Student Teachers, the Morale Curve & Reconciling Theory and Practice

Featured image courtesy of Alan Levine. “I can tell you with confidence when these dips in the morale curve will occur: six weeks, twelve weeks, six months, twelve months…” Kris Magnusson, paraphrased Of oughts and ises Six weeks into our yearlong teacher-education program, our student teachers have enjoyed a month’s honeymoon and visioning process on […]

Assessment for Critical Literacy

This semester’s Socials 9 curriculum was conceived with an intention to cultivate critical literacy, which I have come to define more and more as an ability to develop a praxis of reflection and action to continually discover and define meaning in an increasingly complex system. In learning from curricula, relationships or experience, individuals and societies […]

On 21st Century Schools

As I’ve explored at some length here, I think of schools today as guided by our mission statements and legal mandates to pursue an ageless ideal of education along the lines of how John Dewey characterized schooling as the act of “preparing students for the adult vocations needed for society to continue to exist.” The question […]

Eminent Person Study: Documenting Transformative Learning

We began talking about Eminent Person the other day by discussing Gardner Campbell’s quoting of Gregory Bateson’s work, and the idea of: “…breaches in the weave of contextual structure.” As I’ve mentioned here many times in the past, many experiential aspects of the TALONS program, and authentic learning wherever it happens for that matter, seek […]

Limit Situations, Double Binds & Transformative Learning

Something familiar struck me about a passage I crossed in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed the other day: Humans, however, because they are aware of themselves and thus of the world—because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and their own freedom. As they separate themselves from the world, […]

Opening K12 Education

Having been exploring technology in the classroom for a few years now, I’ve seen more than a few passing trends in pedagogical circles come and go: blogs, wikis, podcasts; flipped classes, pe(a)rsonalized learning, Twitter, SharePoint, Edublogs, Youtube. Each has garnered momentary Klout clout in the Pedablogisphere before giving way to the Next Big Thing, a trend D’Arcy […]

Epistemological Ecology

This is cross-posted on the Philosophy12 Blog. There is a certain pleasure in being allowed to start things off in a class like #Philosophy12; while others may garner the satisfaction that comes from rising to the challenge of the various assignments and syntheses of ideas, as classroom facilitator my critical tasks have thus far revolved […]

Personal Epistemology – Mr. J Edition

About halfway through my attempted introduction of Philosophy 12’s Epistemology unit assignments – clumsily introduced here – Jonathan asked a salient question: Could you do one of these assignments first, so we can see what it is you’re looking for? To refresh myself ourselves, the individual piece of the Epistemology study will be to create a personal epistemological proposition: to state and explain something […]

Bateson’s Hierarchy of Learning

Something that really resonated with me, toward the end of the thesis proposed by Gardner Campbell in his OpenEd12 Keynote, was the introduction of Gregory Bateson‘s Hierarchy of Learning, described below. Despite being focused around the purpose of higher education, I see a lot of what my TALONS colleagues and I have sought over the […]

Simplicity of Cause

Musings on Modern Learning

gregory bateson