Now That's Leverage
Michael Wesch blogged recently about “How to get students to read 94 articles before the next class.”
Essentially, each student in his class had to find, read, and summarize five articles before the next class. The summaries were consolidated using Zoho Creator, and, well, according to Wesch:
By the time of our next class, all 16 students had read 5 articles and been exposed to the main ideas of 94 articles. This created an amazing foundation for deep conversation.
I hear the term “leverage” used quite a bit – mostly as a fancy (read: incorrect) synonym for the word “use” (E.g. “Students leveraged their cell phones to call GCast…” or “The principal leveraged technology to show a PowerPoint presentation…”). As a former physics teacher, the word “leverage” has a specific meaning in my mind. It implies compounding resources to gain some mathematical or mechanical advantage.
Leverage is like mechanical gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. You know – like having 15 students collectively read 94 articles before the next class.
Such a simple idea with so much potential for use in the classroom and in professional development.
(Don’t even get me started on the use of the word “potential.”)
February 17, 2009 at 18:00
[...] that handing an allusion to someone on a silver platter doesn’t. Then into my reader pops, Now That’s Leverage < Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? where another Scott argues for learning about books by doing a version of a jigsaw, where each [...]
February 18, 2009 at 22:21
Maybe we need to put together a wiki of buzzwords in education that we need to get rid of? My personal one lately is “phenomenal”. Think about it: If everything is phenomenal, than nothing is.
February 19, 2009 at 14:01
Love this idea! We did something similar to this with a wiki. Everyone in our design group had to read two articles, and we tried to ensure that each article had at least two readers. When we were done, we had one place with all the ideas summarized. The two readers helped in case one person wasn’t able to read and in some cases, presented different takes on the reading. We decided it was a great way to cover a lot of material in a short period of time, and the wiki is still available, so we can always go back and reference.