Blogs on Education Trends

This blog post is an excerpt from Save Our Science: How To Inspire a New Generation of Scientists by Ainissa Ramirez (TED Books).

The 21st century requires a new kind of learner -- not someone who can simply churn out answers by rote, but a student who can think expansively and solve problems resourcefully. As a scientist and inventor, a longtime professor at Yale University, and a woman who has always been passionate about getting kids excited about science, I believe that the key to this goal is to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. These disciplines are rooted in the kind of thinking that is now critical. One of the most important aspects of this shift is to fix the false presumption that girls are not as good as boys in science and math.

Following the previous post about teaching programming languages to kids, here are five more strategies which we are using in our trials at feynlabs. Our goal is to maintain young people's interest in learning programming so that the participants will acquire enough depth to take independent steps beyond what they learn. As usual, I welcome comments and feedback

The multiple-choice problem is becoming a bit of an issue.

While it has been derided by educators for decades as incapable of truly measuring understanding, and while performance on such exams can be noticeably improved simply by learning a few tricks, the multiple choice question may have a larger, less obvious flaw that disrupts the tone of learning itself. This is a tone that is becoming increasingly important in the 21st century as access to information increases, as the updating of information happens more naturally, and as blended and mobile learning environments become more common.

I have a confession to make: at some point this year, I realized that there’s a difference between the teacher I would love to be and the teacher I currently am.

Most teachers want to do interdisciplinary projects, project-based learning and every other education phrase with the words "exploration" and "project" in it. Despite evidence to the contrary, their reality of having to teach directly to a standardized test (ultimately affecting their municipality's perception of them) casts a longer shadow on them than even the bravest of us want to admit.