The case for Pass/Fail in Secondary Schools When my wife told me that most medical schools in the US are pass/fail, I was dumbstruck. “What do you mean?”, I asked incredulously. How could the smartest people in the country take their classes pass/fail? Wouldn’t they just start skipping class since there was no more competition? […]
Read more "What’s wrong with the A-F grading policy."Google Earth. You heard of it way back in 2006 when it first launched. Odds are that you probably even found your house on it and maybe even played the flight simulator that is built in. What you haven’t realized is that Google Earth is one of the single most powerful teaching tools for social […]
Read more "Why Google Earth is so awesome for teachers."It is so hard to get out of our classrooms these days. With the amount of grading, planning, meeting, and TEACHING that teachers accomplish on a daily basis it is no wonder that once you enter your classroom at 6:30am, you might only leave it to go to the bathroom around noon. These expectations seem […]
Read more "Why you need to visit another classroom"That was my response to a woman I only vaguely knew at work about three years ago. She was having a meeting in my classroom (it was not being used during that period and just happen to be open) and I walked in as she was concluding. We got to talking about teaching and pedagogy, […]
Read more "“You want me to join Twitter”?!?"As an educator I see lots of ideas come and go. There always seems to be the ‘next-big-thing’ that will revolutionize the way education is done. What the reality is more like is there are solutions to specific types of problems that only work if there is enough buy in from the faculty within the […]
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peter spiegel 