Category: podcasts

The final episode of Raising Heretics: The Podcast! Education has really failed to evolve. Sure, we’ve tweaked around the edges, but fundamentally my kids are still experiencing classrooms the way I did, the way my parents did, the way their parents did, and on down the ages. We need to make change. So how do we make this happen? Support Teachers, Lobby Governments, Buy and share Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World, and donate to ADSEI at givenow.com.au/adsei

People often assume that Data Science in Schools has to be secondary school only, because how could primary kids do Data Science? The truth is that Data Literacy and Analysis skills can be built into the curriculum from as young as 5 years old. Here's how.

In the beginning, there were toys. The fundamental message, which underpins all of the issues with the toy approach to teaching technology, was that the students could not see the point of what they were supposed to be learning. And kids can be quite pragmatic – when they can’t see any point to what they are doing, they don’t do it. So what happened when I switched to teaching programming and critical thinking skills using data science with real datasets? Find out in Episode 8 of Raising Heretics: The Podcast.

Getting comfortable with uncertainty is not a panacea for all of our educational woes, but it is an excellent start in allowing students the room to explore different solutions, and in training them to critically evaluate their own work. After all, if your answer is confirmed by the textbook solution, there’s not much room for further evaluation. If we can use real problems without right answers as the basis of at least part of our education, then we will surely prepare our students for the real world.

In Episode 6 we look at how we assess students, what our assessment says about our priorities, and what we really value. How can we change assessment to measure what we really care about?