Unlike roles in nearly every other profession, the job of teacher is undifferentiated — their first day in the classroom looks remarkably similar to day 5,000. Throughout those days, teachers are expected to be experts in too many areas. This makes the job untenable, and many talented individuals choose to leave the profession. This high rate of attrition means the U.S. education system does not reliably deliver quality learning outcomes nor the experiences needed to prepare young people for a future of constant change and challenge.
A recent nationwide survey of schools documented a 42-percent growth in school gardens from 2013–15. Garden-based science teaching is increasingly popular because it integrates formal and informal learning, allows for teaching a range of science topics — soil science, ecology, botany — and creates opportunities to make those topics culturally relevant. Yet while the number of students encountering GBST is increasing, most of the research surrounding it addresses the implementation of school gardens in the context of health and nutrition interventions rather than science instruction.
“Everything Happens Here” is an anticipated nine-episode podcast about the history of Sesame Street and what America has learned from the show over a half-century of broadcasting.
Ariel Anbar and Punya Mishra write, “We are underprepared at multiple levels for the economic, environmental and societal disruptions that accompany the advance of global civilization and technology.” Anbar is a President’s Professor in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and School of Molecular Sciences, and an affiliate faculty member of Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Mishra is associate dean of scholarship and innovation at MLFTC. They stress that, “...
Many people do not know what defines a desert, what is unique about the Sonoran Desert or what this desert may have in common with others. The Sonoran Desert was not included in the Encyclopedia of Life, a free, online collaborative encyclopedia documenting the 1.9 million living species known to science.
How do we explain to students the difference between “sequential,” or cause-and-effect processes for some concepts and emergent causal effects for other processes? Most people are familiar with simple sequential cause-and-effect concepts, such as a child kicking a ball and the ball hitting and breaking a window. Science processes based on a sequence of events are easily understood by most students. But many people are less familiar with processes that have emergent causal effects in which collective interactions create a detectable pattern.