Now how to get creativity

In this you tube, Pythagore and maths.

Education Sunday (4)

Another approach to education would be to look at what is a good practice. There are institutes, teachers, schools and researchers that already work that way that I've encountered in the Netherlands on internet. I don't know any worldwide examples but I'm sure they exist. However, serendip is a site where psychologists and biologists get into discussions on the human mind during their studies and is one of my favorite examples of a good practice teaching. I have more on this blog somewhere... (this blog is starting to look like my purse).

bipolar direction

Instead of bipolar depression, I've two directions at this present moment that pull at me. One is to read a book of a close friend author, the other is to cowrite a manifest for education from enlightened parents viewpoint. I can't help think of four books I'm reading, still surprisingly actual even though the book of Piaget contains ideas formulated before the second world war...
(1) pedagogy book on Dutch pedagogic thinkers
(2) booklet of Piaget commenting education
(3) book of Feuerstein on assessment with his method
(4) book of Tzuriel on dynamic assessment

Also I have to think on blog entries I have been making both on this blog and on the Dutch blog since I started this blog.

Both directions were becomming apparent last year already. Now they're starting to assume a shape.

fruit of education

I've reacted on a post of a theater personnality and now I'm (we're) trying to find out if there's a need for a platform for education that draws the attention to the motivation of children at college. It fits what I've been writing and reading for a few years. I've got many ideas that are in a shapeless format and I'm going to peel them.

better education; icerocket trends

Icerocket statistics look a bit like scaffolds, don't they? According to icerocket trend, there were about 4600 - 4900 posts on education and learning every day in the past three months, against only 20 on scaffolding. I'm guessing this means scaffolding is not yet very known to many who write about education. That's a real pitty, because it is a method that builds children, adolescents and adults and we know already, that there is a relationship between the development of skills and frustration. If we want to do things better, more scaffolding techniques is one of the ways.

why some schools have underachievement

Underachievement. I tried to find an article that had the title: "why some schools have underachievement." (in dutch) but couldn't, because I live too far from real libraries, except for internet. Some articles are cited in other articles and are difficult to get.
Maybe I should have tried harder. I had other things to do. Because now it seems that this school has it.
When turning to the web, I come up with this (incomplete) list:
immigration difficulties
material deprivation and labelling
being a boy
communication skills

hmmm... I'm wondering whether underachieving is influenced by culture. In the Netherlands, the culture of "don't raise your head above the mowing field" is said to be one of the causes of underachievement.

the mean group

There are different concepts in education. One is the so called classical method that has the teacher facing the classroom. Here (in the Netherlands) this method is very common and might be used in classrooms with small groups of tables too. There is an increasing demand for more levels within one classroom. The norm is the mean of the results of the students of the same group. There is little variation in age, and variation is not seen as positive but rather as a problem. The problem is then solved by creating subgroups and again the same system of mean is used for the subgroup. There is a problem. There are quite a few children that fall out. Partly they fall out because they cannot cope with adapting to the difficulty of the tasks, partly they fall out because the tasks are too easy.

Weather to blog: clouds of tags

Do you like clouds of keywords? These are a visual representation of tags for your website or blog. I don't have one here, but I have one at del.icio.us . I'm a very busy mother and I like that I don't have to bother with templates and clouds, when I don't want to. The point is, that I do have children that want to learn and this is why I try to be a step ahead and read about how to make use of the cloud of tags in an educational fun way.

That's why I love sites such as Hackzine.

list of learning

I came across a list of different types of learning. From algorithms to decision trees, to-down, Q-learning and bayesian learning. I'm also putting the link in my linksroll.
Neural networks defines top-down learning as a set of cascades of rules. An article that takes time to understand. Did he say that it will take many years before we can program a robot to 'decide' how to answer to spoken language (top-down)?

busy, busy...

These are busy days... I'm busy with the children and school, administration and groceries. In the middle of that I got a new idea for two new books. One a very practical book for education, the other a comprehensive theory, explaining and predicting mechanisms. I'm excited about these ideas. But how will I find the energy and the time?
I also have an idea to translate a book that I think should be translated. (I have to check if it isn't)

list of carnivals of education

Do you know what a blogcarnival is, exactly? I came across these when I started blogging. Carnivals are lists of blogs that blog about a certain topic. They are a not complete but good way to find a lot of blogs that you might want to read.
I found this list of carnivals of education. Don't ask me why it is called carnival.

Quality control ignores creativity

Quality control fixes everything in static IF THEN format rules, but what about creativity? The systematic flaw of quality management is it's disability to recognize what it does not know.

What about creativity?

My husband who works in education told me this very smart metaphor for building a curriculum. Imagine we put all quality content in a curriculum in bricks to build the curriculum building. All bricks are labelled for content: A, B, and so on. Then we look at the heap and everyone that went through the pile of bricks gets the certificate. But if we take a look at the heap, it is no building, just a heap. A building is characterized by the relationships between the bricks, it is not merely a heap of excellent building material.

Now look again at parameters.

new government, knowledge based education

Yesterday in the Netherlands we were presented with the new government. It was a pleasurable surprise to find out that the education department will now be in the hands of not only a scientist, but a critical thinker. A scientist who engages in discussions over intelligent design versus evolution. Although he is an advocate of evolution, he promised it will not affect the freedom of schools, meaning the special schools will not be affected. I am happy that we have a very intelligent minister at this post. This means I hope better policies and a signal that education will be taken seriously. Now is the chance to accomplish what Piaget pleaded for, more use of science and knowledge in education. Let's hope we will see a change in the curricula that takes more into consideration learning styles and more favorable conditions for all children. I hope the emphasis will shift towards learning strategies and problem solving against reproductive skills only.

Difficult puzzle, scaffolding & automatisation

Difficult puzzles need a strategy to be able to solve them. Smart children just try solving them, trusting their solving skills rather than a strategy. This works until they face a puzzle that seems not to work in that way. Then they have to try something called multilayered strategy. This is exactly the aim of scaffolding, getting insight in structure of solution, rather than being able to just solve the puzzle without having to worry how they did it.
In the midst of this comes emotions that are new to smart children: failure, frustration, stress... These emotions are often successfully avoided because smart children often can solve problems easily. When the puzzle is difficult enough, they get the chance to experience these emotions. A good teacher knows that emotions are a part of education. It is good to reflect on the emotions. What happened? How did you feel?
Then the child has to finish the task anyway. This means perseverance. The more perseverance, the better the child will feel when it does succeed to solve the problem in the end.
When they succeeded to solve the difficult puzzle, accompanied with the necessary frustration, the next step is to teach the child to automatize the puzzle.

binary principle and elephant puzzle

How is a puzzle like the elephant puzzle used to scaffold? (in education, but you can do it among friends too) Well, for one the trick is that you don't need to know how to solve every independent puzzle (exceptions disregarded) to know how to solve a puzzle. For some puzzles, understanding laws is necessary or useful. How switches can be written down as either on or off may be helpful for solving a binary puzzle. Also, the idea of how to list numbers may be important. 00001 comes before 00010 and after 00000.
In the list 00, 01, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111 notice that the last digit changes every time from 0 to 1, before the left digit can change. This also is the case with the elephant puzzle.
This is how a puzzle gives deep insight of maths and logic. Deep because it is a direct experience. It makes a connection between a concept in your head and a visual tactile experience in your hands.

from special to mainstream education

I gave a link to an explanation on scaffolding before. The idea was first followed in special education. It is very popular right now. I see a trend that novel education ideas are first used with the children that have the highest need for help (mediation) by their higher educated teachers and then when it is succesful finds its way to other childrens education. Autism is a spectrum where there is high need of help in education. Many autistic children can only learn with intensive training and don't transfer knowledge. Others function at a high level, but have typical impairments. One way of support for parents is looking at other parents who use techniques with their children, e.g. a video on scaffolding.

language skills and social studies

Social studies are putting effort in expression. Mixing different skills in curriculae is a worldwide enhancement of education.

popular IQ-quizz site

Interactive quizzes by Tammy Maloney is a site that gets visited frequently worldwide. It´s probably good. I found it under education.
http://www.iq.poquoson.org/studysubjectareasocialstudies.html