Making Learning Whole

What Hacker News says

1. manibatraJun 2017
   Same!! On lesson 2 and already feel like I know so much! The top down approach to learning is great! Will actually read the book "Making Learning Whole" that inspired them to follow this approach.
   thread
2. kriroFeb 2017
   #1 and #3 could also mean that you need more "junior games" right away that kind of sort of simulate the entire experience instead of learning from elements. I suggest picking up a copy of "Making Learning Whole" by David Perkins. I personally don't quite like the writing style but the content is pretty interesting and important. Super Cliffnotes version: try to frame everything you learn in some sort of mini-version that is kind of sort of like the whole...yes it's hard for some (especially intellectual) domains but there's usually ways to do it.
   Show morethread
3. PeterisPMar 2023
   The way I see it, the author of the article teaches board games by arranging the explanation according to narrative principles of good storytelling, arguably making the explanation more effective that way.

   Though it would be more effective to directly read and apply pedagogical research instead of pulling in vaguely similar stuff from the field of writing and theater as the author does. For example, much of what the original article says matches pedagogy literature e.g. if I look at 'Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom' by Svinicki chapter 7 about goal-oriented motivation for learning or 'Making Learning Whole' by Perkins chapter 7 about reasons and ways to 'put the learner in driver's seat' then this seems to say similar things as this article only in more detail and with some evidence basis.

   There is no need to reinvent the wheel - we have a whole discipline of science dedicated to researching what works best for learning and instruction, it just needs to be applied.

   Show morethread
4. jorlowNov 2020
   > I'd venture this was written by someone who has a more traditional machine learning background that wants new people to the industry to have that same foundation

   This is the vibe I got as well. Which is fair enough (to each his/her own), but I thought I'd mention fast.ai which takes the opposite approach:

   > Harvard professor David Perkins, who wrote Making Learning Whole (Jossey-Bass), has much to say about teaching. The basic idea is to teach the whole game. That means that if you're teaching baseball, you first take people to a baseball game or get them to play it. You don't teach them how to wind twine to make a baseball from scratch, the physics of a parabola, or the coefficient of friction of a ball on a bat.

   Show morethread
5. kriroFeb 2017
   I think what you label business is the most important and also hardest skill of these. It is also immediately relevant for productivity and team/training if you consider "learning as a whole"[0] a good approach (which I do).

   [0] See: "Making Learning Whole" by David Perkins

   thread
6. tokenadultDec 2011
   This is not time-series data. The study design here (a cross-sectional survey of varying countries, showing a bare correlation between two variables) is not adequate to show causation.

   http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

   (By the way, the scatter of data points around the regression line in their plot suggests that the model is subject to large degrees of error in prediction.) It would take an experimental design (randomly assigning one group of teachers in the same country to receive pay raises while another group does not, with before-and-after comparisons of pupil performance) to show that paying teachers more results in higher pupil performance.

   http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

   There have been hundreds of studies of educational interventions over the years,

   http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Learning-Synthesis-Meta-Analys...

   and many thoughtful international comparisons of teaching practice,

   http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

   http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

   http://www.amazon.com/Making-Learning-Whole-Principles-Trans...

   but none of those conclude that simply raising teacher pay, without changing teaching practices and perhaps also the composition of the teaching workforce, will have much to do with raising pupil performance in any place. Raising teacher pay systematically has been tried in the United States (notably in the state of Connecticut) and has not been shown to markedly raise pupil performance.

   An economist who closely studies education policy has suggested that pay and other incentives be used to encourage the least effective teachers to seek other occupations while rewarding the most effective teachers with increased compensation and more professional support.

   http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...

   Such a policy, he estimates (showing his work in his article) would raise United States educational achievement to the level of the highest-performing countries. This is something worth verifying by experiment, although that will be politically difficult in any state of the United States

   http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj30n1/cj30n1-8.pdf

   and perhaps in Britain as well.

   http://www.economist.com/node/17849199

   P.S. I'm curious about why the United States underperforms so much compared to salaries paid to teachers in the chart shown in the submitted blog post.

   Show morethread