What I believe about learning and teaching
- Humans learn more by doing than by watching. In my classes, we will have a variety of activities and strategies. My classroom is not currently a “flipped classroom,” but a lot of my classroom choices are based on some of the same research as flipped classrooms.
- Mistakes are important. This can be hard; we all want to put our best foot forward. However, making and correcting mistakes are important for understanding ideas at a deeper level and are an important and positive sign that learning and growth are happening.
- Learning something new feels good. Learning something new boosts the “happy chemicals” in our brains!
- School subjects are all mixed up together in the real world; they should interact in school too! Math is not an isolated subject, and I don’t understand why we isolate it in school. Similarly, the topics in our courses do not “stay in their own lanes” in the real world, and forcing them to do so in the classroom hurts our ability to access those same topics when we need them outside the classroom.
- Learning is messy. Sometimes you can learn something new and remember it forever. But mostly, learning something is a task we do over and over again until finally it sticks. Also, some things take lots of repetitive practice to master, while other simply take lots of time for our brain to simmer on.
- Revisiting ideas at regular intervals improves long-term learning. I don’t go through the course topics linearly (one after another). Instead, I spiral us through the course ideas. This is not the same thing as spiral review that you might have had in K-12 school. Rather, this is the idea of looking at the various course topics multiple times spread throughout the 10 weeks of the course, going a little deeper and more detailed each time.
- It’s important that you leave the course knowing something new. In many of my classes (but not all yet), your grade is based on whether you can demonstrate mastery of a set of Essential Skills. This approach keeps the focus on learning rather than accumulating points, defines goals throughout the course, and balances and structures the spiral approach mentioned above.
***Unique strategies for COVID-19 Remote Teaching and Learning***
- Live online sessions are both similar to and different than in-person classes. Some of the same learning tasks work, and others don’t. And there are some new ones we can use as well that don’t work as well in person! I’ll choose the best learning tasks and tools I can to make the best use of our time together.
- Just living in the world right now demands a lot of our brain power. I try to arrange the information for you in a way that saves your “cognitive overhead” for other uses. In other words, I need you to use brain power for the material and learning in the course, but I hope to minimize the brain power you need simply to navigate the expectations and structure of the course.
- Students have different levels of both comfort and availability of technology. I try my best to ensure that you can complete the course whether or not your technology allows you to attend every class, to minimize the “layers” of technology, and to use accessible technologies.