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Brain candy: universal grammar, teacher credentials challenged
July 18th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
The New Yorker magazine is in the news this week because of its controversial cover.
But, there are two resources inside that are extremely interesting for language teachers.
The first is an article on the linguistic professor Dan Everett and his work with the Amazonian tribe the Paraha. Their language has a zen-like focus on the present, and…get this…no recursion. Since Chomskians hold that recursion is the essence of humans’ unique cognitive/linguistic capabilities, Everett’s claim is, as Stephen Pinker terms it, ““a bomb thrown into the party.” Fascinating article.
Second is a video of a presentation by Malcolm Gladwell that discusses teacher credentials and how they have zero correlation to teacher quality. It’s about 15 minutes and much of it involves discussion of US sports, but it’s all very much to the point and highly recommended.
Teacher training vids
March 17th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Via the always-useful blog by Nik Peachey, here’s a link to a site with an extensive collection of teacher training videos, many about using web 2.0 tools.
Current teacher training is not working
July 30th, 2006
by Cleve
Via elearnspace, a spot-on article by the Provost of The King’s College in New York City, Peter Wood, in MercatorNet. Money quote:
Generally schools of education recruit weak students. The average SAT scores for would-be teachers for decades have scraped along among the lowest of all enrolled college students. The schools of education then proceed to endow these well-meaning but dull folks with strangely mistaken ideas about how children learn. The wisdom on how to teach accumulated over several thousand years of civilisation is summarily set aside in favour of what some recent educational theorists have conjectured. The conjectures are typically backed by a form of social science “research” several notches less rigorous than the reader surveys in supermarket magazines.
Wood believes that we’re moving away from the current model and “we will move to a system in which a degree in education will mark a potential teacher as under-educated and mis-trained. Instead teachers will be recruited from the ranks of the liberally educated and will learn, as good teachers have always learned, by devotion to the task itself.”
Certainly “devotion to the task itself” is a great way to learn, but I think it may be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Individual teachers shouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel - they should be able to learn from what other have thought and have done. It would be better to embed teachers in a lifelong self-directed learning process, based on mentoring, collaboration and action research. The web application we’re working on has a simple (but kinda neat) action research functionality, one that I hope will help teachers connect theory and concept to empirical performance, and then share that experience.