Uncommon Sense Teaching

Deep Teaching Solutions via Coursera Specialization

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Provider

Coursera Specialization
Pricing

Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

12 weeks, 4 hours a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner

Found in

Overview

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The Uncommon Sense Teaching Specialization is a foundational program that prepares you to teach based on leading-edge insights from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and movie-making. Your instructors have real-world experience in teaching some of the world’s most popular courses, and they bring their background from academia and beyond, including perspectives that could be obtained only from decades of teaching at virtually every level, personal experience with neurodiversity, adventure from the Bering Sea to the South Pole Station in Antarctica, and much more. This specialization gives invaluable insight for: Teachers—K12, higher ed, adult learning, vocational trainers College students training to be teachers Professors and others who train teachers how to teach Industry trainers Coaches Tutors Parents, caregivers, and homeschoolers The Uncommon Sense Teaching Specialization provides a pathway for you to bring your teaching skillset to a higher level by helping you gain the knowledge and skills to level up your career or strengthen your teaching foundation—whoever you might be teaching. You can take either MOOC 0 or MOOC 1 first, and enjoy MOOC 2 after MOOC 1. Enjoy! Uncommon Sense Teaching Specialization MOOC 0: Teaching Online MOOC 1: Uncommon Sense Teaching MOOC 2: Uncommon Sense Teaching, Part 2

Syllabus

Course 1: Uncommon Sense Teaching
Course 2: Uncommon Sense Teaching: Part 2, Building Community and Habits of Learning
Course 3: Uncommon Sense Teaching: Teaching Online

Courses

489 reviews

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Do your students spend too much (or too little) time learning, with disappointing results? Do they procrastinate in their study because it’s boring and they’re easily distracted? Are you working to make your teaching even more inclusive? Uncommon Sense Teaching will give you practical new insights that will help you solve these goals and challenges, and many more. This is like no other course on teaching—it weaves late-breaking insights from neuroscience with personal insights from the classroom to provide unexpected, yet practical, new approaches. You’ll discover how to bring out the best from all your students in today’s diverse teaching environment, where students often have a wide range of abilities. Uncommon Sense Teaching will take your teaching to a higher level for whatever subjects you teach, whether math, physics, literature, dance, art, or anything else; and whether you are teaching K-12, university, business, vocational, or at home. Join us today to move into the new era of education!
129 reviews

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In Part 2 of Uncommon Sense Teaching: Building Community and Habits of Learning, you will explore the following areas more deeply—helping you to connect with the latest insights into research and have fun while you are doing it! • The hidden strengths of neurodiversity: Dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and other syndromes that relate to learning • The value of forgetting • How to use habits formed by the procedural system to help you with classroom management • Judicious use of rewards to motivate students (too many rewards can de-motivate) • How to avoid educational fads • The power of lesson plans This is like no other course on teaching—it weaves late-breaking insights from neuroscience with personal insights from the classroom to provide unexpected, yet practical, new approaches. You’ll discover how to bring out the best from all your students in today’s diverse teaching environment, where students often have a wide range of abilities. Uncommon Sense Teaching will take your teaching to a higher level for whatever subjects you teach, whether math, physics, literature, dance, art, or anything else; and whether you are teaching K-12, university, business, vocational, or at home. Join us today to move into the new era of education!
62 reviews

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In Uncommon Sense Teaching: TEACHING ONLINE we’d like to help you to move toward fresh approaches to online teaching that build on the latest insights from scientific research. We’ll use insights from movie-making—not to mention from odd visual tricks in Barb’s kitchen—to see how students learn, both independently and together. We all know, for example, that social learning is valuable in helping students grapple with tough concepts as well as in making learning more fun. But if you understand what is happening in the brain during social learning, you can also understand why certain approaches commonly used in online learning, such as discussion forums, can sometimes pose a challenge. As you will see, we can use insights from neuroscience not only to motivate our students, but to help them change their very identity. Our course is designed for university professors, vocational instructors, K-12 teachers, coaches, business trainers, parents, and in fact, anyone who is trying to teach concepts or skills online. We're not just talking about traditional academic materials—if you’ve ever considered teaching a course on Udemy, putting up a video series on YouTube, or launching your own educational blog, this course is also for you. An essential and exciting point is that students can learn even BETTER online than they can in the traditional face-to-face classroom. That’s whether you’re teaching synchronously—that is, live, via a platform like Zoom; or you’re teaching asynchronously—that is, any time—by having videos and other teaching materials accessible to students whenever they want. You can take this course independently from the other two "Uncommon Sense Teaching" courses in this specialization—some of the neuroscience- and cognitive-psychology-based insights we’ll mention here in simple ways are explored more deeply in those other courses. So feel free to take the other two courses in the specialization in conjunction with or after this course. If you’ve already taken the other two courses, you’ll find that this course reviews and extends the practical insights from neuroscience you’ve already received in unexpected new directions. And you’ll find even deeper insights we haven’t covered before. In TEACHING ONLINE you'll be joining a trio of experienced online instructors who have taught millions in some of the world's most popular online courses. One of our deepest goals for this course is to help YOU to teach others to improve their ability to reach and teach students. We’ve loaded the animations and visuals we've developed for this course online in PowerPoints (licensed under Creative Commons) in the assets under the videos, as well as in the resources section. You can rework these PowerPoints as you wish to reteach this material to your colleagues and students. Your sharing and resharing of this material is one of the best things you can do to help us all move teaching and learning forward to a visionary future. YOU are the foundation—children, adults, and society as a whole can leap ahead because of your desire to learn and spread these new ideas!

Taught by

Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, David Joyner and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski

Reviews

5.0 rating, based on 1 Class Central review

4.9 rating at Coursera based on 806 ratings

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Manos Tsikalakis
1

This was a life-changing experience for me. I loved the whole specialization. I think everybody must watch these. It does not matter who you are or what age you are. Every teacher and learner will benefit from the material. Many thanks for a really outstanding series of MOOCs.

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