Known Forever By the Tracks We Leave
If there is really a toxic element in Rousseau's legacy, it is this: his promulgation of the 'myth of the stupid savage'—even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity.
Teachers' Guts
It seems silly for anyone to suggest that educational 'laypeople' suffer from some kind of debilitating ignorance that 'professionals' have overcome.
Inventing the Wheel
They could only ever imagine the next tiny step. Anything else would have been too much of an abstraction.
What We Think With
Knowledge is a background of consciousness which gives meaning to the stream of sense-impressions that impinge against it.
Often Wrong, Never in Doubt
The mistake people make about this is that they're measuring effects of language without thinking about the readers.
Audience Capture
So now you're not running a school for the sake of the kids. You're running a school for the sake of the teachers who are in it.
A Debt Against the Living
"The improvements made by the dead form a debt against the living."
More on Intellectual Authority
Most of the time, if you no longer trust the experts, you've started trusting someone's uncle.
Once More Unto the Understanding
It is not a given, once we turn a rigorous, scientific eye to the question, that the difference between 'knowing' and 'understanding' matters at all to the study of learning.
The Ratchet Effect
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Natural = Explicit
Young children have a 'natural pedagogy' that looks like explicit instruction.
A Vaccine for Ignorance
We need to recognize how our biases for individualism tip us toward misunderstanding and rejecting reality—and the study of reality, science.
Stop Telling Us What to Do
Get the education consultants and academy out of the way and let teachers do what they want to do—(mostly) direct instruction.
Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility is simply recognizing that something that you believe might, in fact, be wrong.
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
Your students are boiling cauldrons of contradictions and three-dimensionality, but so are you.
On Being Smart
"We need to be bound by our traditions, but we need to be judicious in their re-representation and update."
Just 55 Percent
Why should anyone think that making instruction less explicit would increase understanding?
Small, Concrete Actions
Have we intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life?
Common Ground
Ideas can be more easily transmitted if we already are part of a group with much shared understanding.
The Coordination Problem
We need to coordinate even before we collaborate, and rules and conventions are excellent means of doing so.