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The test-optional moment in American college admissions has had three phases. The first was the pre-pandemic era, when a small number of colleges (Bowdoin, Bates, Wake Forest, then a longer list) had moved away from required SAT or ACT scores on equity and diversity grounds. The second was the pandemic shock, when essentially every selective … Read more
Homeschooling has had a strange decade. The pandemic pulled hundreds of thousands of families into it who had never considered it, and a meaningful share decided not to go back. The numbers vary by state and year, but most US states have seen homeschool enrollment roughly double since 2019 and stay elevated. Which means the … Read more
Every few years a new framework arrives that promises to fix lesson planning. SOLO taxonomy, Understanding by Design, project-based learning, the flipped classroom, then a more recent set of generative-AI-aware variations. Some of these are more useful than others. None of them are as durable as the underlying instructional structure they all draw from, which … Read more
The first wave of stories about ChatGPT in schools was about cheating. The second wave was about bans. The third, finally, has been about practice. Three years in, the picture from working classrooms looks different from the picture in the policy debates. A short version: the teachers getting traction with AI are the ones treating … Read more
Massive open online courses turned fifteen this year. Coursera launched in 2012, Udacity the same year, edX in 2013. Back then, the rhetoric was that they would democratize higher education and put pressure on tuition by offering Stanford, MIT, and Harvard lectures to anyone with a laptop. A few years later the reporting turned to … Read more
After a decade of blogging, we’re shifting how and where we share, moving to a new space better suited to curation and conversation, and announcing a forthcoming book of collected posts whose proceeds will support learning initiatives.
We argue that our testing-obsessed education system is failing to prepare kids for a complex future, and we propose an “UnCommon Core” of skills and understandings—from living lightly on the Earth to networked learning and democratic participation—that every child should develop, taught through rich, integrated, real-world contexts rather than test-driven, siloed curricula.
The biggest learning news in our house last week came from our 13-year-old daughter Tess, whose experiences with high jump and a trip to Washington DC raised powerful questions about what we really mean by “learning” and how rarely “productive learning” happens in schools.
Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher describes his “thin walled” classroom in Snow Lake, Manitoba, where students regularly use the Web to collaborate globally. His work illustrates how networked learning environments deepen critical thinking and problem solving, challenge traditional school structures built on scarcity of knowledge and teachers, and shift control of learning toward connected, social, online/offline experiences that mirror the real world students are entering.
Reflecting on what students describe as the benefits of online courses, we question whether this version of “online learning” is truly different from traditional content delivery, and argue for a model that leverages networks, inquiry, and learner-driven paths rather than simple digitized coursework.