Why Great Teaching Means Letting Go by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education Ed note: On May 26, 2015, Grant Wiggins passed away. Grant was tremendously influential on TeachThought’s approach to education, and we were lucky enough for him to contribute his content to our site. Occasionally, we are going to go back and re-share his most memorable…
Homework is only formative if it recurs as a task in which I can learn from feedback to improve at the ‘same’ task. This is easily accessible.
6 Questions On Measuring Creativity & Other Abstractions by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education Oh, you can’t measure that… I hear this in almost every conversation about assessment of long-term educational goals. “Critical and creative thinking – oh, you can’t measurethat.” Why are educators so quick to say things like this? On its face the claim is a…
If we ever asked a large amount of students to give one word to describe school, I think that about 90% of them would simply say: boring.
Why You Teach: Developing A Teacher Mission Statement by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education Why do you teach? I am not asking this question in the sense often assumed, i.e. why do you personally want to teach? That kind of egocentric stuff never appeals to me. I am not interested in a teacher’s account of personal motive…
It is the continual addressing of essential questions that moves us from naïve and okay teachers to skilled professionals teaching learning.
The overwhelming amount of information will surely impede learning for many students in the absence of teaching grounded in good curriculum.
How Good Teachers Decenter Themselves by Grant Wiggins, Ed.D, Authentic Education As teachers we understandably believe that it is the ‘teaching’ that causes learning. But this is too egocentric a formulation. As I said in my previous post, the learner’s attempts to learn causes all learning. The teaching is a stimulus; the attempted learning (or lack of it) is the…
4 Easy Steps To Teach What Matters Most by Grant Wiggins, Ph.D, Authentic Education We have all said it and we have all heard it: there’s just no time to slow down and [fill in the blank], I have so much to cover… This, despite the fact that we all know, at some level, that it is not…
Constructing a pre- and post-assessment system helps you formally track how much progress you make within a given time period.
Where Do Essential Questions Come From? by Grant Wiggins, Ph.D, Authentic Education “I didn’t know they could think!” an excited high school principal blurted out. The principal was reacting to what he had just witnessed: his 9th grade students engaging in their first-ever Socratic Seminar, facilitated by my colleague and wife Denise a few years ago in a…
“When we consider our own perspective first, it is easier to think about the writer’s overarching ideas”
Teaching tactics unmoored from helping kids become autonomous decision-makers is doomed to fail, even if good tactics become second nature.
The problem with rubrics in learning is that they’re often subjective and their point systems are often arbitrary.