I’m in the middle of Hacking Project-Based Learning by Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy, a concise, practical guide for teachers wishing to deploy PBL in their courses. Cooper and Murphy are primary school teachers, so their examples are often calibrated to the elementary grades. But, as they remind readers, instructors can scale and adapt PBL …
Category Archives: Curiosity
Creating Wicked Students: An Idea for Class Discussion
Meaningful Connections I began reading Creating Wicked Students by Paul Hanstedt (2018) some time ago. While my progress has been slower than I’d hoped, a passage inspired me to think of a novel idea for class discussion: Consider the following: Three students are assigned a book chapter. The first one reads the chapter carefully then …
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Children are Curious; Students are not
“Intellectual curiosity becomes a casualty of the education and status wars.” Joshua Eyler. How Humans Learn. 2018 I mentioned psychologist Susan Engel in an earlier post. As recounted in Joshua Eyler’s How Humans Learn, Engel documents a drop-off in curiosity between kindergarten and fifth grade. Eyler points to other research that corroborates an age-related decrease …
The Hungry Mind and the Educated Mind
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That’s funny…” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) https://www.americanscientist.org/article/thats-funny One of the common threads Joshua Eyler identified while researching How Humans Learn is curiosity. Most every reader intuitively grasps the meaning of curiosity, but scholars have leveled varying definitions. Eyler cites …
The Scientist as Child
In How Humans Learn (2018), author Joshua Eyler reminds us he’s a medievalist, not an education scholar. Eyler’s book, then, is his distillation of others’ work. He selects and presents research drawn from related disciplines, like evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), psychology (both cognitive and developmental), and neuroscience. One such example comes from psychologist Alison Gopnik. …