Recommended Articles - Spring 2017: Home

By John Etchemendy, former Provost of Stanford University: "We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one’s own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.”

New research on cognitive science suggests a greater link between the physical body and the realization of the mind. (Nate

The research shows that mindfulness reduces student stress and even improves academic outcomes.

"As vastness expands our worldview, it shrinks our ego. Awe makes spiritual and religious people feel a greater sense of oneness with others. And this oneness can make us nicer: Researchers found that inducing awe — say, by having people stand in a grove of tall trees — increased generosity, in part by stoking 'feelings of a small self.’” The article is replete with links to relevant research that you may find intriguing.

"The camera is inside a courtroom in Scottsboro, Alabama, with green marble walls, a deep wooden bench, and a gray-haired judge flanked by state and U.S. flags. It’s a drug-court session, for addicted offenders who have received state-supervised rehabilitation rather than jail time. Judge John Graham questions a pretty young woman with a pink streak in her brown hair, both of their accents like gobs of honey in their mouths. She states her sober date for the record and fidgets as she talks about getting her kid through school. Then Graham starts reciting Verse 37 of Walt Whitman’s 'Song of Myself.’ 'You laggards there on guard, look to your arms,' he says, behind the bench, as the camera surveys the room. 'In at the conquer’d doors they crowd, I am possess’d.' The woman nods, is dismissed.”

“Beginning my studies, the first step pleas’d me so much… / ....

“The constraints of rigid academic curricula in STEM programs leave little time to emphasize skills such as writing, communication, and organization,” yet employers in the engineering, finance, health care, and IT industries cite these skills as essential.

Simply put, “writing can be incorporated into any activity requiring problem solving.”

By Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for The New Yorker: "In a study, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.) [This is called] the 'illusion of explanatory depth.' People believe that they know way more than they actually do. Where it gets us into trouble is in the political domain. It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about.” (Caveat: This article about the perils of superficial thinking ironically includes a superficial dismissal of the entire Trump Administration. I regret that this is the case and hope that you will appreciate the bulk of the piece nonetheless.)

An excerpt: “We're in swampy territory if we see personalization as a silver bullet, or if we mistake it as the goal rather than as a means to a much larger end: linking students with meaningful learning, enabling collaboration that extends human understanding, and preparing students for a world that will demand of them both reason and wisdom.”

You might also be interested to look at this related chart created by Barbara Bray, an educational consultant, that attempts to distinguish personalization, differentiation, and individualization of instruction and learning.

”: "English teachers’ persistent effect on math is 70 percent of their persistent effect on English, while math teachers’ persistent effect on English is less than 5 percent of their persistent effect on math.”

Eugenia Cheng, author of “How to Bake Pi” and “Beyond Infinity,” says (provocatively) that math teachers are under pressure “to bring students to a certain level, and the only way they know is to drill and drill and drill. That’s not interesting for the people struggling, and it’s not interesting for the people who can already do it. It doesn’t encourage understanding and exploration, because all those things take too long.”

A charter school group operating in California and Washington that has received a lot of positive press.

Founded in New York City with a mission "to design a school-based learning model that integrates live, online, and collaborative learning in ways that meet the unique needs of each learner each day” using what they call personalized “curriculum playlists".

Education Week article on New Classrooms approach

Evidence builds that taking brief activity breaks during the day helps children learn and be more attentive in class, and a growing number of programs designed to promote movement are being adopted in schools.

Many such “scientific” pronouncements have emanated from the educational establishment over the last hundred years or so. The fact that the proven truths of each generation are discovered by the next to be harmful folly never discourages the current crop of experts who are keen to impose their freshly-minted certainties on children. Their tone of cool authority carries a clear message to the rest of us: “We know how children learn. You don’t.”

“The trees are very, very big. You already knew this. But in person, their bigness still feels unexpected, revelatory. And the delirium of their size is enhanced by their age. Some of the oldest sequoias are older than the English language and most of the world’s major religions.”

"...to think and reason flexibly with numbers, use numbers to solve problems, spot unreasonable answers, and make reasonable estimates”.

How much is 41 – 39? How about 100 – 3? Which of those computations was easier for you to do? It so happens that first graders are much more likely to solve 100 – 3 correctly than 41 – 39. Likewise, second graders are much more likely to solve 100 – 3 correctly than 201 – 199. Our data (Schoen et al. 2016) suggest that the latter problems are more difficult for students to solve correctly, because many students’ understanding of subtraction is limited by thinking about the operation only as take-away or by using a default procedure, such as the standard subtraction algorithm in the United States.

Jo Boaler at Stanford offers similar criticisms of traditional math instruction, arguing that math is too often taught as a “performance subject”; that the concept of being innately “good at math” is “an incorrect idea disproven by brain science”; and that “math is taught as a subject of speed and answers, rather than depth, struggle, and ideas.” She is speaking generally, of course. I am confident that our approach to math at Randolph is more human and effective than what she describes; but I also know that we can improve.

Recounts a conversation between a middle-aged man and his first-grade teacher, now 88 years old.

Contrasts “thick” and “thin” organizations. “Some organizations leave a mark on you, and some you pass through with scarcely a memory.