a more radical timetabling model has been successful at Wollongong's Edmund Rice College for the past 20 years.
At the college, year 7 to 10 students begin the day at 8am and finish just before 2pm.
Senior students (years 11 and 12) begin their day about midday, finishing just before 5pm. Some senior students, depending on elective choice, may need to be at school by 10am a couple of days a week.
The principal, David Lear, says the main reason the school introduced the different starting times was to maximise school facilities, "enabling us to provide a wider range of electives''.
''Boys tend to be interested in hands-on, practical subjects that require certain resources and infrastructure,'' he says. ''If we ran a normal school day, these resources would only be available for six periods, but staggering the day as we do, they're available for 10 periods.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/school-daze-why-teens-should-lie-in-20100627-zc2x.html#ixzz1wj2eS15S
Question Formulation Technique
Produce Your Questions
Four essential rules for producing your own questions:
• Ask as many questions as you can.
• Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer the questions.
• Write down every question exactly as it is stated.
• Change any statement into a question.
Improve Your Questions
• Categorize the questions as closed- or open-ended.
• Name the advantages and disadvantages of each type of question.
• Change questions from one type to another.
Prioritize the Questions
• Choose your three most important questions.
• Why did you choose these three as the most important?
Next Steps
• How are you going to use your questions?
In Finland, the state decides what should be taught, but not how. If they like, teachers can take their children outside for "wood mathematics" – where they go into the nearest patch of forest and learn to add and subtract by counting twigs or stones in the open air.
A typical lesson compresses several disciplines into one; in one class, children who don't speak Finnish as their first language are taught to identify and name the parts of a mouse ("ears", "whiskers", "tail") and then mark on a chalk outline of the country where the animal lives. It's a literacy lesson, but biology and geography as well.
The researchers found that the biological clock opposed the sleep-wakefulness cycle at certain points of the day and at certain ages. It kept people awake when they were very tired. Just before puberty, that internal clock helped teens stay alert at night when they should have been falling asleep. The researchers called this a "phase-delay."
More and more school districts around the country, especially in more enlightened and progressive areas, are heeding the science and making a rational decision to follow the science and adjust the school-start times accordingly. Instead of forcing teenagers to wake up at their biological midnight (circa 6am) to go to school, where invariably they sleep through the first two morning classes, more and more schools are adopting the reverse busing schedule: elementary schools first (around 7:50am), middle schools next (around 8:20am) and high schools last (around 8:50am). I hope all schools around the country eventually adopt this schedule and quit torturing the teens and then blaming the teens for sleeping in class and making bad grades.
Some educators have come to the conclusion that China’s outstanding academic success, as indicated by test scores, may be what is holding it back. Now, China is searching for better education models elsewhere.
ADHD individuals outperformed non-ADHD individuals on the Unusual Uses Task,
but performed worse than non-ADHD on the Remote Associates Test and the semantic IOR task.
Our basic experimental procedure was to provide subjects with a story analogy, describing a problem and its solution, and then to observe how subjects used the analogy in solving a subsequent target problem. The target problem was Duncker's (1945) "radiation problem," which in our experiments was stated as follows.
How to recognise when a task is worth stopping in order to let an insight into your mind
What you see very frequently in peoples professional lives and perhaps in their emotional life as well is they lose interest in the 3rd act, you sort of get tired, and indifferent and sometimes defensive and you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment and that’s a great loss because the world is a very astonishing place.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance, a term coined by Daniel Katz and Floyd H. Allport in 1931,[1] describes "a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume (incorrectly) that most others accept it...It is, in Krech and Crutchfield’s (1948, pp. 388–89) words, the situation where 'no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.'".[2] This, in turn, provides support for a norm that may be, in fact, disliked by most people.