November 24, 2014 This month, a NEW YORK TIMES article, “States Listen as Parents Give Rampant Testing an F” by Lisette Alvarez focused on some of the damage constant testing is inflicting on our children: “Florida embraced the school accountability movement early and enthusiastically, but that was hard to remember at a parent meeting in a high school auditorium here not long ago. Parents railed at a system that they said was...
November 19, 2014 Wikipedia defines “training” as follows: “Training is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of the teaching of vocational or practical skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies.” Narrowing that definition to Industrial Skills Training we can describe it as a branch of training designed to develop the skills and knowledge required of workers in the process and manufacturing industries. Working in industry today...
November 17, 2014 Too many people have forgotten the goals of “Training.” Information transferral has begun to blur the lines. And unfortunately, the real losers will be those workers who need to learn the necessary skills their organizations require. The distinction between Education and Training has been clear for centuries. While “Education” is difficult to pin down, generally, the accepted definition revolves around the acquiring of Knowledge for one of a variety...
November 12, 2014 The world is beginning to harvest the advantages achieved by bringing technology-based learning into both the academic classroom and the corporate training environment. In education, many of the foundation skills and competencies — upon graduation, so critical to the workplace — can be achieved through the use of technology in the classroom. “Students using technology demonstrate any number of improvements: more confidence, higher motivation, peer mentoring, collaboration, and enhanced...
November 10, 2014 “According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read. The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago....
November 5, 2014 Today’s post will begin by quoting from PLANT ENGINEERING (“Logic and plant engineering: become a more effective problem-solver by avoiding these common fallacies”): “Troubleshooting problems in plant equipment and systems requires a flawlessly logical thought process. Like many of the skills needed in the world of plant operations and management, logic is something maintenance managers and facilities engineers are just assumed to have. Yet good logic is a skill...
November 3, 2014 It’s been five years since Theodore Sizer died —- but, his influence lives on through the Essential Schools movement he founded. In a long career, Dr. Sizer was, among other appointments, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Chairman of Brown University’s education department. Dr. Sizer’s view of education reform — “with a premium on classroom creativity, bottom-up innovation and multiple measures of student learning” — opposed...