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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoThe One Best Way Is a Trap - by L. M. Sacasas2023-05-27T22:19:25+00:00
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-one-best-way
robertogreco2023 jacquesellul lmsacasas social technology human humanism standardization humanity efficiency optimization productivity homogeneity homogenizingeffects mentalhealth capitalism neoliberalism unschooling deschooling philchristman faith luddism fate gamification psychology freedom schooling schooliness progress bestpractices anxiety fear health pressure frustration self-loathing failure achievement technique quantification medicalization pharmaceuticals humans onebestwayhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:34f23f8978d9/Saying ‘No’ to Best Practices – OFFICE OF DIGITAL LEARNING2017-06-19T20:15:11+00:00
http://digitallearning.middcreate.net/instructional-design/saying-no-to-best-practices/
robertogrecoLearning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging ourselves to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust — trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community.
Critical pedagogy assumes that students want and are motivated to learn. Only about 75% of teachers I’ve talked to feel this way. We need to change that for ourselves. Teaching is not only more effective when we trust students to learn (which I distinguish from following instructions or passing a test), but it’s also more fun, more satisfying, and less exhausting.
Grade less / Grade differently
Peter Elbow writes, “Grading tends to undermine the climate for teaching and learning. Once we start grading their work, students are tempted to study or work for the grade rather than for learning.” We all know this is true. Working for a grade undermines not only a lifelong attitude toward learning, but also student agency. A critical pedagogy asks us to reconsider grading entirely; and if we can’t abandon it whole-hog, then we must revise how and why we grade. Consider allowing students to grade themselves. Offer personal feedback on work instead of a letter, number, or percentage. There are lots of options to evaluating work without artificial markers.
Question deadlines
When pressed, most teachers have told me that they enforce deadlines because students will need to meet deadlines in the “real world.” There are no students in higher education who got there without meeting deadlines. Education need not be militaristic about deadlines. Ideas and creation are more important than timeliness. I wrote, in my post called “Late Work,”
We are put in the most unique spot of coaching learners into a world of knowledge. What we need to remember is that their world of knowledge may not align perfectly with our own, their process may not fit our schedules, their ideas may not synch with our own.
Think about what you are actually teaching and question whether you need deadlines, whether students need deadlines, and whether either of you benefit from them.
Collaborate with students
Learners are pedagogues in their own right. Chris Friend, Director of the Hybrid Pedagogy journal, writes:
If we give students the freedom to choose their own path, they might choose poorly or make mistakes on our watch. But we must be willing to allow them the challenge of this authority, the dignity of this risk, and the opportunity to err and learn from their mistakes. They learn and gain expertise through experimentation.
If pedagogy is the sole purview of the instructor in the room, students are asked to follow along a path predetermined by that instructor’s best (we hope) intentions. However, because students bring different levels of expertise to any material or discussion—and because their lives, identities, and intersectionality inform their learning—students should be as involved in their own learning as possible. From syllabus creation to grading, building rubric and assignments to self-assessment. As Daniel Ginsberg writes, “my students are the most central members of the community in which I learn critical pedagogy.”
Inspire dialogue
Very little can be accomplished through direct instruction. Bloom’s Taxonomy makes a show of positioning knowledge-level learning as the foundation of any learning experience. But learning is more chaotic, messier, and more confounding than taxonomies provide for. In “Beyond Rigor,” Jesse Stommel, Pete Rorabaugh, and I argue that:
Intellectually rigorous work lives, thrives, and teems proudly outside conventional notions of academic rigor. Although institutions of higher education only recognize rigor when it mimics mastery of content, when it creates a hierarchy of expertise, when it maps clearly to pre-determined outcomes, there are works of exception — multimodal, collaborative, and playful — that push the boundaries of disciplinary allegiances, and don’t always wear their brains on their sleeves, so to speak.
Simply put, learning happens outside the lines. It’s perfectly acceptable for instructors to provide lines, but whenever we do so, we must just as diligently encourage learners to leave those lines—to question, to redraw, to imagine, to refuse, to explore. When we do this, we inspire dialogue, not just between students, but between ourselves and students, between ideas, between the act of learning and the act of instruction themselves.
Be quiet
Generally speaking, teachers fear dead air. Silence in the classroom, or few to no responses on a discussion forum, can stir all kinds of thoughts and emotions—from “they’re not getting it” to “I’ve done something wrong” to “they’re bored,” and worse. But in truth, thoughtfulness and thoroughness takes time.
Janine DeBaise writes that: “Every student has something valuable to teach the rest of us. I’ve made that assumption for over thirty years now, and so far, I’ve never been proven wrong.” If at the core of critical pedagogy we believe that learners are their own best teachers—and if we have spent any time at all as teachers ourselves preparing lesson plans and discussions—then we can acknowledge that teaching takes time.
Filling silence may come out of a desperation to keep the class moving and to ensure that all ideas are understood, but it also reinforces the teacher’s voice as primary. When we are silent, we can hear what students have to say (even when they’re not saying it), and listen for the swell of understanding as it builds.
Be honest and transparent about pedagogy
Teaching isn’t magic. In fact, there are very good reasons for teachers to reveal their “tricks” to learners. I have, numerous times, sat on the desk at the front of the classroom and called attention to how that’s different to standing behind a podium, sitting in a circle with the class, or lecturing from notes. Not to qualify one over the other, but to reveal something about the performativity of learning and teaching.
Similarly, we should invite students into a discussion about the syllabus, the 15- or 10-week structure of a course, the usefulness or uselessness of grades, etc. Kris Shaffer, in “An Open Letter to My Students,” brings students in close to his teaching process:
I am not perfect. Nor are any of your other professors. We are experts in the fields we teach, and some of us are experts in the art of teaching. However, we make mistakes … and each pass through the material brings new students with different experiences, backgrounds, skills, sensitivities, prejudices, loves, career goals, life goals, financial situations, etc. There is no one way — often not even a best way — to teach a topic to a student.
There is power in secrecy, as any magician knows. But for a collaborative, critical pedagogy to work, that power must be shared.
Keep expectations clear
In digital learning, instructions are vital. If we haven’t adequately prepared a learner to navigate whatever cockamamie educational technology we’re employing, then we’re setting that learner up to fail. And this applies more broadly to teaching in general. If we don’t make very clear what hopes we have for students, we lay the foundation for misunderstanding, distrust, angst, and combativeness in a classroom.
However, this does not mean we need to parse in clear terms our learning objectives for a course. Adam Heidebrink-Bruno writes, about the syllabus as a container of our expectations,
The problem with the form arises when we share this information without its cultural and historical contexts. The content appears isolated and meaningless. And while an educator may quickly jot down that “participation is worth 20% of your grade” or “office hours by request,” it is a wholly different experience to consider this rhetoric in relation to its implied ideologies.
In fact, learning objectives are a red herring when it comes to keeping expectations clear. We should think about expectations in terms of the community we are forming in a class; but we also need to be very honest about the ways a student might run aground of our own silent standards.
Be open to change
Thomas P. Kasulis wrote that “A class is a process, an independent organism with its own goals and dynamics. It is always something more than even the most imaginative lesson plan can predict.” Most teachers have had the experience of a class going “off the rails” at one time or another. In some cases, we struggle to get students back on course, back in line; but in other cases, we follow the lead of a tangent or derailment to a surprising, revelatory end.
And this is the most troubling side of best practices: they rarely allow for an improvisational approach, a “yes, and” methodology. Amy Collier and Jen Ross have written about the idea of not-yetness, a theory antithetical to evidence-based teaching. In “What about Qualitative Research in the ‘New Data Science of Learning‘?”, Amy offers:
Maggie Maclure calls the push for evidence-based education “animated by the desire for certainty, willing to sacrifice complexity and diversity for ‘harder’ evidence and the global tournament of standards.” The push for “harder evidence” often pushes out the kinds of learning and evidence that come from post-structural, phenomenological, and critical approaches.
The problem with the evidence-based approach, Amy goes on to say, is that it can’t account for learning that might be tied to a person’s identity, to the intersectional way in which they approach the material. In fact, the goal of best practices that come out of randomized controlled experiments is efficiency, not learning… not dialogue, not trust, and not collaboration. If we’re going to enact any best practices, they should be unattached to outcomes, deeply seated in our interest in students, and wholly malleable."]]>bestpractices education pedagogy teaching howweteach 2017 seanmorris learning edtech digitalliteracy jessestommel criticalpedagogy sfsh grade grading howwelearn deadlines collaboration chrisfriend hybridpedagogy dialogue peterorabaugh rigor janinedebaise silence quiet listening performativity expectations adamheidebring-bruno change thomaskasulis maggiemaclure krisshaffer amycollier jenrosshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8691ae508160/Education Gurus | the édu flâneuse2017-05-29T19:21:34+00:00
https://theeduflaneuse.com/2017/05/26/edu-gurus/
robertogrecocultofpersonality edugurus education australia newzealand 2017 deborahnetolicky learning research andyhargreaves michaelfullan lindadarling-hammond dianeravitch academia dylanwiliam bengoldacre scotteacott matenkoomen influence leadership thoughtleaders neo-taylorism schools georgelilley garyjones jonandrews bestpractices echochambers expertise expertshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8c05623fb57e/Amelia Greenhall: Start your own b(r)and: Everything I know about starting collaborative, feminist publications2015-05-13T02:22:59+00:00
http://ameliagreenhall.com/posts/start-your-own-b-r-and-everything-i-know-about-starting-collaborative-feminist-publications
robertogrecoadvice branding publishing startups publications howto organization bestpractices frameworks principles workflows organizations 2015 tutorials via:caseygollanhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:701fc5541d2b/Radical Computer Science — )2014-12-18T15:43:30+00:00
http://radicalcomputerscience.tumblr.com/post/105302974906
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http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/freire-made-mooc-open-education-resistance/
robertogrecomooc moocs seanmichaelmorris jessestommel paulofreire criticalpedagogy criticaldigitalpedagogy education highered highereducation conversation compulsory assessment outcomes bestpractices agency lcproject howweteach pedagogy learning howwelearn open openeducation henrygirouxhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d5489b817534/We Don’t Need New Models, We Need a New Mindset | Art Museum Teaching2014-09-26T07:09:28+00:00
http://artmuseumteaching.com/2014/09/25/we-dont-need-new-models-we-need-a-new-mindset/
robertogrecochange museums museumeducation 2014 complexity organizations models paradigmshifts theory karinamangu-ward practice bestpractices experience difference funding strategicplanning corevalues values experimentation failure art arteducation leadership evaluation purpose governance audience income revenuehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:81ec2338a8da/‘Building a Better Teacher’ and ‘Getting Schooled’ - NYTimes.com2014-08-25T02:25:15+00:00
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/building-a-better-teacher-and-getting-schooled.html
robertogrecoteaching howweteach learning 2014 math mathematics magdalenelampert deborahball garretkeizer schools bestpractices pedagogy inquiry problemsolving objectivity standardizedtesting accountability data elizabethgreen charterschoolshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a5f0825608eb/Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom | DML Hub2014-03-07T08:08:29+00:00
http://dmlhub.net/publications/teaching-connected-learning-classroom
robertogrecoanterogarcia mimiito connectedlearning 2014 bestpractices teaching pedagogy emergentcurriculum christinacantrill daniellefilipiak budhunt cliffordlee nicolemirra cindyodonnell-allen kyliepeppler classideas openstudioproject tcsnmy lcproject interest-drivenlearning learning peer-supportedlearning sharedpurpose networking production-centeredclassrooms interest-basedlearninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2c4a2e90ae24/@HistoryInPics, @HistoricalPics, @History_Pics: Why the wildly popular Twitter accounts are bad for history.2014-02-06T19:12:47+00:00
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2014/02/_historyinpics_historicalpics_history_pics_why_the_wildly_popular_twitter.single.html
robertogrecoEvery image is also an artifact—it has a creator, a context, and, in the era of film photography at least, a physical original that sits in a repository somewhere. Divorced from all that metadata, a stream of historical images is always going to be a shallow experience.
By not linking to sources or context, history pic accounts create an impression of history as a glossy, impervious façade."
…
"When she posted her rant on the history-pics phenomenon, the Folger’s Sarah Werner received pushback on Twitter, and was accused of being “against fun.” But a critique of this mode of history-on-Twitter is actually the opposite of elitist schoolmarmery. By posting the same types of photographs over and over and omitting context and links, these accounts are robbing readers of the joy of the historical rabbit hole—and they’re taking a dim, condescending view of the public’s appetite for complexity and breadth of interest.
In my capacity as blogger for the Vault, I spend a lot of time in (free!) digital archives, on the blogs of libraries and museums, and on sites produced by historians working inside and outside of the academy. A delirious pleasure of historical inquiry, on- and offline, lies in the twists and turns: You think you’re writing about children’s encyclopedias from the 1920s, and at the end of the day you’re researching the primatologist Robert Yerkes. This joy is easier than ever for anyone to experience, given the ever-growing body of linked information and original documents available on the Web.
I’m under no illusion that every blog reader follows the links I include to the archives where I find documents, or that every Twitter follower clicks on the links I put in @SlateVault tweets. But if they do, and they land in a digital archive or on a blog, they might see a slider pointing to related documents, a right rail with links to intriguing past posts, or an appealing subject heading. Or, they might decide to plug some of the information they find into Google Books, and see whether anything fun surfaces.
My hope is that I’m providing a starting point, not an end point, with each post. I never know for sure if what sparks my own curiosity will kindle a similar fire with readers, but if it does, I want readers to be able to pursue the subject beyond the confines of my short posts and tweets. The history-pics accounts give no impression of even knowing this web of legitimate, varied historical content exists. Given their huge follower counts, this is a missed opportunity—for their readers, and for the historians and archivists who would thrill to larger audiences for their work."]]>history curiosity rebeccaonion sarahwerner @HistoryInPics @HistoricalPics @History_Pics johnoverholt questioning askingquestions attribution context mattnovak truth twitter alexismadrigal discovery learning complexity artifacts bestpractices tumblr research howweshare internet web online 2014 questionaskinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e90af88753ee/Hive NYC Learning Network2013-07-20T20:45:13+00:00
http://explorecreateshare.org/
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http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/legible-practises
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http://www.sesameworkshop.org/our-blog/2012/12/17/sesames-best-practices-guide-for-childrens-app-development/
robertogreco2012 bestpractices sesamestreet appdev appdesign education mobile gamedev children applications ipad developmenthttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:51a5d65049ab/Instagram i love you - YouTube2012-11-03T04:07:39+00:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GacoqdKjVyE
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http://borderland.northernattitude.org/2011/12/16/a-good-day/
robertogrecoteaching dougnoon 2011 noticing humanconsciousness consciousness perspective howweteach observation introspection whatmatters cv bestpracticeshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fbcfe9580d34/leading and learning: Let's celebrate those few creative teachers -and even fewer creative schools. They are the future.2011-08-03T11:06:47+00:00
http://leading-learning.blogspot.com/2011/08/time-now-to-let-students-really-learn.html
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/why-schools-should-try-things.html
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html
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http://www.freddesign.co.uk/2009/12/archive/rules-for-good-typography/
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http://code.google.com/speed/articles/
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http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_thoughtful_user_guide/writing_my_twitter_etiquette_article_14_ways_to_use_twitter_politely.php
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http://designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=38855
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http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/07/howto-make-online-vi.html
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