expose different points of view

involve the learner in communica-tion with experts and peers

Because adults learn by doing, effective instruction focuses on tasksthat adults can perform, rather than on memorization of content

Draws on his/her accumulated reservoir of life experiences to aid learning

All of these go to show that mathematical sophis-tication and artistic representation, far from being divorced from each other, actually do go hand in hand.

The crucial difference is that the essence of play is its open-ended ness and that needs to be considered when thinking of including play

Students can see the func-tion traced over time, and feel the tempo of it as the input is pulled along the axis.

These seven cognitive tools are: perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied think-ing, modeling, play, and synthesizing.

Technology integration, however, still finds disappoint-ing levels of penetration and success

John Dewey’s vision, “School should be less about preparation for life and more like life itself.”

Students who are learning oriented like new challenges; those who are performance oriented are more worried about making errors than about learning.

Monitoring involves attempts to seek and use feedback about one’s progress. Feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning

Although many people believe that “talent” plays a role in who becomes an expert in a particular area, even seemingly talented individuals require a great deal of practice in order to develop their expertise

“accomplished novices.” Accomplished novices are skilled in many areas and proud of their accomplishments, but they realize that what they know is minuscule compared to all that is potentially knowable. This model helps free people to continue to learn even though they may have spent 10 to 20 years as an “expert” in their field.

Steven began his unit on Hamlet without ever mentioning the name of the play. To help his students grasp the initial outline of the themes and issues of the play, he asked them to imagine

In sum, although the students scored very well on facts about history, they were largely unacquainted with modes of inquiry with real historical thinking.

Their knowledge is not simply a list of facts and formulas that are relevant to their domain; instead, their knowledge is organized around core concepts or “big ideas” that guide their thinking about their domains.

children can be taught these strategies, including the ability to predict outcomes, explain to oneself in order to improve understanding, note failures to comprehend, activate background knowledge, plan ahead, and apportion time and memory. Reciprocal teaching, for example, is a technique designed to improve students’ reading comprehension by helping them explicate, elaborate, and monitor their understanding as they read

In Teacher A’s classroom, the students are learning something of media production, but the media production may very well be getting in the way of learning anything else. In Teacher B’s classroom, the teacher is working to ensure that the original educational purposes of the activity are met, that it does not deteriorate into a mere media production exercise. In Teacher C’s classroom, the media production is continuous with and a direct outgrowth of the learning that is embodied in the media production.

New curricula for young children have also demonstrated results that are extremely promising: for example, a new approach to teaching geometry helped second-grade children learn to represent and visualize three-dimensional forms in ways that exceeded the skills of a comparison group of undergraduate students at a leading university (Lehrer and Chazan, 1998).

“usable knowledge”

Emerging technologies are leading to the development of many new opportunities to guide and enhance learning that were unimagined even a few years ago.

a new theory of learning is coming into focus that leads to very different approaches to the design of curriculum, teaching, and assessment than those often found in schools today.