Education
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The Two Minds Of An Educator
by Terry Heick In his essay Two Minds, Wendell Berry, unsurprisingly enough, offers up two tones of thought produced by two kinds of ‘mind’—Rational, and Sympathetic. One is driven by logic, deduction, data, and measurement, the other by affection and other wasteful abstractions—instinct, reverence, joy, and faith. These minds struggle for to manifest in our collective behavior. That is, they both…
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Social Emotional Learning Strategies For The Classroom
contributed by Meg Price, the ei experience Social-emotional learning (SEL) by definition is a process for learning life skills, including how to deal with oneself, others, and relationships, and work in an effective manner. Although there are many great SEL programs, SEL can also be incorporated into each lesson as a way of teaching students to understand how to action…
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Teaching Students To See Quality
by Terry Heick Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you…
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Why Some Students Think They Dislike Reading
by Terry Heick We tend to teach reading in a very industrial way. We focus on giving kids ‘tools’ and ‘strategies’ to ‘make’ sense of a text. To ‘take the text apart’. To look for the ‘author’s purpose’—to bounce back and forth between a main idea, and the details that ‘support’ the main idea, as if the reading is some…
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Teach Students To Think Irrationally
Teach Students To Think Irrationally by Terry Heick Formal learning is a humbling thing. As planners, designers, executors, and general caretakers of public and private education systems, we are tasked with the insurmountable: overcome a child’s natural tendency to play, rebel, and self-direct in hopes of providing them with a ‘good education.’ Reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. And this isn’t wrong.…
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What Is Education Technology? – TeachThought
Introduction As a culture (and society and nation and species), we use language and words and phrases so often that they can be emptied of meaning. They kind of just fly out of our mouth: education technology and it’s just a noun that precedes another noun and predicate and off we go, leaving it in behind. Education technology. But exactly…
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On Teachers And Teaching And The Essential Criticism Of It All
In 2015 (and updated most recently in 2024), I wrote a post about helping students learn more from ‘others’ than they do from you (the teacher). The general premise is that modern learning is, in large part, about access, networks, spaces, and personalization–and there’s simply no way for a single teacher to ‘do’ this. In fact, it’s important to note…
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Things You Can Say To Encourage A Child
by TeachThought Staff There are many ways to encourage a child, but for students of any age, honest, authentic, and persistent messages from adults that have credibility in their eyes are among the most powerful. The National Center on Quality Teaching and Learning has put together a graphic below–50 Ways To Encourage A Child. It was designed for younger students (head…
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Some Thoughts On Knowledge And Knowledge Limits
Knowledge is limited. Knowledge deficits are unlimited. Knowing something–all of the things you don’t know collectively is a form of knowledge. There are many forms of knowledge–let’s think of knowledge in terms of physical weights, for now. Vague awareness is a ‘light’ form of knowledge: low weight and intensity and duration and urgency. Then specific awareness, maybe. Notions and observations,…
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Wendell Berry And Preparing Students For “Good Work”
by Terry Heick The influence of Berry on my life–and thus inseparably from my teaching and learning–has been immeasurable. His ideas on scale, limits, accountability, community, and careful thinking have a place in larger conversations about economy, culture, and vocation, if not politics, religion, and anyplace else where common sense fails to linger. But what about education? Below is a…
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