OLDaily

Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills
Carl Hendrick, Aeon, 2018/03/29

Carl Hendrick restates the tired and wrong argument that critical thinking cannot be taught as a general skill. But from where I sit, if a person says critical thinking cannot be detached from context, then this tells me that the person does not understand what critical thinking is. Critical thinking is not factual recall or provision of implicit premises. It's based on form, not content. I offer more argumentation here (and I guess I'll just have to write an article or something to dispel this wrongheaded notion).

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Apple’s Strongest Case to Reclaim the Education Market Is Not the New iPad
Jin-Soo Huh, EdSurge, 2018/03/29

Apple chose to launch its new education-specific iPad at an exclusive private school, Lane Tech College Prep in Chicago. That should tell you all you need to know about its approach to education. The pitch is that students can be more creative with a iPad than with (say) a Chromebook. At three times the price (plus a $90 pen) I'm not surprised. The iPad also comes with Schoolwork, Apple's answer to Google Classroom. It "allows a teacher to send out documents and open specific apps on their students’ iPad (and) gives them visibility into what each student is working on to make sure they are on task or to provide support." Developers were pointed to ClassKit, a set of APIs that connect with Schoolwork. More coverage: The Verge, ComputerWorld, TechRadar, MacWorld, VentureBeat, Apple Insider, CNet, Mashable, Gizmodo.

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Unlocking the Science of How Kids Think
Daniel Willingham, Education Next, 2018/03/29

Now with the correct link. I thought this was a pretty good article. I don't think that we've yet "unlocked the science of how kids think" but the way the article is set up allows us to set the overstatement aside and focus on how we think about some principles of learning in our day-to-day work. The context is set by looking at how we approach teacher training. For example, "teachers report that their education is overly theoretical and not of great utility." Willingham says "they are required to learn some basic principles of psychology as part of that education, but it is not clear that practicing teachers remember what they were taught." May or maybe not, but I would say that the key factor here is whether they believe what they were taught. They won't if someone simply tells them things (I certainly wouldn't). So the way to look at psychological principles is to look at their application, first in the training of teachers themselves, then in the wider classroom. 

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