Purpose
Teachers spend every day immersed in learning and they always want to know more. This course gives a language for talking about learning. Teachers watch students grow and change, yet they often don’t have words for discussing what they see and experience. Teachers who have taken this course report that they can communicate with colleagues, students, and parents in more effective ways.
The course is designed to help teachers learn to create activities with and without technology to deepen learning. The course uses free, open, and high quality materials and is continually updated. The course shares the latest research on learning and continually asks the question: How can theory guide practice and how can practice inform theory?
Learning Sciences Course – Poster (click to expand, or download PDF)
Course Topics
- Debunking Learning Myths
- Motivation from different perspectives (neuroscience, emotion, cognitive, psychological, sociocultural)
- Identity, Belonging, Power, Privilege, Biases, and Funds of Knowledge
- Turning Collaboration into Convergent Conceptual Change
- Active Learning: Project-Based Learning, Inquiry, Constructivism, Acquiring Knowledge, and Formative Assessment
The topics are examined from many different perspectives, including cognitive science, neuroscience, motivational, social and cultural ones. The course has a practical focus and participants will use what they learn to design activities for their classrooms. It will help them think through what a curriculum provides, and how different pedagogies can affect what students learn.
The course is structured to run intensely over a summer or less intensely over a semester. In addition, the course has a modular structure and one module (or any number of modules) can be chosen for a shorter, focused class or workshop.
The course is ideal for teachers who have been teaching at least 2-3 years or for instructional or technology coaches.
For more information, contact Judi Fusco.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
2019