Items to Share: 6 September 2015

Education Focus

• What Success Looks Like — The Synapse — Medium 'Students either pass or fail; when they do the former, they succeed. That is generally the notion of success in education. Does this happen in the real world? Think of any successful person in society. Did they become successful because in one fell swoop they either passed or failed? No. The entertainers, innovators and creators who are all household names are successful today only because they failed. Some failed more than others. But they had an intangible trait that is missing when we in education talk about success. What they all possessed was resilience. To be truly successful, in school and in the “real world”, one has to be resilient. In education, this trait is most often glossed over. Where we lack is teaching students that it is okay to fail.'

• Kick-start learning by giving students a lecture ‘trailer’ | Times Higher Education Nicholas Morton is road-testing some unusual ways to get, and keep, students’ attention

• These Videos Could Change How You Think About Teaching - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education  

• Donald Clark Plan B: 10 bloody good reasons for using much-maligned text in online learning 

• The sticky problem of threshold concepts in music | Musings of a music teacher 'Meyer and Lande identify 'threshold concepts as portals that ‘open up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something’. Basically, these are the points at which students tend to become stuck, and if they remain stuck, they will not be able to progress further in their understanding. Identifying what they are is of enormous help in planning a good curriculum and sound teaching. [...] Of course, this got me thinking about what threshold concepts there might be in music. Where to start? With what music actually is?...''