ARTICLE: Experimental School Gets Rid of Classes, Teachers

Imagine a school where students select their own learning projects rather than having scheduled classes, where adults serve as guides and critics rather than teachers, where technology is employed as a learning infrastructure, where loners feel comfortable and collaboration is promoted, and where test performances are perfectly fine... more»

VIDEO: A vision of students today [about the world and education]

Here's a short video made by some college students summarizing how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams & what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime... more»

ARTICLE: Failing Schools Strain to Meet U.S. Standard

"More than 1,000 of California’s 9,500 schools are branded chronic failures, and the numbers are growing. Barring revisions in the law, state officials predict that all 6,063 public schools serving poor students will be declared in need of restructuring by 2014, when the law requires universal proficiency in math and reading.

“What are we supposed to do?” Ms. Paramo asked. “Shut down every school?” more»

OPINION: Cave Man Didn’t Have Classrooms

In the beginning, there was action -- and learning was accomplished through sustained apprenticeships and deliberative practice. And now, of course, there is still action -- but we put a lot of energy into thinking it isn't the central thing... more»

The cave man’s mind was never prepared for, or concerned with, knowing. There was no test. There were no game shows. There was no Nobel Prize. There was action. The winner was the person who brought down the elk or buffalo. He didn’t have to know how to do it, at least not consciously. He had to be able to do it. What knowledge he had was unconscious. He may not have been able to say what he knew that helped him throw a rock straight. He could just do it. He practiced a lot.

INTERACTIVE MEDIA: What will shape the future of Education? The 2006-2016 Education Map

Here's a research-based interactive and participatory map of the predicted major influences on education over the coming decade... more»

RESOURCE: New Graduation Rate Resource

Here's a beta version of a new online mapping tool to help the public, policymakers, and educational leaders understand the high school graduation crisis... web site» tool» article»

RESOURCE: The National Science Digital Library

NSDL is the U.S. online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. more»

CONSENSUS REPORT: Learning In and Out of School in Diverse Environments

This new report summarizes important principles that educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers can use to build upon the learning that occurs in the homes and community cultures of students from diverse groups...

announcement»
report»
slides»

PRINCIPLE 1: Learning is situated in broad socio-economic and historical contexts and is mediated by local cultural practices and perspectives.

PRINCIPLE 2: Learning takes place not only in school but also in the multiple contexts and valued practices of everyday lives across the life span.

PRINCIPLE 3: All learners need multiple sources of support from a variety of institutions to promote their personal and intellectual development.

PRINCIPLE 4: Learning is facilitated when learners are encouraged to use their home and community language resources as a basis for expanding their linguistic repertoires.

ARTICLE: Beginning the Journey: Five-Year-Olds Drive Their Own PBL Projects

Project-based learning ties nicely into role play dimensions of early development. "Student-driven projects, enhanced by technology, launch kindergartners on their way to lifelong learning..." more»

ARTICLE: Language Gap Mars Parent-Teacher Chats

Federal law requires school districts to provide interpreters for parent-teacher conferences. But demand far outstrips the state and federal funds provided. How are schools adapting? more»

ARTICLE: As States Feel Pressed to Revisit Standards, Calls Are Being Renewed to Tighten Them

At a time of increased interdisciplinarity and an exponential expansion in data production, is it really the time for narrowing the curricular goals of K-12 education? Moves toward fewer standards might be a good fit with the heightened attention to inherently narrow accountability structures like high-stakes tests. But will fewer concepts taught more coherently across 13 years of instruction really serve youth well? Could we ever agree what those "core" concepts should be? more»

ARTICLE: New Breed of Digital Tutors Yielding Learning Gains

Describing the work of the LearnLab Science of Learning Center, here's an interesting article on the scaling of cognitive tutors out into school instruction... more»

Educators are finding that "intelligent tutors" are an effective supplement to classroom instruction, thanks to their ability to understand a student's shortcomings, customize instruction, and provide instant tracking of behavior. Developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, Cognitive Tutor programs are currently in use in 1,500 school districts nationwide, and are either available on the market or in development for instruction in chemistry, foreign language, reading, and computer science, among other subjects. "What distinguishes intelligent tutors from integrated learning systems or skill-building software is that the tutors sort of both scaffold and support more complex cognitive processes," said Center for Children and Technology director Margaret Honey. "Well-designed tutors are smart enough to know there's not a single way to solve a problem, and that's what makes them 'intelligent.'" The NSF, the pentagon, and the Department of Education have supported intelligent-tutoring systems since the 1970s, but in a 2004 What Works Clearinghouse study, Cognitive Tutor Algebra was one of only two middle school math programs to receive a "positive" rating for effectiveness. Studies have shown that Cognitive Tutor can improve a student's performance by a single letter grade, while one-on-one human instruction has been found to increase performance by two letter grades. The "goal is not to replace teaching," explains CMU human-computer interaction professor Kenneth R. Koedinger. "It's to give teachers more time to do what they do best ... The contrast to use might be a textbook. With textbooks, students don't get feedback on solutions."

STUDY: Opportunities to Learn in America's Elementary Classrooms

Here's an analysis of elementary school classrooms in the United States that is discouraging in terms of the range of quality of students' experiences... more» activity mapping»

BOOK: The Cultural Production of the Educated Person

We seem to have a real difficult time understanding the cultural work associated with schooling. Not a new perspective, but still one that doesn't get enough consideration... more»

We argue that the concept of "cultural production" allows us to better understand the resources for, and constraints upon, social action -- the interplay of agency and structure -- in a variety of educational institutions. We also argue that a culturally specific and relative conception of the "educated person" allows us to appreciate the historical and cultural particularities of the "products" of education, and thus provides a framework for understanding conflicts around different kinds of schooling. (1996, p. 3)

BOOK: Dividing classes: How the middle class negotiates and rationalizes school advantage

Social class is an organizing category in education. The values of dominant groups help explain the reproduction of social class... more»

First, adult wages vary widely, with the income gap increasing over recent years...Second, per capita pupil expenditure correlates with social class; hence schools differ in the quality of their facilities, materials, and human resources...Third, there is a high correspondence between student class status and school achievement and attainment...Although these strong links between class status, school structures, and student outcomes are well known, social class is still ignored or treated as if it were relatively unimportant to schooling. (Brantlinger, p. 1)

STUDY: The Cultural Work of Learning Disabilities

"Culturally and educationally, the United States specializes in the production of kinds of persons described first by ethnic, racial, and linguistic lines and second by supposed mental abilities. Overlaps between the two systems of classification are frequent, systematically haphazard, and often deleterious..." more»

BOOK: Successful Failure: The School America Builds

We have organized our schools to manufacture individual success and failure... more»

The success and failure system, as a cultural fact, is real in its connections to the political economy, exquisitely detailed in its connections with the everyday behavior of the people who make up the system, and in both these ways massively consequential in the lives of all. Yet it does not have to be this way, and if everyone stopped measuring, explaining, and remediating, school success and failure would in a significant sense disappear. Other ways to stratify would soon evolve, but this evolution would have the virtue of separating education from resource allocation. (Varenne & McDermott, 1998, p. viii)

REPORT: From Cradle to Career - Quality Counts 2007 (EdWeek)

Progress indicators of state efforts to create seamless education systems from early childhood to the world of work. Where a child lives matters for his or her life prospects. Children from low-income families perform significantly worse when they enter kidergarten. Poor 12th graders read on par with affluent 8th graders... more»