Welcome to the first issue of The Edge of Education Carnival. As will all the issues to follow, this carnival is devoted to all those teachers out there on the cutting edge of teaching and learning. There is a lot go good stuff going on out there. Our mission in creating The Edge of Education Carnival is to collect that frontier work that is leading the way in teaching and learning–in all it’s chaotic glory.
The problem with blind spots is that you don’t know you’ve got them. I mean, it’s obvious to us today that students weren’t going to need a slate or homemade ink in order to be successful. But imagine living in that time. There was no way those people could have foreseen the changes that make us snicker at those statements today.
Might we also be clinging to faulty beliefs about what will make our students successful? But how do we identify them? What beliefs do we throw out? Which ones do we keep? What skills and content are we teaching that will be irrelevant in five years? What tools are we still using that are already outdated?
In recent months, the Library of Congress has piloted a new photo series on the photo-intensive website, Flickr. If you’ve never been to Flickr, it’s essentially a website where photographers from around the world are uploading and sharing their photos, and commenting on the photographs other people post.
In this case, Flickr has teamed up with an unlikely photographer (or should I say archive of American historical photography), and the results are literally breathtaking. One example alone is Jack Delano’s “In the waiting room of Union Station”, taken in Chicago, Illinois. The photo features two officers who create shadows in spotlight-like beams of sunshine coming in from the gothic windows above.
Receiving a Master’s degree from the University of St. Mary’s has been an immensely satisfying experience for me. I’ve learned and changed and grown in innumerable and meaningful ways. But when it comes to professional development, the St. Mary’s program is second to none. I have applied my new learning and confidence directly to my classes and my students have benefited. St. Mary’s breaks their program into four IDEA categories: Instruction, Discipline, Environment, and Assessment. This article outlines the effect this program has had on my instruction.
Team-based learning, an educational method primarily conceived for business schools, was developed in the early 1980s by Larry K. Michaelsen, now a professor of management at the University of Central Missouri in the United States. An alternative to traditional lecturing, this method uses a mix of individual and group processes to solve problems.
In recent years, some medical schools have recognized the advantage of active learning that encourages critical thinking and have started to experiment with Professor Michaelsen’s techniques.
Now, the Duke-N.U.S. Graduate Medical School, in Singapore, has gone a step further, applying this method to its entire basic science education.
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