Some Interesting Topics

8. Eight 8-Minute Talks by Harvard Education Professors

            At a recent event at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, eight faculty members gave super-brief talks on a variety of hot topics. You can view the talks in full at this link:

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/14/09/8x8-hgse-faculty-share-their-bold-ideas-improve-education

• Paul Reville: Getting to “All Means All” – What can we learn from the failure of education reform, so far, to deliver on the promise to bring high-quality education to all? asks Reville. How can we get past demography being destiny?

• Karen Brennan: Getting Unstuck – Helping students and teachers move beyond using social media and use computers more powerfully. Brennan describes using ScratchEd, a platform for creating projects, and students’ problem-solving strategies when they’re stuck.

• Todd Rose: The End of Average – What neuroscientists have found about how differently people remember and process information, leading to the conclusion that we can’t understand individual brains by using group averages. The same goes for how we deal with students; we must treat them as individuals, which we now can do better with recent advances in classroom technology.

• Bridget Terry Long: Nudging Students to Success – The gaps between low-income and higher-income students being admitted to and succeeding in college are still as wide as they were 40 years ago, says Long. She describes strategies for giving disadvantaged students the information they need for college success, starting years before they apply.

• Tom Kane: Learning What Works – The U.S. labor market has changed in recent decades, and schools haven’t kept up with the task of preparing students for the changed world. What strategies will work, and how can we develop them quickly? asks Kane.

• Karen Mapp: Linking Family Engagement to Learning – Relationships between schools and families have to be relational, interactive, collaborative, developmental, and linked to what students are learning, says Mapp, so that families can be more effective supporting learning at home. In particular, Mapp is critical of traditional open-house meetings in schools.

• Nonie Lesaux: A Matter of Talk – “Today’s ‘science of talk’ tells us, then, that it’s not about how much talk children and youth hear that influences their reading development,” says Lesaux, “but the substance, the matter of that talk. This is actually in stark contrast to what we used to think – that it was all about how many words parents used with young children. And now we know that this is about educators, too.” The words that teachers use in classrooms are essential to developing students’ vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, she says, yet the use of complex vocabulary varies greatly from teacher to teacher. Her research shows that teachers who use a greater number of conceptual words per day boost their students’ reading achievement significantly more than teachers who use simpler words – and than many programs and curriculum packages. What’s more, teachers can rapidly improve their use of more-conceptual words once they are made aware of this insight.

• Howard Gardner: Beyond Wit and Grit – Our understanding of “wit” has been expanded to include multiple intelligences, says Gardner, and we now realize the importance of “grit” – the cluster of non-cognitive skills. But these are not enough. Gardner believes we also need a moral dimension. “You can have plenty of grit, and multiple wits,” he says, “but they need to be directed towards becoming a good person, a good worker, and a good citizen… There’s a ‘triple helix’ of good work and good citizenship: excellence, ethics, and engagement.”

“8x8: HGSE Faculty Members Share Their Bold Ideas to Improve Education” September 19, 2014 (see above for the link)