Bell Labs and School

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the article in The New York Times from February 23rd: ”True Innovation“. Jon Gertner is the author of a forthcoming book about Bell Labs called The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation and this was a kind of preview. There was plenty of detail [...]

Dinner Table Talk

So, I’ve been thinking about conversations I do or don’t have with my students. Two events got me thinking about this. First, I was at school a few Saturdays ago for an open house event. This year there were a number of 5th graders there too. They were adding a student perspective, which I thought [...]

Put That Post-it on the Wall

So, I’ve been thinking about how my students organize information. We have practiced a couple of ways to gather information and then manipulated it this way and that. We have worked on this both formally and informally. So, I was interested to see what groups of students would do with this assignment: Note: I had [...]

The Power of Discovery

So, I’ve been thinking about how my students learn things–things that I’ve been trying to teach them, repeatedly. The other day we were doing some writing connected to our “This I Believe” study. (See here and here for more details.) As usual, we had talked about the assignment. Students had worked on a planning sheet. [...]