Ideaphora Insights

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

The skies are blue, the temperatures are edging up and summer is poised on the horizon: it’s that great time of year when we take down our bulletin boards and break out our (metaphoric) surfboards. There’s nothing better than those first days of vacation when our minds drain of the agendas and administrivia of the classroom, and it’s okay to pick up a book with a plot instead of a matrix of standards.

That feeling doesn’t last forever, though. After about three weeks, I get bitten by the teaching bug again. I remember the faces of all those students who never quite engaged, who might have excelled but didn’t, and I start wondering what I can do in the coming fall to address their needs. That’s when I do a different kind of summer reading—titles from the annals of pedagogy. My favorite kind of education book is passionate, based on experience in the trenches and reflective of what the writers believe about learning, not the “how to” books of which there are so many. Here are a few of my favorites:

This post is written by Mary Chase, Ph.D., an expert in curriculum design, literacy education, and technology integration. 

Years ago, when I first entered the classroom, I thought I knew my subject area and I thought I knew how to teach. You won’t be surprised to learn that, while my head was stuffed with facts and learning strategies, I really knew nothing about either area. Dewey teaches that we learn by doing and that is nowhere more true than in the field of teaching. Further, all my training, all the demands of my job and the expectations of my administrators, parents and students were defined by curriculum. Nobody said much about learning, let alone thinking.

Later, in graduate school, I discovered the work of cognitive psychologist, Vera John-Steiner, and her works became seminal to my own ideas about the role of thinking in education. John-Steiner’s first contribution to the field, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking, centered on the cognitive habits of geniuses from science, art, writing, music—all of the humanities—based on a close analysis of their journals, personal accounts and conversations. Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, Diego Rivera—over 50 geniuses account for their creative visions. Her investigation is accompanied by her own insights on the nature of thinking. She writes, “Thought is embedded in the structure of the mind. One way to think of this structure is to view it as formed by networks of interlocking concepts of highly condensed and organized clusters of representations.”

As a participant in GSVlabs, a community of carefully selected startups, I had the opportunity to attend the ASU+GSV Summit earlier this week. The conference, designed for ed tech business leaders, startups and investors, featured a diverse range for speakers, including celebrities, authors, tech icons, nonprofit leaders and government officials.

One of the major themes stressed by speakers, Bill Gates and Tom VanderArk among them, was personalized learning—what it is and isn’t, and the aids and obstacles to implementation. VanderArk noted that while the technological capabilities now exist to fully realize personalized learning, it’s not implemented in all schools. Gates also stated that personalized learning is the future of education, but must scale up. Progress toward personalized learning varies widely due to a variety of factors such as insufficient infrastructure and funding.