generally try to work on planning and professional development, so I’ve had my nose in both for the past three weeks. The summer’s reading is The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, which, 205 pages in, I have not found as useful to my own practice as I did The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Still, there are plenty of important ideas articulated in the book (Cambridge University Press has thoughtfully posted as a giveaway this PDF of the introduction to the book, by its editor, R. Keith Sawyer; if you search The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, you’ll find a couple of different PDFs from its pages for free download as well.)

One of the first articles in this volume is by Allan M. Collins, who, as you can see from his Wikipedia page, is an important figure in the learning sciences. I like his ideas about cognitive apprenticeship. Here is an outline describing cognitive apprenticeship strategies that I took from his article and typed into a Word document.

I hope you find it useful.

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A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Learning about Learning

Posted on July 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

Kids who struggle to learn need all the help they can get. I work to incorporate into my teaching practice–I have a category of curriculum I simply call “Focus on Learning Methods”–readings that describe the act of learning. If our struggling students can understand the learning process, then they can begin to understand their own struggles with it. From there, students have a real opportunity to learn how they learn, and begin approaching the demands of school with an understanding of how they can meet them.

So, what use for the special education teacher in this situation? Little to none, I would hope–that’s the point of this. The students is autonomous, and the teacher has done his or her job. A pint of ale and a few episodes of “Family Guy,” anyone?

One of the many projects I have going is a unit on learning on cognition. Needless to say, this Intellectual Devotional reading on learning and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it would form one of the mainstays of such a unit.

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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The Education Bloggers Network

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

Mark’s Text Terminal is now part of  The Education Bloggers Network, about which I am particularly excited. What is the Education Bloggers Network? The Network was founded by Jonathan Pelto, who sent me this conspectus of its mission:

The Education Bloggers Network:

The Education Bloggers Network is an informal confederation of more than 230 bloggers who are dedicated to supporting public education, pushing back the corporate education reform industry and their agenda, while ensuring that the voices of parents, teachers and other educators are part of the national, state and local debate about education policy.

While many members of the Network have their own blogs sites, some write commentary pieces for national, regional and local newspapers while others use their Facebook or other social media platforms to write about education issues.

Like the Committees of Correspondence leading up to America’s War for Independence, education bloggers work alone, in groups and as a collective to educate, persuade and mobilize parents, teachers, education advocates and citizens to stand up and speak out against those who seek to undermine public education, privatize public schools and turn classrooms into little more than Common Core testing factories.

The Education Bloggers Network was developed in conjunction with the publication and roll-out of Diane Ravitch’s best-selling book, “Reign of Error.”    It was founded and is managed by Jonathan Pelto, an education advocate, former member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, communications strategist and education blogger. 

The Education Bloggers Network has become a vibrant community of advocacy journalists, investigative bloggers and public education activists working to make sure that citizens have accurate and timely information about public education issues at the local, state and federal level.

I thank Jonathan Pelto for extending an invitation to join this distinguished group of scholars, educators, journalists, writers and activists.

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bell hooks on Teaching as an Exercise of Students’ Wills

Posted on July 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

“I entered the classroom with the conviction that is was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer…education that connects the will to know with the will to become.”

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (1994)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Horace Mann on Education as a Human Right

Posted on June 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

“I believe in the existence of a great, immutable principle of natural law, or natural ethics which proves the absolute right of every human being that comes into the world to an education; and which, of course, proves the correlative duty of every government to see that the means of an education are provided for all.”

Horace Mann, as Quoted in Places for Learning, Places for Joy: Speculations on American School Reform by Theodore R. Sizer (1973)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Sequencing DNA in High School Science Classes

Posted on May 31, 2017 | Leave a comment

Back in the early 1980s, while living in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, I fell in with a group of doctoral candidates in the genetics department of the University of Wisconsin. I was and remain no genius when it comes to science. At that time, the lab in which these scholars worked, under the direction of a man named Fred Blattner, was on the cutting edge of genetic research. So perhaps only initiates into that world really understood what was going on in the Blattner Lab, as it was known.

The fellow who introduced me to this circle, Tim Durfee, remains a close friend of mine. So I was delighted this week when he sent me a PDF from the Genome Web on a new technology, developed at Columbia University, to bring what was once the arcane science of DNA sequencing into middle school and high school classrooms. Tim will develop the analytical software for this endeavor, and he is clearly excited about it.

For this is, in fact, exciting: bringing real-world scientific inquiry into the high school classroom can only be a good thing. If this interests you, you may want to have a look at this PDF: PlayDNA Works on Bringing DNA Sequencing, Big Data Analysis to Secondary Schools.

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Some Important Words for Our Time from George S. Counts

Posted on May 22, 2017 | Leave a comment

“To refuse to face the task of creating a vision of a future America immeasurably more just and noble and beautiful than the America of today is to evade the most crucial, difficult, and important educational task.”

George S. Counts (1889-1874) As Quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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The Weekly Text, May 12, 2017: A Taxonomy of Questions from the Harvard Business School

Posted on May 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

In my classroom, I rely almost exclusively on the Socratic method in my teaching for a variety of reasons, the most salient of them is simply that students who are talking in class–i.e. answering questions–are also thinking. As Daniel Willingham, the cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia (with whose work all teachers ought to familiarize themselves) succinctly puts it, “memory is the residue of thought.” If you want your students to retain what you teach them, ask questions that compel–or, one hopes, impel– them to think about the matter at hand in your classroom.

A couple of years ago I read Education for Judgement: The Art of Discussion Leadership by C. Roland Christenson, David A. Garvin, and Ann Sweet and published at the Harvard Business School Press. It’s one of the better books I’ve read for my own professional development, and I highly recommend it. To give you a sense of the riches this book contains for those interested in developing their skills in leading class discussion, I offer as this week’s Text this taxonomy of questions from its pages.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. Since this isn’t my work, I seek no peer review of it (and in any case, it seems like a safe bet that this material has been peer-reviewed by some of the best people in education).

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Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Reference, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text

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Screens and Cognition

Posted on April 19, 2017 | Leave a comment

If your school is dealing with rules concerning cell phones, and more specifically, smartphones, then I wish you luck. I won’t win any friends with the administration of my school in noting–as I have to the administration itself–that it has failed in its attempt to arrive at a sensible policy regarding these devices. In fairness to the principal and assistant principals of this institution, this is a very complicated and challenging area in which to formulate disciplinary code.

Educators can muster many reasons for prohibiting the use of smartphones in school. At the very least, they are a serious distraction and impede learning. It now appears that these devices may impair cognition and stunt brain development, perhaps permanently. For some time I’ve been waiting for the science on this, particularly science that teachers can use to design teaching activities that raise students’ consciousness about the risks theytake when they use smartphones excessively. My own sense is that until we educate students about the hazards of these devices, we don’t stand a chance of competing with them, let alone assisting students in developing their own understanding of the hazards of the excessive use of smartphones.

So, lo and behold, this morning when I woke up, I heard a short squib on the BBC about the problems associated with excessive social media use–which is the mainstay, I expect, of patterns of smartphone use among adolescents. I can’t find the exact link, but if you search “BBC Social Media Report” in your preferred internet browser, you’ll find that the BBC has done an comprehensive job covering this.

After getting myself to Lower Manhattan on the 5 train, I turned on my computer, opened Diane Ravitch’s Blog, scrolled down a few posts, and found that she posted yesterday this excellent post from Edward Berger (which actually links to a podcast) on the dangers of excessive screen use among children.

In my not especially humble, but nonetheless formed-from-direct-experience, opinion, smartphones are one of the major educational issues (and this, remember, in an environment where someone as manifestly unqualified as Betsy DeVos can be named Secretary of Education) facing teachers. Until we develop pedagogy around the cognitive hazards of excessive screen time, we will play a losing game with smartphones.

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