US Education Policy is Confused

And now, a re-post from a brilliant education scholar who understands what matters in education and what needs to be changed.  Yong Zhao recently moved to Oregon to become the Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon, Eugene. You can read his recent post here. His [...]

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Learning, not Teaching (for 21st Century education)

The next element, as we begin to define what the 21st-century-education-paradigm could look like, is to understand the difference between teaching and learning.  This is critical because the conventional education paradigm wants to think as one as the means to the other: that teaching leads to learning.  That’s the whole paradigm.  The 21st century education [...]

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Education down the Road Less Traveled

This gets scary pretty quickly, for some – change can do that.  Remember, Thomas Jefferson really threw a curve ball at the traditions of governing society when he formally put down that  “government by the people” bit in a world of monarchies.  This is radical terrain.  Many will claim that the new education paradigm is [...]

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Green Education or What Nature Wants

Remember the film “What Women Want?” ?  The premise was: have a man be able to “read a woman’s mind”, to be in her thoughts, so that “men” could gain insight into how women think and then presumably deal with them in  “healthier” way, equipped with this new insight.  Let’s pretend for a minute that [...]

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21st Century Education Paradigm

This is really hard to wrap one’s head around, or so I’m beginning to think. When I talk about a “new education paradigm” people seem to think that I’m talking about something “different”.  Sure, its different, but there’s “different” and then there’s DIFFERENT.  Thinking of the necessary paradigm shift merely as “different” fails to capture [...]

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China – education to emulate?

If we’d like a culture of poorly motivated and critically-thinking impaired people then- sure, let’s emulate China’s education system. Wait!  Don’t they “perform” really well by international standards?  Aren’t they the ones we’re chasing on math and science tests?  Don’t they win most of the competitions in US schools and always “do well”.. why wouldn’t [...]

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Education and Parenting

Some parents do a very good job of messing up their children’s lives. Some fail to prepare their children for their futures. Some think they are preparing them and are in fact doing harmful and destructive things.  In the latter category you can squarely place the recently published law prof-cum-author Amy Chua.  Her recent memoir, [...]

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Subject Literacy vs. Test Scores

So I’ve spoken quite a bit in this space about how testing doesn’t lead to, or reveal, learning.  I’ve argued that a test will not tell you what a student has learned, only what they’ve remembered.  Recently I’ve also mentioned how the Chinese are turning their backs on standardization and testing because they are realizing [...]

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