Education, Schooling, & Ranking Functions
For our second unit in AGILE, students studied pedagogical theory and schooling in America. They read John Hattie and Gregory C. R. Yates’s text Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn. While reading this book, they pulled examples from the text to address the nine principles that the text is shaped around. In addition to this text, they read selections from bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and created “in-freire-graphics” to tackle the philosophical proof that Freire presents. They also watched the documentary Approaching the Elephant in order to look at just how different a school can be. They then listened to the podcast, Nice White Parents, and watched the documentary American Promise to think about the role of race in America’s schools. Students also looked at Meridian’s budget with head of school Josh Abrams, and studied how financial decisions shape the values and culture of a school. While engaging with these texts, students also studied ranking functions. In the context of education, they looked at the US News and World Report Best Colleges, as well as Niche for independent schools and pushed themselves to try and understand what variables are used and how they are mathematically manipulated. This work culminated in students choosing new ways to rank schools, students, or classrooms. They crafted their own multivariable functions and wrote papers to explain their process, thinking, and results.
Click and explore one group's interpretation of Freire's proof on pedagogy.
Click and explore ongoing student responses to the podcast Nice White Parents.
Click and explore the learning principles from Hattie and Yates's Visible Learning.
Education Ranking Function Papers
