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Welcome to the Wonderful World of Teacher Inquiry! Together we will explore some of the inumerable questions about teaching, learning and everything in between.

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Controlled Confusion?

Controlled confusion . Is this an oxymoron? Educational neuroscience reminds us that excess stress - when all you see on the board is hieroglyphs or the white hot panic when Teacher asks you a question and you're not even sure it was in English - gets in the way of learning. And not just a little. Chronic experience of excess stress will actually re-wire the brain in such a way that it can no longer properly regulate emotion. Imagine trying to concentrate when your body is in a constant state of fight, flight or freeze . It's obvious, then, that confusion has no place in the classroom. But is it? One of the tensions expressed in educational neuroscience and effective learning is that there is an optimal level of stress. Too much gets in the way, but too little does also. Learning is hard, and in order to make the cognitive jump to higher understanding, we need a little oomph. Healthy stress is an incredibly useful motivator. In this way, Teacher must balance on one scale  a ...
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Flipped Classrooms

At the end of this past class, I found myself with lots and lots of questions. Here are some of the big ones I've been thinking about since then: How does this model clash with the concept of Obchenie? This class came on the heels of our discussion of the interrelational nature of teaching/learning as it was understood by Vygotsky. He saw the social nature of education as a crucial aspect of the act of learning. At first glance, it seems that flipping the classroom would take away from the social nature of learning by making instruction one-sided. But after listening to Khan speak, it became clear that putting the stand and deliver model aside actually creates much more time for direct, one-on-one interaction in the learning environment. And not just between teacher and student, but between peers, a practice that is known to positively impact students of all abilities and levels. My concern with this model is that introducing new topics in an environment outside of teacher contr...
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