Serendipity35

When I started in instructional technology at NJIT in 2000, one of my fears was that I would be dealing with professors who were focused on research and had little interest in pedagogy. There were certainly some of those professors. A research university (especially a science and technology university) breeds those and nurtures them. But I was very pleasantly surprised that the teachers who came to the workshops and seminars we offered on a regular basis were very interested in pedagogy. A number of those faculty members told me that, "Basically I teach the way I was taught. I try to imitate the good teachers and avoid the bad things I saw as a student."

I clearly remember a workshop we did on designing assignments using Bloom's Taxonomy. No one in the group had ever heard of Benjamin Bloom. They knew taxonomies and liked that it had a nice scientific taste. The conversation was quite heated with people disagreeing with what I (Bloom) was calling "knowledge."

Over my seven years there, I did many workshops that mixed technology & pedagogy and I came to appreciate for myself many of the topics like Bloom, learning styles, curriculum design, rubrics etc. that were an everyday part of the educational world I had lived in for a few decades.

I was looking for some links in Wikipedia a few weeks ago to use for a workshop and realized that I was building quite a list of bookmarks that started to sound like a syllabus for an education course.

I'm putting a list of them here as a kind of Wikipedia education course. The articles are a good starting place in learning about some people and topics in education. One of the things I do like about using Wikipedia is that the external links at the bottom of an article are often a nicely selected way to start your own research - and much more filtered than a Google search.

1. John Dewey
2. William Spady
3. Jean Piaget
4. Benjamin Bloom
5. Marc Tucker
6. Maria Montesori -
7. Outcome-based education
8. Cognitive load
9. Standards-based education reform
10. Outcomes-based education
11. Developmentally Appropriate Practice
12. Holism
13. Constructivism
14. Active learning
15. Problem-based learning
16. Discovery learning
17. Inquiry-based science
18. Inventive spelling
19. Open-space schools
20. Small schools movement
21. Inclusion
22. Learning standards
23. National Science Education Standards
24. National Reading Panel
25. Standards-based mathematics
26. No Child Left Behind Act and some of its components like
27. Adequate Yearly Progress
28. School-to-work transition
29. National Skill Standards Board
30. Standards-based assessment
31. Authentic assessment
32. Criterion-referenced test
33. Norm-referenced test
34. Standards-based assessment

I'll label these as "K-12" and hope that higher ed readers will be smart enough to see the connections.

• High school graduation examination
• Standardized tests
• List of standardized tests in the United States
• Standardized testing and public policy
• Guided reading
• Phonics
• Whole language
• Traditional education
• Traditional mathematics
• Direct instruction
• Rote learning
• Tracking