TeacherJay's EduBlog

In relation to yesterday’s honor of Christopher Columbus and his “discovery” of “A New World”, I began thinking of the millions of people that were already living there.  While they new it existed, their world changed with the arrival of Europeans as well.  However, our history books don’t always teach us that.  The video below [...]

Ralph Tyler presented a model of curriculum design in 1949 that is still the foundation of many designs used today.

…a story about a student I once taught to improve her writing skills and a question of whether or not this was truly a benefit for her…

The most recent issue of Harvard Educational Review contained an insightful essay about a student-run radio program at Swarthmore College that focuses on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Emily Hager, though still a junior in college, tells us of her experiences interviewing people experiencing the wars firsthand—such as refugees, and government officials—on the other [...]

I just found this post on the Elementary Educator, where the author discusses the way that school curricula have become “sanitized” to not offend anyone by giving children the information to make their own informed opinions that could possibly in contrast to their parents. As a result, we may be creating a generation of [...]

What matters more – the memorization of answers to trivial questions or familiarity with the tools to find the answers?

Five years ago today, what is perhaps my favorite education news site, Edutopia, published an article, High Tech in Hawaii: The Real-World Relevance of Technology, about an elementary school in that was incorporating technology into its classrooms.  The article discusses how the school uses technology as a tool for learning and not simply for [...]

The debate has come up again in Texas.  This is important for the entire nation because textbook publishers in their diligence to keep costs low and profits high refer to write only one version of the content and just make minor adaptations to fit each state’s curriculum guidelines.  Because of this, Texas, with its [...]

It is fascinating to read about events such as the American Revolution in a French textbook … 1) History becomes compartmentalized into an abstract string of facts that is not relevant to the world in which we live today. 2) It fosters a seperationist attitude in American students which will become increasingly damaging as the world grows more and more globally connected … So what should be done about this?

Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan B. Scovronick teamed up to show the ways in which the public education system advances, but also hinders, the ability to pursue the “American Dream”, in their 2003 book The American Dream and the Public Schools.  After first coming up with a definition of what the American dream is, they explore what [...]

The Winter 2008 issue of Harvard Educational Review contains an interesting article by Pat Clifford and Susan Marinucci on Inquiry-based Learning.  Here is the abstract from the publisher:
In this Voices Inside Schools essay, Dr. Pat Clifford and Susan Marinucci take us inside a classroom engaged in “genuine inquiry.” As we follow Russell and his fellow [...]

TeacherJay has been a fan of this site for quite some time and is an active member.  The idea is to collaboratively form an ideal curriculum with professional educators as the contributors.  This approach is similar to the way software developers create open-source software – by making the programming code public and inviting anyone [...]