Making Standards Transparent Encourages Students

When we make the standards and objectives transparent for students, we empower them to be active in our learning choices as well. I have found that when students know what the previous year’s standard is and where we were headed in our learning, they are eager to co-construct our learning. Students care about being able to demonstrate what they know because they understand the journey. This kind of transparency also makes it much easier for students to advocate for themselves and explain wh...

 Digital Content and the Common Core

Common Core Standard 7 says students should be able to "integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words." Anchor Standard 6 in writing says students should "use technology, including the internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others." And Anchor Standard 8 says students should "gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and ...

 Why Economists Will Continue to be Wrong

Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many ...

 Replacing the Gold Standard with an Energy Standard

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of substa...