Watching the videos and the subsequent discussion in small groups was very interesting. One idea that stuck out to me personally was from the Jo Boaler video. In it she said that there is a pre-existing idea that only some kids can be good at math. For whatever reason this a prevalent idea in schooling and an extremely damaging one as well. Part of overcoming this misconception is encouraging our students to have a growth mindset when it comes to education and learning. I also enjoyed seeing the TED talk from the creator of wolfram alpha as part of that video. In it he said that math requires 4 steps with computation being only 1 piece of the process.
Seeing the Alfie Kohn video made me question the practices we use in education. What is the purpose of grades? And how do we ensure that grading is achieving these purposes and not creating more issues. It is hard to think about removing grades, because it is uncertain what we would use as a replacement. I think we do need some way to evaluate our students learning, but it is difficult to think of ways that we could accomplish this fairly.
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