Posted: December 25th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
Josh writes:
Hello from Day 2 of retraining in Nakuru!
Teachers were waiting in classrooms for sessions to begin at 7:00am, 30 minutes ahead of schedule. There was a positive buzz Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 24th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
It begins.
This January we’ll debut some new lesson structures at Bridge. It’s for all the kids in 7th grade and nursery school, over 9,000 total. Here’s the general idea.
Typically, what happens with kids and teachers when a “new lesson structure” is put in place? Historically, around the world, it doesn’t go well.
Why? Teachers are used to the “old way.” The new way can feel “wrong.” (Heck, sometimes it *is* wrong — plenty of instances of teachers being handed bad lessons to teach). So teachers are tempted to revert. You need good lessons for sure, but you also need buy-in, training, and to solve a ton of “little problems” that combine to cause teachers big headaches if not addressed.
Our friend Ben Piper, who is leading an amazing roll-out of improved curriculum in Kenyan gov’t schools (PRIMR), has described these challenges to me. Ben tries to find a “sweet spot,” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 23rd, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
The remarkable Ashish Diwan writes:
On our journey toward achieving school education reform, our investments act as proof points to achieve larger policy goals. I am excited to highlight some ventures we have catalysed this year.
Saajha is an initiative we incubated within Pratham Delhi, to build and strengthen the capacity of School Management Committees (SMCs) in 60 municipal schools across North and East Delhi. The project aims to demonstrate that meaningful and sustained engagement of the community can improve student attendance and parent participation in the learning process, and positively impact student achievement in the long run.
In our journey with the founders of Saajha, we visited over 30 organisations that are doing innovative work on SMCs, and realized that the ecosystem could benefit from the consolidation of our learnings. Therefore Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 19th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
Doug’s interview is up on his blog. Daisy Christodoulou wrote a new book called Seven Myths About Education.
Doug:
You also talk about how simplistic and isolated facts are presented as a proxy for knowledge and then dismissed. It’s a recurring trope to pull a single obscure fact—the date of the battle of Waterloo, say—and point out that it is useless to know such a thing when that isn’t really “knowing.” This becomes an argument to dismiss the importance of a broad-based knowledge of facts.
I loved your response which was to point out that this is a way of reducing the idea to absurdity. That the power is in in fact in systematic knowledge.
You write:
“Of course pulling one fact out like this does seem rather odd, But the aim of fact-learning is not to learn just one fact — it is to learn several hundred which, taken together form a schema that helps you understand the world. Just learning the date of the battle of Waterloo will be of limited use. But learning the dates of 150 historical events from 3000BC to the present and learning a couple of facts about why each event was important will be of immense use because it will form the … basis of [a broad and widely applicable] historical understanding.”
Can you talk a bit more about that?
Daisy:
My current favourite analogy for this is brushing your teeth. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 17th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
IBM says:
In five years, the classroom will learn you. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 16th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »
From the Washington Post:
Arlington public schools are kicking off a competition Monday that invites data analysts from around the country to help solve one of the most vexing problems in public education: how to keep kids from dropping out.
The school system plans to select up to 10 data teams to analyze a trove of student data to spot Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 12th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
Reading through “Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Comparative Analysis.” It’s by Kirsten Majgaard and Alain Mingat. Good stuff. I started it on Google books and ordering a hard copy.
This sort of data is hard to come by.
Check this out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 9th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 7 Comments »
This from the SF Chronicle:
A few years ago, Aspire’s administrators and teachers tossed aside the traditional system. They wanted Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 8th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 1 Comment »
This is not a Bridge International Academy. At least not yet.
Great NPR blog by Lynn Neary on the wonderful nonprofit called World Reader: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 6th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »
If you want to invest a few moments today to think of Nelson Mandela, I recommend to you my friend Joe Richman, who produces radio for National Public Radio.
Joe writes:
“I am prepared to die.” Those are the last 5 words of the speech, and they are well known today. Less well known are the 10,693 other words in the speech. It lasted four hours.
An audio recording of the speech was made by a court stenographer on a dictabelt, a plastic recording that was never intended to preserve history. The recording was lost and forgotten for almost 4 decades, until it was discovered in the basement archive of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.
I know that basement well. Read the rest of this entry »
