Favorite Tools

Innovative Education

A fantastic tool for team-based learning, facilitating robust discussion and immediate access to answers, offering a unique opportunity both for students to learn during assessments, and for the instructor to assess the learning process rather than data regurgitation. The site is packed with data and research regarding the effectiveness of the technique.

WordMint offers a variety of ways to gamify class discussions or study sessions. Ensure students are paying attention by introducing internal motivations and fun. 

Shake up the world of PowerPoint with a jaunty presentation. The educational product is decently priced, and gives full access to the entire library. You can upload narration and music, and download your projects as presentations or movies.  Account includes a tool for students to use.

Critical Thinking about current and historical events is increasingly scarce. NewseumED is a fantastic responseand an imaginative tool for educators, offering both online resources and classroom-ready lessons to facilitate the development of media literacy and critical thought in a world of fake and junk news.

  An Empowering Book

Chapter selections from my inventive and approachable philosophy text.

 A Field Guide for Educational Spelunking

A Statement of Educational Philosophy

The difference between education and instruction is stark and can be understood by means of contrasting metaphors.

Paulo Freirecontrasts two worldviews: the investment model of teaching and the liberation model of teaching. The former sees the student as a passive receptaclean information ATMinto which society deposits information, values, and beliefs. The role of the student is to regurgitate. The best word to describe this investment model is instructionin Latin, a building into. The student is constructed, put together by invested parties, who expect specific outcomes at certain times when their payoff is due.

There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying. (John Dewey)

The liberation modelwhich Freire endorsesis unsurprisingly embraced as the more humanizing view by Dewey, Rousseau, Mill, Aristotle, and Plato.

The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings. (J.S. Mill)

This model sees the student as an agent, actively seeking out, taking hold of, and employing skills, knowledge, and values. 

The best word to capture this model is educationin Latin, a leading out, which implies that the student must actively participate in a journey.

By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name. (Plato)

Platos description of the liberation model is most famously presented in his Allegory of the Cave, wherein people find themselves chained up and aware only of shadows. Their knowledge base is precisely that of instruction: they passively receive what has been forced upon them. But one day a prisoner is compelled to escape, and he discovers the instruction model, the emptiness of his knowledge, and the possibility of wisdom. He undergoes the very difficult journey out of the cave, where he eventually encounters higher levels of understanding. This journey is the path of education.